which is conveniently expressed and commonly understood by the term
Christianity have turned very much of late years upon the authenticity
of the several books composing the New Testament. Inquiries of this
nature have commended themselves to an age which we need not shrink
from characterising as critical and discriminating. There is a
manifest and a very intelligible pleasure to be derived from reopening
questions which many have been accustomed to regard as settled, from
proving former conclusions erroneous, or showing that considerable
doubt still remains where certainty was believed to exist; and in
the natural enthusiasm attending investigations of this kind, it is
by no means a matter of surprise if the actual importance of the
results has been somewhat overrated. The inferences following from
the conclusions arrived at, have been estimated in proportion to the
supposed certainty of the conclusions. If a particular Gospel can be
shown to be falsely, or at any rate with doubtful truth, ascribed to
its traditional author, the inference drawn, or at least suggested, is
the comparative depreciation, if not worthlessness, of that Gospel. We
know not why, but it is frequently assumed that if everything is not in
exact accordance with the popular belief in any matter, nothing which
is popularly associated with that belief can reasonably be maintained.
The whole edifice will fall, or must even be destroyed, because a stone
here or there is faulty, or out of place. Because investigation shows
that the foundation does not lie as it was thought to lie, therefore
there is no foundation at all. The rashness and precipitancy of any
such inference will be at once apparent to every thoughtful mind.
Because the reasons usually assigned are inconclusive, it by no means
follows that no reasons can be given. The central questions really
involved, may be altogether unaffected by the technical and subordinate
question, who was actually the writer of some particular book. The
critical investigation of authorship may have positively no bearing
at all on the opinions expressed, or the facts recorded in the book.
Whether or not this be so in any given instance, it is at any rate
conceivably possible in the abstract.
In the case now before us, however, we have to deal with a converse
position. There are four Epistles in the New Testament which have been
admitted on all hands to be the veritable productions of the Apostle
Paul. These are the two Epistles to Corinth, the Epistle to the Church
at Rome, and the Epistle to the Galatians. The writers, if any, who
have ventured to call in question the authenticity of these Epistles
are so few, and so insignificant, as to be unworthy of mention. We may
safely pass them by without fear of challenge or dispute. There is
absolutely no room for any reasonable doubt that we have in our hands
in these four letters the true and genuine compositions of Saul of
Tarsus, after he had become a Christian.
It will be my business, then, on the present occasion, to examine and
weigh the precise value of this admission of authenticity, which can
only be spoken of as universally made. What is the evidence in support
of Christianity which can be fairly adduced from it? In endeavouring
to estimate the nature and amount of this evidence, I shall not assume
these Epistles to be what we commonly understand by inspired. I shall
regard them only as the natural human productions of a certain man
whose personal history, to a considerable extent, can be discovered
from them. If, on internal or other grounds, there is cause to believe
they have any higher authority, that will be another matter. But we
shall not assume it in dealing with them. Our aim in the first place
must simply be to inquire what the acceptance of these four Epistles
as the work of St. Paul legitimately demands of us; what are the
inferences fairly deducible from their statements; what insight
they give us into the character and motives of the writer, and what
information they convey as to the nature and constitution of the early
Christian society to which they were addressed.
And first, as to their date. We cannot place the death of the Apostle
Paul later than the year of our Lord 68. It may have been the year
before; but as he is said by Jerome and Eusebius to have suffered
under Nero, and Galba succeeded Nero in A.D. 68, it cannot have been
afterwards. Again, we are safe in saying that, on the supposition of
the latter date, these four Epistles had been written ten years before
the Apostle Paul died; that is to say, they were all written before
the end of A.D. 58. Festus probably succeeded Felix in the year of our
Lord 60. But Paul had been two years a prisoner at Cæsarea, when Festus
came into the province;[113] and these letters were written while he
was still at liberty. We have, then, in St. Paul's Epistles, by which
we mean always and exclusively these particular Epistles, undoubted
genuine productions of about five-and-twenty years, or not much more,
after the death of Jesus Christ. Making all due allowance for possible
variation in the requisite dates, we are warranted in saying that the
interval between the Crucifixion and the sending of these letters to
their several destinations, did not exceed by more than two or three
years the quarter of a century. It was certainly less than thirty years.
