You wish to draw my attention to the Resurrection of Christ. “That,” you
say, “is either miraculous or nothing. The arguments by which you appear
to be driving miracles into non-existence—expelling them first from
profane history, then from the Old Testament, then step by step from
every part of the New—cannot make a stand at your convenience, so as to
except the Resurrection. Yet even St. Paul makes the Resurrection of
Jesus the basis of his own belief and Gospel. If, therefore, that final
miracle falls to the ground, the Pauline Gospel falls with it: and to
that downfall I fear your arguments all tend, although you yourself do
not see it or wish it.”
I entirely deny the quiet assumption of your first sentence; which, as
it stands (but I am sure you cannot mean it), affirms that the
Resurrection of Christ “is either miraculous or nothing.” I assert,
without fear of contradiction, that if the phenomena which convinced the
earliest disciples and St. Paul of the reality of the Resurrection of
Christ, were not miraculous but natural, they constitute the most
wonderful event in the history of the world. But what you wish to say, I
suspect, is this: “By the Resurrection of Christ I mean the Resurrection
of the body; now if Christ’s body was raised again, the act must have
been miraculous.” But how if the Resurrection was spiritual? St. Paul
himself speaks of a “spiritual body,” not a material body, as rising in
the Resurrection. Do you suppose that a “spiritual body” can be touched?
Or that St. Paul could have touched the presence that appeared to him
when he heard the words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Now if
the Resurrection of Christ was spiritual and not material, there may
have been no suspension at all of the laws of material nature, but
simply a real, spiritual fact, manifested to the world according to
certain laws by which spiritual facts are manifested to the senses.
But this theory, you will reply, although possibly consistent with the
Pauline narrative, is inconsistent with the Gospel accounts of the
Resurrection. It certainly is. But it is quite certain—however
unprepared you may possibly be for the statement—that the Gospel
accounts of the Resurrection, taken altogether, cannot be compared, for
weight, with the Pauline evidence. You know that the oldest Gospel (St.
Mark xvi. 8) terminates (probably because it was left incomplete) with a
vision of angels who speak of the tomb as empty and of Christ as risen;
but not a word about Christ’s resurrection itself. The next Gospel in
chronological order (St. Matthew’s) mentions one appearance of Christ to
some women, and another to some disciples in Galilee; but as to the last
it is said that “some doubted.” Not till we come to St. Luke’s Gospel do
we find detailed appearances of Jesus to disciples in or near Jerusalem,
in the course of which Jesus is present at a meal and offers to eat, as
evidence that He is no mere spirit. In the last Gospel of all (St.
John’s) there is added an appeal to the sense of touch; and in an
Appendix to that Gospel, Jesus is represented as inviting the disciples
to a repast of fish and bread, apparently miraculously supplied and
prepared (“they see a fire of coals there and fish laid thereon, and
bread,” John xxi. 9), which He distributes to the disciples. Afterwards
he holds a long discourse with them. Similarly long discourses between
the risen Saviour and the disciples are recorded in the first chapter of
the Acts of the Apostles, which we know to have been written after the
Gospel of St. Luke. You see how unsatisfactory all this is. The further
back we go, and the nearer to the event, the more meagre and shadowy
does the evidence become. It does not appear in a form ample and cogent
until a period so late as to throw irresistible doubt upon its truth.
How can we possibly answer the doubter’s natural question, “If there was
this unanswerable evidence of the material resurrection of Jesus, why
was it suppressed for two generations?” Moreover, some of these later
accounts, which relate the handling of the body of Jesus, or the
presence of Jesus at the breaking of bread, might be literal
misinterpretations of some traditions concerning visions of Christ
accompanying the “handling of the body of the Lord Jesus” in the Lord’s
Supper. It is very significant that St. Peter—whose allusions in the
Acts of the Apostles to his personal evidence concerning the
Resurrection of Christ are of the briefest kind—is introduced by St.
