The passion of Jesus Christ, and indeed His whole public ministry,
alone offer a parallel to the Mission and death of the Báb, a parallel which no
student of comparative religion can fail to perceive or ignore. In the
youthfulness and meekness of the Inaugurator of the Bábí Dispensation; in the extreme
brevity and turbulence of His public ministry; in the dramatic swiftness with
which that ministry moved towards its climax; in the apostolic order which He
instituted, and the primacy which He conferred on one of its members; in the
boldness of His challenge to the time-honored conventions, rites and laws which
had been woven into the fabric of the religion He Himself had been born into;
in the rôle which an officially recognized and firmly entrenched religious
hierarchy played as chief instigator of the outrages which He was made to
suffer; in the indignities heaped upon Him; in the suddenness
of His arrest; in the interrogation to which He was subjected; in the derision
poured, and the scourging inflicted, upon Him; in the public affront He
sustained; and, finally, in His ignominious suspension before the gaze of a
hostile multitude—in all these we cannot fail to discern a remarkable
similarity to the distinguishing features of the career of Jesus Christ.
(Shoghi
Effendi, ‘God Passes By’)
