Strauss and the Hallucination Theory
IT has been well established by Paley, and indeed has seldom been denied,
that within a very few years of Christ’s crucifixion a large number of
people believed that he had risen from the dead. They believed that
after having suffered actual death he rose to actual life, as a man who
could eat and drink and talk, who could be seen and handled. Some who
held this were near relations of Christ, some had known him intimately
for a considerable time before his crucifixion, many must have known him
well by sight, but all were unanimous in their assertion that they had
seen him alive after he had been dead, and in consequence of this belief
they adopted a new mode of life, abandoning in many cases every other
earthly consideration save that of bearing witness to what they had known
and seen. I have not thought it worth while to waste time and space by
introducing actual proof of the above. This will be found in Paley’s
opening chapters, to which the reader is referred.
How then did this intensity of conviction come about? Differ as they
might and did upon many of the questions arising out of the main fact
which they taught, as to the fact itself they differed not in the least
degree. In their own life-time and in that of those who could confute
them their story gained the adherence of a very large and ever increasing
number. If it could be shewn that the belief in Christ’s reappearance
did not arise until after the death of those who were said to have seen
him, when actions and teachings might have been imputed to them which
were not theirs, the case would then be different; but this cannot be
done; there is nothing in history better established than that the men
who said that they had seen Christ alive after he had been dead, were
themselves the first to lay aside all else in order to maintain their
assertion. If it could be maintained that they taught what they did in
order to sanction laxity of morals, the case would again be changed. But
this too is impossible. They taught what they did because of the
intensity of their own conviction and from no other motive whatsoever.
What then can that thing have been which made these men so beyond all
measure and one-mindedly certain? Were they thus before the Crucifixion?
Far otherwise. Yet the men who fled in the hour of their master’s peril
betrayed no signs of flinching when their own was no less imminent. How
came it that the cowardice and fretfulness of the Gospels should be
transformed into the lion-hearted steadfastness of the Acts?
The Crucifixion had intervened. Yes, but surely something more than the
Crucifixion. Can we believe that if their experience of Christ had ended
with the Cross, the Apostles would have been in that state of mind which
should compel them to leave all else for the sake of preaching what he
had taught them? It is a hard thing for a man to change the scheme of
his life; yet this is not a case of one man but of many, who became
changed as if struck with an enchanter’s wand, and who, though many, were
as one in the vehemence with which they protested that their master had
reappeared to them alive. Their converse with Christ did not probably
last above a year or two, and was interrupted by frequent absence. If
Christ had died once and for all upon the Cross, Christianity must have
died with him; but it did not die; nay, it did not begin to live with
full energy until after its founder had been crucified. We must ask
again, what could that thing have been which turned these querulous and
faint-hearted followers into the most earnest and successful body of
propagandists which the world has ever seen, if it was not that which
they said it was—namely, that Christ had reappeared to them alive after
they had themselves known him to be dead? This would account for the
change in them, but is there anything else that will?
They had such ample opportunities of knowing the truth that the
supposition of mistake is fraught with the greatest difficulties; they
gave such guarantees of sincerity as that none have given greater; their
unanimity is perfect; there is not the faintest trace of any difference
of opinion amongst them as to the main fact of the Resurrection. These
are things which never have been and never can be denied, but if they do
not form strong _primâ facie_ ground for believing in the truth and
actuality of Christ’s Resurrection, what is there which will amount to a
_primâ facie_ case for anything whatever?
