We are living together in this world, but I do not know whether we
shall live together in the next world. You probably consider yourself
as booked for heaven, and me as booked for the other establishment. But
that is a question I will not discuss at present. I will only remark
that you may be mistaken. Existence, you know, is full of surprises;
and, as the French say, it is always the unexpected that happens.
Well, my fellow citizens of this world, it is now the time when you
celebrate the death and resurrection of your "Savior." Not being of your
faith, I cannot join in the commemoration. I shall, however, regard the
season after a more primitive fashion. Your Church adopted an old
Pagan festival, the rejoicing at the renewal of the earth in the genial
springtide. At the vernal equinox the sun is increasing in power, the
world is astir with new life, and begins to reassume its mantle
of green. Such a time inspired jollity in the human breast. It was
commemorated with feast and dance and song. Perhaps it will be so again,
even in sombre England, when the gloom of your ascetic creed has lifted
and disappeared. Meanwhile I, as a "heathen man and a sinner," will
imitate as far as I may the example of the Pagans of old. I will not
sing, for I am no adept in that line; and my joints are getting too
stiff for dancing. But I will feast, within the bounds of reason; I will
leave this million-peopled Babylon and put myself in touch with Mother
Nature; I will feel, if only for a brief while, the spring of the turf
under my feet; I will breathe air purified by "the moving waters at
their priest-like task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores";
I will watch the seahorses, with their white crests, in endless rank,
charging the shore; I will listen to the sound which Homer heard so long
before your Christ was born--the sound so monotonous, so melancholy, yet
so soothing and sustaining, which stirs a pulse of poetry in the very
dullest and most prosaic brain. But before I go I send you this Easter
egg, to show that I do not forget you. Keep it, I pray you; study well
its inscriptions; and perhaps, after all, you will not pelt me with it
at the finish.
I have said, my Christian fellow citizens, that your Church appropriated
an ancient Pagan festival--the festival of spring. I may be told
by scholars amongst you that the time of Christ's crucifixion and
resurrection was fixed by the Jewish Passover. I reply that the Passover
was itself a spring festival, whose original and natural meaning was
obscured by priestly arts and legendary stories. That it happened at
this time of the year, that it depended on astronomical signs, that
its commemoration included the sacrifice of the firstlings of the
flock--shows clearly enough that it was a Jewish counterpart of the
common Gentile celebration. Has it ever occurred to you that if Christ
died, he died on a particular day; and that if he rose from the dead, he
rose on a particular morning? That day, that morning, should have been
observed in the proper fashion of anniversaries. But it never was, and
it is not now. Good Friday--as you curiously, and almost facetiously
call the day on which the founder of your faith suffered a painful and
ignominious death--and Easter Sunday, when he left his sepulchre,
never fall on the same date in successive years. They are determined by
calculations of the position of the sun and the phases of the moon--a
planet sacred to lovers and lunatics, and naturally dear therefore to
devotion and superstition. You decorate your churches with evergreens
and flowers as the Pagans decorated their temples and altars. You use
Easter eggs like the pre-Christian religionists. You show, and your
creed shows, in everything that Easter is really a spring festival. The
year springs from the tomb of winter, and Christ springs at the same
time from the tomb of death.
I am disposed to regard your "Savior" as a purely mythical personage,
like all other Saviors and sun-gods of antiquity, who were generally,
if not always, born miraculously of virgin mothers, mysteriously
impregnated by celestial visitors; and whose careers, like that of your
Christ, were marked by portents and prodigies, ending in tribulation and
defeat, which were followed by vindication and triumph. Whether there
was a man called Jesus, or Joshua (the Jewish form of the name), who
lived and taught in Galilee and died at Jerusalem, is more than I will
undertake to determine, and it seems to me a question of microscopic
importance. But I am convinced that the Christ of the Gospels is the
product of religious imagination; an ideal figure, constructed out of
materials that were common in the East for hundreds and perhaps for
thousands of years.
To confine ourselves, however, to the Easter aspect of the matter, I
think you will find--if you read the Gospel story with unprejudiced
eyes--that the closing scenes of Christ's career are quite imaginary.
The story of his Trial and Crucifixion is utterly at variance with Roman
law and Jewish custom. It also includes astonishing incidents--such
as the earthquake which rent the veil of the temple, the three hours'
eclipse of the sun, and the wholesale resurrection of dead "saints"--of
which the Romans and the Jews were in a still more astonishing
ignorance. What must have startled the whole or the then known world,
if it happened, made absolutely no impression on the Hebrew and Gentile
nations, and not a trace of it remains in the pages of their historians.
