Christ Jesus confounded his opponents when he said (John 8:58), "Before Abraham was, I am." Limiting their understanding of individual existence to fleshly life, with birth and death as its components, these materialists could not grasp the spiritual implications of the Master's words. Christian Science explains that he was referring to the Christ, his eternal, spiritual identity, and not to his temporal, corporeal personality.
Mary Baker Eddy says in her Message to The Mother Church for 1901 (pp. 8,9): "The Christ was Jesus' spiritual selfhood; therefore Christ existed prior to Jesus, who said, 'Before Abraham was, I am.' Jesus, the only immaculate, was born of a virgin mother, and Christian Science explains that mystic saying of the Master as to his dual personality, or the spiritual and material Christ Jesus, called in Scripture the Son of God and the Son of man—explains it as referring to his eternal spiritual selfhood and his temporal manhood."
Because the Christ is eternal, it is indestructible; it possesses the vitality to persist forever. Jesus proved this by his resurrection. Expressing the divine nature, the human Jesus was able to manifest unprecedented power over every phase of mortality: sin, sickness, material limitation, insentient faculties, and even death. In his ascension the Master's Christliness dispelled the illusion of a fleshly self, and the temporal sense of life, which had obscured the eternal Christ-man, disappeared.