Nevertheless the matter does not rest here. While there exists the
faintest possibility of mistake we may be sure that we shall deal most
wisely by examining its character and value. Let us inquire therefore
whether there are any circumstances which seem to indicate that the early
Christians might have been mistaken, and been firmly persuaded that they
had seen Christ alive, although in point of fact they had not really seen
him? Men have been very positive and very sincere about things wherein
we should have conceived mistake impossible, and yet they have been
utterly mistaken. A strong predisposition, a rare coincidence, an
unwonted natural phenomenon, a hundred other causes, may turn sound
judgments awry, and we dare not assume forthwith that the first disciples
of Christ were superior to influences which have misled many who have had
better chances of withstanding them. Visions and hallucinations are not
uncommon even now. How easily belief in a supernatural occurrence
obtains among the peasantry of Italy, Ireland, Belgium, France, and
Spain; and how much more easily would it do so among Jews in the days of
Christ, when belief in supernatural interferences with this world’s
economy was, so to speak, omnipresent. Means of communication, that is
to say of verification, were few, and the tone of men’s minds as regards
accuracy of all kinds was utterly different from that of our own; science
existed not even in name as the thing we now mean by it; few could read
and fewer write, so that a story could seldom be confined to its original
limits; error, therefore, had much chance and truth little as compared
with our own times. What more is needed to make us feel how possible it
was for the purest and most honest of men to become parents of all
fallacy?
Strauss believes this to have been the case. He supposes that the
earliest Christians were under hallucination when they thought that they
had seen Christ alive after his Crucifixion; in other words, that they
never saw him at all, but only thought that they had done so. He does
not imagine that they conceived this idea at once, but that it grew up
gradually in the course of a few years, and that those who came under its
influence antedated it unconsciously afterwards. He appears to believe
that within a few months of the Crucifixion, and in consequence of some
unexplained combination of internal and external causes, some one of the
Apostles came to be impressed with the notion that he had seen Christ
alive; the impression, however made, was exceedingly strong, and was
communicated as soon as might be to some other or others of the Apostles:
the idea was welcome—as giving life to a hope which had been fondly
cherished; each inflamed the imagination of the other, until the original
basis of the conception slipped unconsciously from recollection, while
the intensity of the conviction itself became stronger and stronger the
more often the story was repeated. Strauss supposes that on seeing the
firm conviction of two or three who had hitherto been leaders among them,
the other Apostles took heart, and that thus the body grew together again
perhaps within a twelve-month of the Crucifixion. According to him, the
idea of the Resurrection having been once started, and having once taken
root, the soil was so congenial that it grew apace; the rest of the
Apostles, perhaps assembled together in a high state of mental enthusiasm
and excitement, conceived that they saw Christ enter the room in which
they were sitting and afford some manifest proof of life and identity; or
some one else may have enlarged a less extraordinary story to these
dimensions, so that in a short time it passed current everywhere (there
have been instances of delusions quite as extraordinary gaining a
foothold among men whose sincerity is not to be disputed), and finally
they conceived that these appearances of their master had commenced a few
months—and what is a few months?—earlier than they actually had, so that
the first appearance was soon looked upon as having been vouchsafed
within three days of the Crucifixion.
The above is not in Strauss’s words, but it is a careful _résumé_ of what
I gather to be his conception of the origin of the belief in the
Resurrection of Christ. The belief, and the intensity of the belief,
need explanation; the supernatural explanation, as we should ourselves
readily admit, cannot be accepted unless all others are found wanting; he
therefore, if I understand him rightly, puts forward the above as being a
reasonable and natural solution of the difficulty—the only solution which
does not fail upon examination, and therefore the one which should be
accepted. It is founded upon the affection which the Apostles had borne
towards their master, and their unwillingness to give up their hope that
they had been chosen, as the favoured lieutenants of the promised
Messiah.
No man would be willing to give up such hope easily; all men would
readily welcome its renewal; it was easy in the then intellectual
condition of Palestine for hallucination to originate, and still easier
for it to spread; the story touched the hearts of men too nearly to
render its propagation difficult. Men and women like believing in the
marvellous, for it brings the chance of good fortune nearer to their own
doors; but how much more so when they are themselves closely connected
with the central figure of the marvel, and when it appears to give a clue
to the solution of that mystery which all would pry into if they
could—our future after death? There can be no great cause for wonder
that an hallucination which arose under such conditions as these should
have gained ground and conquered all opposition, even though its origin
may be traced to the brain of but a single person.