Can you believe that the most remarkable occurrences on record escaped
the attention of all who were living at the time, with the exception
of a handful of men and women, who never took the trouble to write an
account of their experiences, but left them to be chronicled by unknown
writers long after they themselves were dead?
All the documentary evidence we possess is Christian. It is the witness
of an interested party, uncorroborated by a particle of testimony from
independent sources. I do not forget that the literature of your early
Church includes a letter from Pontius Pilate to the emperor Tiberius,
giving a detailed account of the trial, sentence, crucifixion, and
resurrection of Christ; but this is one of the many forgeries of
your early Church, and is now universally rejected as such alike by
Protestant and by Catholic scholars. To my mind, indeed, this forgery
itself proves the falsehood of the Gospel narrative; it shows that the
early Christians felt the necessity of some corroborative evidence,
and they manufactured it to give their own statements an air of greater
plausibility.
Taking the Gospels as they stand, I will ask you to read the story in
Matthew (not that I believe _he_ wrote it) of the watch at Christ's
sepulchre. The Jewish priests come to Pilate, and ask him to let the
sepulchre be sealed and guarded; for the dead impostor had declared he
would rise again on the third day, and his disciples might steal his
body and say he had risen. The guard is set, but an angel descends from
heaven, terrifies the soldiers, rolls away the stone, and allows Jesus
to escape. Whereupon the Jewish priests give the soldiers money to tell
Pilate that they slept at their posts.
How, I ask, did those Jewish priests know that Jesus had said "After
three days I will rise again"? According to John (xx. 9), his very
disciples were ignorant of this fact--"For as yet they knew not the
scripture, that he must rise again from the dead." Could it be unknown
to his intimates, who had been with him day and night for three years,
in all parts of Palestine; yet well known to the priests, who had only
seen him occasionally during a few days at Jerusalem?
There was an "earthquake" before the angels descended. Would not
this have attracted general attention? And is it conceivable that the
soldiers would take money to say they had slept at their posts? The
punishment for that offence was death. Of what use then was the bribe?
Do men sell their honor for what they can never enjoy, and count their
lives as a mere trifle in the bargain? Is it conceivable that the
priests were so foolish as the story depicts them? Would bribing the
soldiers protect them against Christ? If he had risen he was lord of
life and death. Would they not have abandoned their projects against
him, and sought his forgiveness? He who had the power to revive himself
had the power to destroy them.
The appearances of Jesus, after his resurrection, are grotesque in
their self-contradiction. Now he is a pure ghost, suddenly appearing and
suddenly vanishing, and entering a room with shut doors. Then he appears
as solid flesh and blood, to be felt and handled. He even eats broiled
fish and honeycomb.
Such conditions are quite irreconcilable. We may imagine a ghost going
through a keyhole, but is it possible to imagine broiled fish and
honeycomb going through the same aperture? Or is the stomach of a ghost
capable of digesting such victuals?
Has it never struck you as strange, also, that the risen Christ never
appeared to anyone but his disciples? No outsider, no independent
witness, ever caught a glimpse of him. The story is a party report to
prove a party position and maintain a party's interests. Surely, if
Christ died for _all men_, if his resurrection is the pledge of ours,
and if our inability to believe it involves our perdition, _the fact_
should have been established beyond all cavil. Christ should have
stood before Pilate who sentenced him to be crucified; he should have
confronted the Sanhedrim who compassed his death; he might even have
walked about freely amongst the Jews during the forty days (more or
less) during which, as the New Testament narrates, he flitted about
like a hedge-row ghost. He should have made his resurrection as clear as
daylight, and he left it as dark as night.
To ask what became of the body of Jesus if he did not rise, is an idle
question. There is not the slightest _contemporary_ evidence that his
body was an object of concern. On the other hand, however, the story of
the Ascension looks like a convenient refuge. To talk of a risen Christ
was to invite the question "Where is he?" The story of the Ascension
enabled the talkers to answer "He is gone up." It relieved them from the
awkward necessity of producing him.
Space does not allow of my discussing this subject more extensively. I
could swell this Easter egg into gigantic proportions, but I must leave
it as it is It goes to you with my compliments, and a hope that it will
do you good. If it leads any of you to "take a thought and mend," if it
induces one of you to review the faith of his childhood, if it stirs a
rational impulse in a single Christian mind, I shall be amply rewarded
for my trouble.--Christian fellow citizens, Adieu!--I remain, Yours for
Reason and Humanity.