The best way of appreciating such an interval as this is to take a
corresponding period in our own lives. We have most of us a very clear
recollection, probably, of events which happened in the year 1844 or
1845. The war in the Punjaub, and the Irish famine, which happened
shortly afterwards, in 1846, and the great European events of 1848,
some two years later, are fresh and vivid in the memory of every
person who has arrived at middle age. To others yet more advanced, an
interval of five-and-twenty or thirty years can effect but little in
effacing events or circumstances which at the time produced a deep and
powerful impression. They remember them as yesterday. So it must have
been with many who were living at Corinth when the first Epistle to the
Church there was written, and who read it on its arrival. But from this
Epistle we know[114] that more than 250 persons who had seen the risen
Jesus at one time were still alive and able to give their testimony
to that effect. These persons, therefore, must have had as vivid a
recollection of the circumstance referred to, as we ourselves have of
the battles on the Sutlej. The Queen's coronation is to us an event
farther in the background of the past than the vision of the crucified
Jesus was to the 250 brethren who still survived.
And the way in which their experience is mentioned is one which
is the more striking because it is so casual. St. Paul alludes to
it incidentally as a thing of which he had often spoken to the
Corinthians. He could not have done so had this not been the case.
They knew perfectly well that he had mentioned it to them. They had
not forgotten that it formed a part of his oral communications. He
could not have referred to it in this way had it not been so. But so
neither is it possible that he could have spoken of the fact had the
250 witnesses been the mere invention of his own brain. Were there no
shrewd men of common sense in the Church of Corinth who could have
detected an imposition so gross as this, if it had been one? Had there
been even a small minority of such men, we should have had no second
Epistle to the Corinthians, or the second Epistle would surely have
been very different from what it is. We are obliged, in accepting the
first Epistle to Corinth as the veritable work of St. Paul, to conclude
that during his stay in that city he had habitually spoken of the fact,
which none could call in question or deny, that there were living at
that time more than 250 persons who had a distinct recollection of
having seen Jesus Christ at some period less than six weeks after He
had been crucified, _but who never saw Him again_. St. Paul not only
said this, but the whole Corinthian Church knew that what he said was
true, for otherwise he would not in this way have dared to say it.
There is no occasion now to discuss the question what it was these
people saw, because that would carry us far astray. All we need for the
present insist upon is the fact that we have contemporary evidence of
the very best kind, in the form, namely, of a genuine letter, that a
large number of persons were still alive, say in the year of our Lord
58, who believed that they had seen a person, not merely as a spectre
or vision, but as a living and substantial man, whom they knew to have
been crucified and buried but a short time before, and who likewise
knew that there were many more who could have corroborated their
evidence on this point if they had not been dead.
We fully admit, then, that this is a circumstance which is open to
explanation in various ways, the true explanation being determinable
upon other and additional considerations; but what we do maintain is
that upon the premises conceded to us by the most rigid criticism, it
is not possible to set aside the evidence on which it rests, be its
explanation what it may.
And here it is worth while asking, before we pass on, how we should
feel ourselves justified in regarding the testimony of 500 persons now,
not more credulous or weak-minded than ourselves, to an event which
had passed under the cognisance of their own senses, even though that
event were the posthumous appearance of a man who had been put to death
as a malefactor? Is it not certain that any such supposed appearance
would be calculated to make an impression on the beholders which might
well last for five-and-twenty or thirty years, and should we not regard
their uniform agreement in the matter as a very remarkable circumstance
imperatively demanding some solution?
The first point, then, which the existence of this Epistle establishes,
is the fact that at the time it was written there were living many
competent eye-witnesses of what was believed by them to have been the
reanimation of a body which had been dead and buried, and that their
testimony was accepted by a very large number of persons who implicitly
believed it. Here, then, we have written evidence to the effect that a
particular event was amply testified and very generally believed upon
the testimony.
But, again, the same Epistle shows that this belief was by no means
unquestioning. The very same chapter proves that there were those at
Corinth who said there was no resurrection of the dead.[115] They did
not believe, that is, in the doctrine that the dead will ultimately
rise. They held no doubt in common with others that the resurrection
was "past already;" that the change which had passed upon the Christian
upon belief in Christ was so radical and so complete, that he might
literally, without any violent figure of speech, be said to have risen
again from the dead. They acquiesced so fully in the truth expressed
by St. Paul in the second Epistle, "If any man be in Christ, he is a
new creature,"[116] that the felt newness of that spiritual creation
seemed to satisfy all their longings after life, and they relegated
to the insignificance of a non-essential and a dreamy unreality the
thought of a resurrection of the body yet to come. The way, then,
in which the Apostle meets this form of unbelief is in the highest
degree noteworthy. He argues from the known to the unknown, from what
was believed to what was not believed, from what these early doubters
implicitly accepted to that which they sceptically rejected. "Now, if
Christ be preached that He rose from the dead, _and ye believe it_, how
say some among you that there is no _future_ resurrection of the dead?