He would be a bold man who should say that this was impossible;
nevertheless it cannot be accepted. For, in the first place, we collect
most certainly from the Gospel records that the Apostles were _not_ a
compact and devoted body of adherents at the time of the Crucifixion; yet
it is hard to see how Strauss’s hallucination theory can be accepted,
unless this was the case. If Strauss believed the earliest followers of
Christ to have been already immovably fixed in their belief that he was
the Son of God—the promised Messiah, of whom they were themselves the
especially chosen ministers—if he considered that they believed in their
master as the worker of innumerable miracles which they had themselves
witnessed; as one whom they had seen raise others from death to life, and
whom, therefore, death could not be expected to control—if he held the
followers of Christ to have been in this frame of mind at the time of the
Crucifixion, it might be intelligible that he should suppose the strength
of their faith to have engendered an imaginary reappearance in order to
save them from the conclusion that their hopes had been without
foundation; that, in point of fact, they should have accepted a new
delusion in order to prop up an old one; but we know very well that
Strauss does not accept this position. He denies that the Apostles had
seen any miracles; independently therefore of the many and unmistakable
traces of their having been but partial and wavering adherents, which
have made it a matter of common belief among those who have studied the
New Testament that the faith of the Apostles was unsteadfast before the
Crucifixion, he must have other and stronger reasons for thinking that
this was so, inasmuch as he does not look upon them as men who had seen
our Lord raise any one from the dead, nor restore the eyes of the blind.
According to him, they may have seen Christ exercise unusual power over
the insane, and temporary alleviations of sickness, due perhaps to mental
excitement, may have taken place in their presence and passed for
miracles; he would doubt how far they had even seen this much, for he
would insist on many passages in the Gospels which would point in the
direction of our Lord’s never having professed to work a single miracle;
but even though he granted that they had seen certain extraordinary cases
of healing, there is no amount of testimony which would for a moment
satisfy him of their having seen more. _We_ see the Apostles as men who
before the Crucifixion had seen Lazarus raised from death to life after
the corruption of the grave had begun its work, and who had seen sight
given to one that had been born sightless; as men who had seen miracle
after miracle, with every loophole for escape from a belief in the
miraculous carefully excluded; who had seen their master walking upon the
sea, and bidding the winds be still; our difficulty therefore is to
understand the incredulity of the Apostles as displayed abundantly in the
Gospels; but Strauss can have none such; for he must see them as men over
whom the influence of their master had been purely personal, and due to
nothing more than to a strength and beauty of character which his
followers very imperfectly understood. _He_ does not believe that
Lazarus was raised at all, or that the man who had been born blind ever
existed; he considers the fourth gospel, which alone records these
events, to be the work of a later age, and not to be depended on for
facts, save here and there; certainly not where the facts recorded are
miraculous. He must therefore be even more ready than we are to admit
that the faith of the Apostles was weak before the Crucifixion; but
whether he is or not, we have it on the highest authority that their
faith was not strong enough to maintain them at the very first approach
of danger, nor to have given them any hope whatever that our Lord should
rise again; whereas for Strauss’s theory to hold good, it must already
have been in a white heat of enthusiasm.