Luke as mentioning only one definite kind of manifestation of Jesus; and
that is one in which the Apostles “did _eat and drink with him_ after he
rose from the dead” (Acts x. 41). Lastly, there are traces of
interpolations, or additions, at a very early date in the
post-resurrection chapters of St. Luke, and probably of St. Matthew and
St. John; and in dealing with the post-resurrection narrative of the
life of Christ some of the earliest Fathers quote passages not found in
our Gospels but agreeing somewhat with the suspected additions in the
third and fourth Gospel. The sum of all is, so far as my own experience
goes, that after a patient and prolonged study of the evidence, with
every desire, and indeed I may say with an intense anxiety (at one
period of my life), to justify myself in continuing to believe all that
I once believed, I now rise from the perusal of the last chapters of the
Gospels and the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, with the
conviction that _something_ certainly happened to persuade the Apostles
that their Master had verily risen from the dead, but what that
_something_ was, the evidence, so far as it can he obtained from the
Gospels, does not enable us to determine.
But we have not yet touched on the evidence of St. Paul and to this we
now pass. Here at last we stand on firm ground. Here for the first time
we find (in St. Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians xv. 8), the
unquestionable evidence of an eye-witness, probably recorded several
years before the appearance of any Gospel now extant. No one who is
competent to form an opinion on the question can for a moment doubt St.
Paul’s assertion that Christ “appeared” to him, and that some such
appearance as that recorded thrice in the Acts, converted him from a
persecutor into an apostle of Christianity. We have just been asking,
“What was that unknown something—possibly some manifestation of Jesus
after death—which inspired the Twelve with the conviction and the
faculties necessary to overcome the world?” Now we seem to have found
the answer. An appearance that overcame and converted a recalcitrant
enemy might well satisfy and imbue with confidence loving disciples,
longing to believe. Especially might this be the case if Jesus had
predicted, as I believe He did predict, that His work would not be cut
short by death, but that in Him would be fulfilled the saying of Hosea:
“In the third day he shall raise us up and we shall live in his sight.”
Although these words may have been neglected or not understood at the
time when they were uttered, they may have well recurred to the minds of
the Disciples, after their Master’s death, with a powerful effect. To
urge that the despair of the Twelve could be a greater obstacle than the
vehement and bigoted antagonism of Saul, in the way of their receiving a
vision of their beloved Master, is a paradox so pedantical that it is
scarcely worth mentioning. You cannot have forgotten, too, how St. Paul
himself assumes that the appearances of the Saviour to himself, and to
the original Apostles, were of the same kind and on the same footing:
“He _appeared_ unto Cephas, he _appeared_ unto James, he _appeared_ unto
five hundred brethren ... and last of all he _appeared_ unto _me_ also.”
In the two latest Gospels these “appearances” have been magnified into
accounts that represented Jesus as possessed of flesh and bones, as
capable of eating, as reclining at a meal, and as entering into long and
familiar discourses: naturally we ask as to St. Paul’s, the indisputably
earliest account of a manifestation of Christ, what traces it exhibits
of similar distortions and exaggerations? You know the answer. There are
no such traces. The manifestation to St. Paul is plainly admitted by the
accounts in the Acts to be what is commonly called subjective. The
“subjectivity” of some of the earlier manifestations of Jesus to the
disciples is dimly suggested by some passages in the Gospels which
describe how “some doubted” and others failed to recognize Him; but it
is not merely suggested, it is plainly expressed, in the accounts of the
manifestation to St. Paul. The Apostle is clearly stated to have seen a
sight and heard words, which other people, his companions, with the same
opportunities for seeing and hearing, did not see and did not hear.
Putting aside some slight discrepancies in the three accounts given in
the Acts[27]—discrepancies easily and naturally explicable, and valuable
as shewing that the accounts have not been arbitrarily harmonized we may
say that this is the substantial result: the Lord Jesus appeared to St.