For if there be no _future_ resurrection of the dead, then is Christ
not risen? _but ye know and believe Him to be risen, otherwise ye would
not be what ye are_."
This, and nothing else than this, is the drift of the Apostle's
argument. It shows us plainly, therefore, that there was a
discriminating exercise of reason at work in men's minds at Corinth.
The struggle between reason and faith had landed them in a logical
inconsistency. They rejected the future resurrection on what seemed to
be rational grounds, because it appeared to them contrary to reason
and experience, but they forgot that they had already submitted their
reason to a belief no less absolute and imperious, which, if logically
held, would stultify their scepticism.
And there is no setting aside the inference from this argument, that
the tendency of the mind which rejected the future resurrection was to
reject likewise the personal resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and the
testimony of the greater part of the 500 brethren yet surviving who
had seen Him after He was risen. That is to say, the character of the
faith in the one case is enhanced by the scepticism in the other. Just
as the belief of Thomas after his doubt, accepting for the sake of
illustration the narrative in St. John,[117] was the stronger and more
convincing because he had only adopted it upon conclusive evidence, so
is the belief of the Corinthians in the resurrection of Jesus of the
greater value evidentially, because we know it to have been their habit
of mind not unquestioningly to believe.
We arrive, then, at this further position that we may not lightly
regard the belief of the Corinthian Church in the validity of the
evidence for Christ's resurrection as the belief of persons who were
credulous enough to believe anything. Upon fairly estimating all the
circumstances, there is abundant and conclusive proof, which we may
call contemporary, that the resurrection of the Lord Jesus was believed
in as a fact by a vast number of persons who were convinced they had
received that fact upon ample or sufficient testimony.
We must not forget, also, the nature of the fact that was believed.
The resurrection of a dead body is so contrary to all reason and
experience, that the difficulties in the way of believing it may be
estimated as practically equal in all cases. No one can profess to
believe it without being fully conscious of the absurdity of that which
he professes to believe. It is a point in which the imagination can
scarcely hope to take the reason at a disadvantage, or at unawares.
In only two ways is deception possible. First, on the supposition
of the unreality of the previous death; and secondly, that the
subsequent appearance was unreal. Now in the first case the notion
of unreality is precluded, because it was firmly and universally
believed, and not by Christians only, that Christ had died; and there
is no vestige of any evidence to show that He died in any other way
than on the cross. This death was as needful an element in the creed
of the Corinthian Church as His resurrection, not to say that any
true belief in His resurrection involved the belief in His death.
It will not do to explain His supposed resurrection on the ground
that His death was unreal. Where would have been the foolishness of
the cross, if Christ had not died? To secure the resurrection of
Christ at the expense of His death would have been simply absurd, for
two reasons: first, because that would have made the resurrection
after all no resurrection--an unreality; and secondly, because the
death of Christ alone and by itself was a fact that was implicitly
believed, and without which the faith of the Church cannot be conceived
or comprehended. We are reduced, therefore, to the necessity of
explaining the resurrection of Christ on the alternative supposition
that the subsequent appearance was unreal. And here we are met by
the transcendent difficulty, that it is antecedently in the highest
degree improbable that any sane man should be found to believe that the
appearance of a person after death, who had been crucified and buried,
could be other than imaginary and delusive. And we become, in fact,
bound to determine whether in the abstract it is more improbable that
multitudes of competent persons should believe in what was contradicted
by universal experience, and especially by their own, or that something
may have occurred which, in spite of themselves and their experience,
had compelled them to this belief.
For we must not fail to remember that the two suppositions are
mutually destructive. If Christ died, then the belief in His
resurrection can only be explained on the theory that His subsequent
appearance was unreal. If His subsequent appearance was unreal, then,
to say the least, it is entirely gratuitous to deny the fact of His
having died, because if He did not truly die, there is no discoverable
reason why His supposed appearance after death should not have been
real. We may choose which explanation we deem preferable. We cannot
alternately or simultaneously adopt both.