But even granting that this was so—in the face of all the evidence we can
reach—men so honest and sincere as the Apostles proved themselves to be,
would have taken other ground than the assertion that their master had
reappeared to them alive, unless some very extraordinary occurrences had
led them to believe that they had indeed seen him. If their faith was
glowing and intense at the time of the Crucifixion—so intense that they
believed in Christ as much, or nearly as much, after the Crucifixion as
before it (and unless this were so the hallucinations could never have
arisen at all, or at any rate could never have been so unanimously
accepted)—it would have been so intense as to stand in no need of a
reappearance. In this case, if they had found that their master did not
return to them, the Apostles would probably have accepted the position
that he had, contrary to their expectation, been put to a violent death;
they would, perhaps, have come sooner or later to the conclusion that he
was immediately on death received into Heaven, and was sitting on the
right hand of God; while some extraordinary dream might have been
construed into a revelation of the fact with the manner of its
occurrence, and been soon generally believed; but the idea of our Lord’s
return to earth in a gross material body whereon the wounds were still
unhealed, was perhaps the last thing that would have suggested itself to
them by way of hallucination. If their faith had been great enough, and
their spirits high enough to have allowed hallucination to originate at
all, their imagination would have presented them at once with a glorious
throne, and the splendours of the highest Heaven as appearing through the
opened firmament; it would not surely have rested satisfied with a man
whose hands and side were wounded, and who could eat of a piece of
broiled fish and of an honeycomb. A fabric so utterly baseless as the
reappearances of our Lord (on the supposition of their being unhistoric)
would have been built of gaudier materials. To repeat, it seems
impossible that the Apostles should have attempted to connect their
hallucinations circumstantially and historically with the events which
had immediately preceded them. Hallucination would have been conscious
of a hiatus and not have tried to bridge it over. It would not have
developed the idea of our Lord’s return to this grovelling and unworthy
earth prior to his assumption into glory, unless those who were under its
influence had either seen other resurrections from the dead—in which case
there is no difficulty attaching to the Resurrection of our Lord
himself—or been forced into believing it by the evidence of their own
senses; this, on the supposition that the devotion of the first disciples
was intense before the Crucifixion; but if, on the other hand, they were
at that time anything but steadfast, as both _a priori_ and _a
posteriori_ evidence would seem to indicate, if they were few and
wavering, and if what little faith they had was shaken to its foundations
and apparently at an end for ever with the death of Christ, it becomes
indeed difficult to see how the idea of his return to earth alive could
have ever struck even a single one of them, much less that hallucinations
which could have had no origin but in the disordered brain of some one
member of the Apostolic body, should in a short time have been accepted
by all as by one man without a shadow of dissension, and been strong
enough to convert them, as was said above, into the most earnest and
successful body of propagandists that the world has ever seen.
Truly this is not too much to say of them; and yet we are asked to
believe that this faith, so intensely energetic, grew out of one which
can hardly be called a faith at all, in consequence of day-dreams whose
existence presupposes a faith hardly if any less intense than that which
it is supposed to have engendered. Are we not warranted in asserting
that a movement which is confined to a few wavering followers, and which
receives any very decisive check, which scatters and demoralises the few
who have already joined it, will be absolutely sure to die a speedy
natural death unless something utterly strange and new occurs to give it
a fresh impetus? Such a resuscitating influence would have been given to
the Christian religion by the reappearance of Christ alive. This would
meet the requirements of the case, for we can all feel that if we had
already half believed in some gifted friend as a messenger from God, and
if we had seen that friend put to death before our eyes, and yet found
that the grave had no power over him, but that he could burst its bonds
and show himself to us again unmistakably alive, we should from that
moment yield ourselves absolutely his; but our faith would die with him
unless it had been utter before his death.
The devotion of the Apostles is explained by their belief in the
Resurrection, but their belief in the Resurrection is not explained by a
supposed hallucination; for their minds were not in that state in which
alone such a delusion could establish itself firmly, and unless it were
established firmly by the most apparently irrefragable evidence of many
persons, it would have had no living energy. How an hallucination could
occur in the requisite strength to the requisite number of people is
neither explained nor explicable, except upon the supposition that the
Apostles were in a very different frame of mind at the time of Christ’s
Crucifixion from that which all the evidence we can get would seem to
indicate. If Strauss had first made this point clear we could follow
him. But he has not done so.
Strauss says, the conception that Christ’s body had been reawakened and
changed, “a double miracle, exceeding far what had occurred in the case
of Enoch and Elijah, could only be credible to one who saw in him a
prophet far superior to them”—_i.e._, to one who notwithstanding his
death was persuaded that he was the Messiah: “this conviction” (that a
double miracle had been performed) “was the first to which the Apostles
had to attain in the days of their humiliation after the Crucifixion.”