Paul in what is called a vision. I myself firmly believe that there was
a spiritual act of Jesus simultaneous with the conveyance of the
manifestation to the brain of the Apostle. But none the less, however
coincident it may have been with a spiritual reality, if there was no
presence of a material body, the manifestation of Jesus to St. Paul must
be placed in the class of visions: and if it was not seen by others who
had the same physical means of seeing, it must be called, in some sense,
“subjective.”
Yet this vision sufficed for him and for the world. In the strength of
this vision, (followed, no doubt, by subsequent visions and communings
with the Lord Jesus), the Thirteenth Apostle, the intruder, as he might
be called—not “chosen of men,” like Matthias, not called by Christ in
the flesh did the great work of which you and I, with millions of
others, are now joint inheritors. Think of it; Is it not a remarkable
instance of “men working one thing while God worketh another” to see the
Apostles with due form and ceremony electing their substitute for the
Traitor to be the solemnly ordained Twelfth Apostle, henceforth unnamed
in Holy Writ and all the while the Holy Spirit preparing a Thirteenth!
And for this Thirteenth Apostle, who never looked on the face of Christ,
never heard a single word of His doctrine, it has been reserved to tell
us perhaps more about the meaning of Christ’s teaching and certainly to
give us more cogent proof of His Resurrection than all the other
Apostles and Evangelists put together! Truly the last has been first!
And in the strength of his proof of Christ’s Resurrection—mere vision
though we may call it—this Thirteenth Apostle, in the face of
persecutions outside the Church, and discouragements and jealousies
inside the Church, first converted the Roman empire to the Christian
faith; then, fifteen centuries afterwards, reconverted and purified a
large section of the Church from mediæval corruptions; and now, as I
believe, some nineteen centuries afterwards, is on the point of still
further purifying the Church from antique superstition and from modern
materialism!
What shall we say of the mighty vision that originated these stupendous
results? Shall we take the view of the modern scientific young man, and
lecture the great Apostle on the folly of that indiscreet journey to
Damascus at noon-tide, when his nerves were a little over-wrought after
that unpleasant incident of poor Stephen? Shall we say it was all
ophthalmia and indigestion—that flash of blinding light, those
unforgettable words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”—all a mere
vision? Is a fact that changed the destinies of Europe to be put aside
with the epithet “mere”? Would not even a materialist stonemason
recognize that a vision which built St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s is of
some tangible importance? You and I and your scientific young
lecturer—do we not in some sort owe our existence to this “mere vision,”
but for which the earth might be a chaos of barbarism, England a forest
scantly populated with tattooed bipeds, and our civilized selves
non-existent? Patricidal creatures, let us not speak lightly of the
“mere” author of our own important being!
To my mind the manifestation of the Resurrection of Christ appears, not
as an isolated fact, but as a part, and the central part, of the great
revelation of the immortality of the soul which has been conveyed by God
to man, in accordance with the laws of human nature, from the beginning
of the creation of the world by the medium of imaginative Faith. In the
same way the laws of astronomy have been conveyed by God to man, in
accordance with the laws of human nature, from the beginning of the
creation of the world, by the medium of imaginative Reason. I have shewn
in previous letters that Imagination has been the basis of all that is
worth calling knowledge. To shew the bearing of this on the
manifestations of the Resurrection of Christ shall be the object of my
next letter.
Footnote 27:
“And the men that journeyed with him stood speechless hearing the
voice but beholding no man,” Acts ix 7: “And they that were with me
beheld indeed the light but they heard not the voice of him that spake
to me,” _ib._ xxii. 9. Whether Saul’s companions saw and heard nothing
except subjectively, through force of sympathy, or whether (comp. John
xii. 29) some natural phenomenon may have been interpreted in one way
by Saul and in another way by his companions, cannot now be
determined; but I have confined myself to indisputable fact in stating
that Saul “saw a sight and heard words which other people, his
companions, with the same opportunities for seeing and hearing, did
not see and did not hear.”
XXI
THE RESURRECTION REVEALED