THE PROOFS OF CHRIST’S RESURRECTION.
CHAPTER I.
SOURCES OF EVIDENCE.
It is a characteristic of all who deny this and all other miracles, that they beg the whole question to begin with. They assume as an axiom that a miracle is impossible, or impossible to be proved by human testimony. Or, to put it more mildly, in the language of one of their number (Renan[1]), “neither men of the people nor men of the world are competent to prove it. Great precaution and a long habit of scientific research are requisite.” If these are sound axioms, it should be a matter of indifference who were the witnesses, or what their credibility or means of knowledge, since at the best they were but human, and it is not claimed that they were experts or savans after the modern skeptical school, although they might be expected to know whether one who walked with them, and to whose instructions they listened, and from whom they received their commission, were dead or alive.
It is also a comfortable assumption on their part that no one is a scholar who does not agree with their opinion, and many young men who would not be thought to be behind the times are misled by their confident boasting. “No modern theologian,” says Strauss,[2] “who is also a scholar, now considers any of the four Gospels to be the work of its pretended author, or in fact to be by an Apostle or colleague of an Apostle.” The logic of this is, that if any one does so consider them, he is not a scholar. The same kind of scholarship and habit of thinking that induced this wise conclusion brought him at last to the denial of the existence of a personal God or a future life. His experience is instructive, and shows the inevitable tendency of all reasoning that denies the possibility of a miracle or a divine revelation. Mill’s hard logic cannot well be resisted. “Once admit a God, and the production, by his direct volition, of an effect which in any case owed its origin to his creative will, is no more a purely arbitrary hypothesis to account for the past, but must be reckoned with as a serious possibility.” If, then, a miracle may occur, it may be proved[A] by human testimony, for the very motive or reason for its occurrence, or, at least the principal reason, must be its value as an attestation.
And the immense labor which the Tübingen school and every class of skeptics have bestowed in attempts to disprove the authorship of the Four Gospels, shows that they have not much confidence in their axioms after all. Why so anxious as to the witnesses, if it is immaterial who they are, or what they testify to? If a miracle cannot be proved by any evidence, why have they multiplied books to prove or disprove the authorship of the gospels?