Yes—but how were they to attain to it, being now utterly broken down and
disillusioned? Strauss admits that before they could have come to hold
what he supposes them to have held, they must have seen in Christ even
after his Crucifixion a prophet far greater than either Moses or Elias;
whereas in point of fact it is very doubtful whether they ever believed
this much of their master even before the Crucifixion, and hardly
questionable that after it they disbelieved in him almost entirely, until
he shewed himself to them alive. Is it possible that from the dead
embers of so weak a faith, so vast a conflagration should have been
kindled?
I submit, therefore, that independently of any direct evidence as to the
when and where of Christ’s reappearances, the fact that the Apostles
before the Crucifixion were irresolute, and after it unspeakably
resolute, affords strong ground for believing that they must have seen
something, or come to know something, which to their minds was utterly
overwhelming in its convincing power: when we find the earliest and most
trustworthy records unanimously asserting that that something was the
reappearance of Christ alive, we feel that such a reappearance was an
adequate cause for the result actually produced; and when we think over
the condition of mind which both probability and evidence assign to the
Apostles, we also feel that no other circumstance would have been
adequate, nor even this unless the proof had been such as none could
reasonably escape from.
Again, Strauss’s supposition that the Apostles antedated their
hallucinations suggests no less difficulty. Suppose that, after all,
Strauss is right, and that there was no actual reappearance; whatever it
was that led the Apostles to believe in such reappearance must have been,
judging by its effect, intense and memorable: it must have been as a
shock obliterating everything save the memory of itself and the things
connected with it: the time and manner of such a shock could never have
been forgotten, nor misplaced without deliberate intention to deceive,
and no one will impute any such intention to the Apostles.
It may be said that if they were capable of believing in the reality of
their visions they would be also capable of antedating them; this is
true; but the double supposition of self-delusion, first in seeing the
visions at all, and then in unconsciously antedating them, reduces the
Apostles to such an exceedingly low level of intelligence and
trustworthiness, that no good and permanent work could come from such
persons; the men who could be weak enough, and crazed enough, if the
reader will pardon the expression, to do as Strauss suggests, could never
have carried their work through in the way they did. Such men would have
wrecked their undertaking a hundred times over in the perils which
awaited it upon every side; they would have become victims of their own
fancies and desires, with little or no other grounds than these for any
opinions they might hold or teach: from such a condition of mind they
must have gone on to one still worse; and their tenets would have
perished with them, if not sooner.
Again, as regards this antedating; unless the visions happened at once,
it is inconceivable that they should have happened at all. Strauss
believes that the disciples fled in their first terror to their homes:
that when there, “outside the range to which the power of the enemies and
murderers of their master extended, the spell of terror and consternation
which had been laid upon their minds gave way,” and that under the
circumstances a reaction up to the point at which they might have visions
of Christ is capable of explanation. The answer to this is that it is
indeed likely that the spell of terror would give way when they found
themselves safe at home, but that it is not at all likely that any
reaction would take place in favour of one to whom their allegiance had
never been thorough, and whom they supposed to have met with a violent
and accursed end. It might be easy to imagine such a reaction if we did
not also attempt to imagine the circumstances that must have preceded it;
the moment we try to do this, we find it to be an impossibility. If once
the Apostles had been dispersed, and had returned home to their former
avocations without having seen or heard anything of their master’s return
to earth, all their expectations would have been ended; they would have
remained peaceable fishermen for the rest of their lives, and been cured
once and for ever of their enthusiasm.
Can we believe that the disciples, returning to Galilee in fear, and
bereaved of that master mind which had kept them from falling out with
one another, would have remained a united and enthusiastic body? Strauss
admits that their enthusiasm was for the time ended. Is it then likely
that they would have remained in any sense united, or is it not much more
likely that they would have shunned each other and disliked allusions to
the past? What but Christ’s actual reappearance could rekindle this dead
enthusiasm, and fan it to such a burning heat? Suppose that one or two
disciples recovered faith and courage, the majority would never do so.