I am not now called upon to prove more than what is clearly proved,
that the existence of this one Epistle as the genuine work of St. Paul
affords abundant evidence that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from
the dead was accepted as a fact by large numbers of men, some of whom,
at least, can only have accepted it on evidence which seemed to them
sufficient to counteract the adverse testimony of their experience,
their reason, and their senses. And it is almost needless to observe
that the belief in the resurrection as here depicted, involved also a
belief in the burial[118] of Jesus Christ, in the main and essential
features of His death,[119] that it was on the third day that He
arose,[120] that His appearances after His resurrection were distinct
and manifold,[121] and that the Apostle who depicted it had himself
been among the most vehement opponents of this very belief in the
person of the Lord, whose resurrection he proclaimed.[122] All this
is established by the admission of this letter as genuine, and by
the admission which cannot be denied, that the writer was giving a
natural and plain statement of the truth, and not a fabricated or ideal
narrative of fictitious occurrences.
That is to say, so far the testimony of this Epistle is in conformity
with the framework of the Gospel history. If the four Gospels were lost
to us, the life, and death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ would
still remain firmly and distinctly imbedded in the original faith
of the Corinthian Church. We know from this letter that less than
thirty years after the death of Christ, there was a very large body
of men at Corinth who believed implicitly that He had risen from the
dead, and that they knew that many persons were still alive who were
eye-witnesses of the fact.
I ask you, then, very carefully to observe that this does not prove the
fact. It only shows us conclusively that less than thirty years after
the fact there were many persons who believed in it as such.
And let us put a parallel case. Suppose a person coming to London
in the present day, and declaring that less than thirty years ago
a certain man in a distant country who had been put to death as a
malefactor, had risen from the dead the third day, and was still
alive. What success think you would he meet with? Most assuredly there
would not be half-a-dozen people who would believe him. But if, on the
contrary, a new society should be formed, consisting exclusively of
persons professing to believe all this, would not the circumstance be
so remarkable as to lead us to infer that there must be some adequate
cause for it? If the persons professing this belief were of all
stations and classes, and many of them, as is proved by this Epistle,
men of intelligence and discernment, should we not be constrained
to confess that the only reasonable supposition was that there was
something in the evidence which could not be lightly set aside? However
strange and mysterious the tale might be, it could not be altogether a
cunningly devised fable. There must be something at the bottom of it.
No effect can exist without an adequate cause. Here is clear evidence
of a very considerable effect existing. What was the cause of it? The
cause alleged would doubtless be a sufficient cause, for truth is
not only stranger, but mightier than fiction. And it may be fairly
questioned whether, under all the circumstances, any other cause can be
discovered which would be sufficient. There is so far, therefore, an
antecedent probability that the cause alleged was the true cause.
Again, it is to be observed throughout all these Epistles of St. Paul
that the resurrection of Christ was to him not a past influence, but
a present power. If the evidence of the first Epistle to Corinth is
less than thirty years after the death of Christ, the evidence of the
second carries us back to nearly half that time. The writer speaks of
himself as being in Christ more than fourteen years before.[123] This
brings us virtually to not more than a dozen or fifteen years from
the actual occurrence of the resurrection; and in all probability the
Epistle to the Galatians carries us back even further still. Critics
are divided as to the computation of the time mentioned in it. But if
the "fourteen years after" of chap. ii. are to be added to the "three
years" after which Paul "went up to Jerusalem to see Peter," then the
whole period can be little less than twenty, and the extreme limit
referred to scarcely more than ten years after the resurrection.[124]
At that time, then, St. Paul himself fully and implicitly believed
in it. At that time he had made great sacrifices for his belief in
it. At that time, or shortly after, he had not improbably suffered
privation and persecution because of it. But the faith which he held
then he is found holding as tenaciously as ever fourteen or twenty
years afterwards, holding it, in fact, so tenaciously that he is able
to bring many others to share it with him. A man must be something more
than an enthusiast who for fourteen years could retain a conviction so
monstrous as this, if false, and at the end of that time could make
more converts than before. Surely this is not the ordinary experience
of mankind, that it is so easy to get men to believe as a fact,
contradicting their own experience, what after all is no fact at all.
It is one thing to win converts to our _opinions_ or our _principles_,
and quite another to gain credence for a _fact_ that it is every one's
interest to disprove.