If Christ himself with the magic of his presence could not weld them into
a devoted and harmonious company, would the rumour arising at a later
time that some one had seen him after death, be acceptable enough to make
the others believe that they too had actually seen and handled him?
Perhaps—if the rumour was believed. But _would_ it have been believed?
Or at any rate have been believed so utterly?
We cannot think it. For the belief and assertion are absolutely without
trace of dissent within the Christian body, and that body was in the
first instance composed entirely of the very persons who had known and
followed Christ before the Crucifixion. If some of the original twelve
had remained aloof and disputed the reappearances of Christ, is it
possible that no trace of such dissension should appear in the Epistles
of St. Paul? Paul differed widely enough from those who were Apostles
before him, and his language concerning them is occasionally that of
ill-concealed contempt and hatred rather than of affection; but is there
a word or hint which would seem to indicate that a single one of those
who had the best means of knowing doubted the Resurrection? There is
nothing of the kind; on the contrary, whatever we find is such as to make
us feel perfectly sure that none of them _did_ doubt it. Is it then
possible that this unanimity should have sprung from the original
hallucinations of a small minority? True—it is plain from the Epistle to
the Corinthians that there were some of Paul’s contemporaries who denied
the Resurrection. But who were they? We should expect that many among
the more educated Gentile converts would throw doubt upon so stupendous a
miracle, but is there anything which would point in the direction of
these doubts having been held within the original body of those who said
that they had seen Christ alive? By the eleven, or by the five hundred
who saw him at once? There is not one single syllable. Those who heard
the story second-hand would doubtless some of them attempt to explain
away its miraculous character, but if it had been founded on
hallucination it is not from these alone that the doubts would have come.
Something is imperatively demanded in order to account for the intensity
of conviction manifested by the earliest Christians shortly after the
Crucifixion; for until that time they were far from being firmly
convinced, and the Crucifixion was the very last thing to have convinced
them. Given (to speak of our Lord as he must probably appear to Strauss)
an unusually gifted teacher of a noble and beautiful character: given
also, a small body of adherents who were inclined to adopt him as their
master and to regard him as the coming liberator, but who were
nevertheless far from settled in their conviction: given such a man and
such followers: the teacher is put to a shameful death about two years
after they had first known him, and the followers forsake him instantly:
surely without his reappearing in some way upon the scene they would have
concluded that their doubts had been right and their hopes without
foundation: but if he reappeared, their faith would, for the first time,
become intense, all-absorbing. Surely also they might be trusted to know
whether they had really seen their master return to them or not, and not
to sacrifice themselves in every way, and spend their whole lives in
bearing testimony to pure hallucination?
There is one other point on which a few words will be necessary, before
we proceed to the arguments in favour of the objective character of
Christ’s Resurrection as derivable from the conversion and testimony of
St. Paul. It is this. Strauss and those who agree with him will perhaps
maintain that the Apostles were in truth wholly devoted to Christ before
the Crucifixion, but that the Evangelists have represented them as being
only half-hearted, in order to heighten the effect of their subsequent
intense devotion. But this looks like falling into the very error which
Rationalists condemn most loudly when it comes from so-called orthodox
writers. They complain, and with too much justice, that our apologists
have made “anything out of anything.” Yet if the Apostles were not
unsteadfast, and did not desert their master in his hour of peril, and if
all the accounts of Christ’s reappearances are the creations of
disordered fancy, we may as well at once declare the Evangelists to be
worthless as historians, and had better give up all attempt at the
construction of history with their assistance. We cannot take whatever
we wish, and leave whatever we wish, and alter whatever we wish. If we
admit that upon the whole the Gospel writings or at any rate the first
three Gospels, contain a considerable amount of historic matter, we
should also arrive at some general principles by which we will
consistently abide in separating the historic from the unhistoric. We
cannot deal with them arbitrarily, accepting whatever fits in with our
fancies, and rejecting whatever is at variance with them.
Now can it be maintained that the Evangelists would be so likely to
overrate the half-heartedness of the Apostles, that we should look with
suspicion upon the many and very plain indications of their having been
only half-hearted? Certainly not. If there was any likelihood of a
tendency one way or the other it would be in the direction of overrating
their faith. Would not the unbelief of the Apostles in the face of all
the recorded miracles be a most damaging thing in the eyes of the
unconverted? Would not the Apostles themselves, after they were once
firmly convinced, be inclined to think that they had from the first
believed more firmly than they really had done? This at least would be
in accordance with the natural promptings of human instinct: we are all
of us apt to be wise after the event, and are far more prone to dwell
upon things which seem to give some colour to a pretence of prescience,
than upon those which force from us a confession of our own stupidity.
It might seem a damaging thing that the Apostles should have doubted as
much as long as they clearly did; would then the Evangelists go out of
their way to introduce more signs of hesitation? Would any one suggest
that the signs of doubt and wavering had been overrated, unless there
were some theory or other to be supported, in order to account for which
this overrating was necessary? Would the opinion that the want of faith
had been exaggerated arise prior to the formation of a theory, or
subsequently? This is the fairest test; let the reader apply it for
himself.
On the other hand, there are many reasons which should incline us to
believe that, before the Resurrection, the Apostles were less convinced
than is generally supposed, but it would be dangerous to depart either to
the right hand or to the left of that which we find actually recorded,
namely, that in the main the Apostles were prepared to accept Christ
before the Crucifixion, but that they were by no means resolute and
devoted followers. I submit that this is a fair rendering of the spirit
of what we find in the Gospels. It is just because Strauss has chosen to
depart from it that he has found himself involved in the maze of
self-contradiction through which we have been trying to follow him.
There is no position so absurd that it cannot be easily made to look
plausible, if the strictly scientific method of investigation is once
departed from.
But if I had been in Strauss’s place, and had wished to make out a case
against Christianity without much heed of facts, I should not have done
it by a theory of hallucinations. A much prettier, more novel and more
sensational opening for such an attempt is afforded by an attack upon the
Crucifixion itself. A very neat theory might be made, that there may
have been some disturbance at one of the Jewish passovers, during which
some persons were crucified as an example by the Romans: that during this
time Christ happened to be missing; that he reappeared, and finally
departed, whither, no man can say: that the Apostles, after his last
disappearance, remembering that he had been absent during the tumult,
little by little worked themselves up into the belief that on his
reappearance they had seen wounds upon him, and that the details of the
Crucifixion were afterwards revealed in a vision to some favoured
believer, until in the course of a few years the narrative assumed its
present shape: that then the reappearance of Christ was denied among the
Jews, while the Crucifixion as attaching disgrace to him was not
disputed, and that it thus became so generally accepted as to find its
way into Pliny and Josephus. This tissue of absurdity may serve as an
example of what the unlicensed indulgence of theory might lead to; but
truly it would be found quite as easy of belief as that the early
Christian faith in the Resurrection was due to hallucination only.
Considering, then, that Christianity was not crushed but overran the most
civilised portions of the world; that St. Paul was undoubtedly early
told, in such a manner as for him to be thoroughly convinced of the fact,
that on some few but sufficient occasions Christ was seen alive after he
had been crucified; that the general belief in the reappearance of our
Lord was so strong that those who had the best means of judging gave up
all else to preach it, with a unanimity and singleness of purpose which
is irreconcilable with hallucination; that all our records most
definitely insist upon this belief and that there is no trace of its ever
having been disputed among the Jewish Christians, it seems hard to see
how we can escape from admitting that Jesus Christ was crucified, dead,
and buried, and yet that he was verily and indeed seen alive again by
those who expected nothing less, but who, being once convinced, turned
the whole world after them.
It is now incumbent upon us to examine the testimony of St. Paul, to
which I would propose to devote a separate chapter.