The Supernatural in the New Testament, Possible, Credible, and Historical / Or, An Examination of the Validity of Some Recent Objections Against Christianity as a Divine Revelation

by C. A. Row

Let us suppose, however, that all these difficulties do not exist, and that she is gone to publish among the friends of Jesus that she had seen Him risen from the dead. His death had proved to them a stunning blow; but let us suppose that they were still eagerly desirous of the occurrence of something which might renew their old faith in their Master's Messiahship. It is [pg 458] clear that nothing short of a belief in His resurrection could have accomplished this. Yet however desirous they may have been of His return to life, they were confronted with the stern fact that He had been publicly executed, and that the credulity of the past had not succeeded in restoring dead men to life. Their despondency occasioned by the events of the last three days was extreme. Let us suppose that Mary Magdalene rushes in with the announcement: “I have seen the Lord,—the tomb is empty,—He is risen from the dead.” However desirous they might be that the news should be true, it is evident that such an announcement must have filled the minds of even the most credulous with astonishment. What! not the apparition of His departed spirit, but a bodily reality, the very man himself? Is it possible that none of them suspected that it was the dream of an enthusiastic woman? Is it conceivable that men or women, passionately attached to their Master, asked her no questions about the interview; what He had said to her; where He was to be found? Some replies to these and kindred questions were inevitable; and unless they were distinct and satisfactory, the rising enthusiasm must have been checked. Is it true to human nature that the most enthusiastic credulity could have accepted these things as facts, or that the dead Jesus could have straightway assumed His place of Messianic dignity in their minds, if He had made no appointment where He could meet His friends; or if that appointment was created by the imagination of the Magdalene, but when tested by the attempt to see him, it proved a delusion?

But even credulity, when united with profound love and attachment to a departed friend, must have some farther satisfaction than a fancied sight. If the disciples, in the height of their enthusiasm, imagined that [pg 459] they saw Him, they surely would have spoken to Him. Could they have helped embracing Him on his return to life after His cruel sufferings and ignominious death? Above all, what about the future? Was He going to teach again in public? Was He not going to bring confusion on His enemies? Was He actually going to retire from public view out of their way? And if He did so, what about His Messianic claims? Who was to head the party for the future? Could they have no secret interviews with Him? If He henceforth retired into obscurity, what announcement were His friends to make to His opponents? The most fanatical enthusiasts must have asked some of these questions.

Either no answer was returned, and the delusions must have been immediately dispelled; or the enthusiasm which generated a phantom, and mistook it for a reality, invented an answer likewise. Any reply which fell short of a promise to appear for the future at their head, and either convince or confound His adversaries, must have extinguished their belief in His Messiahship. They either fancied they saw Him again, or they did not. If the former was the case, they must have had repeated interviews, all created by the imagination, at which something definite must have been supposed to have passed sufficient to establish the belief that He was a Messiah returned to them from the grave. If His old Messianic character had ceased, some definite plan must have been propounded of the mode in which He was going to enter on a new one. If, however, we accept the alternative that He saw them no more, we shall possibly be told that His followers accounted for His absence by imagining that He had for a time been taken up into heaven, whence He was shortly coming again to destroy His enemies. But in that case it must have been a cruel blow to enthusiastic love. What! their [pg 460] much loved Master, for whom they had sacrificed their all, to afford them one mute interview after His resurrection, immediately to go into heaven, and leave them without a head, exposed to the assaults of the opponents who had murdered Him?

But let us imagine all these difficulties got over, and that they fancied that they caught one solitary glimpse of Him, and that He was taken up into heaven, whence He would come again to revive His sinking cause. Was He to return in a few days, or months, or years? If the days became months, and the months years, what was to be done with the Church in the meantime? Was it to organize itself? If so, on what new basis? Was it to confront His foes? Was it to make converts; or quietly to await His return? If the latter, as months and years passed away, the Church must have simply died of inanition, and we should have heard no more of Christianity. If the former hypothesis be preferred, then it is plain that His followers must have determined to start His Messiahship on a new basis. But what was this? How was it to be propounded to the world? How were His other disciples to be persuaded to accept it? Instead of an earthly, the Church for the future must be headed by a heavenly Messiah, who was coming at some future day to take vengeance on His foes. Such a change of tactics must have been resolved upon, and that speedily; the whole plan must have been conceived and executed by a few credulous enthusiasts, or the belief in the Messiahship of Jesus must have been extinguished in His grave.

But further; the necessity of converting the other disciples to this belief was most urgent; for until this could be done, the society was dissolving into its individual elements. How was it to be accomplished? It is easy to say that these enthusiasts communicated [pg 461] their enthusiasm to the rest. But this little sentence conceals behind it whole mountains of difficulty. Every one to which I have already alluded, must have had to be surmounted in each individual case. There must have been many other disciples who dearly loved their Master. What must have been their feelings on hearing that He had appeared to only four or five of them, and had gone up into heaven? What! He, whom we loved, who dearly loved us, risen from the dead, and gone to heaven without affording us the consolation of a parting interview? Such a thought was enough to chill all ordinary enthusiasm. Was His mother one of those who fancied they saw Him come again from the grave? If she was, could she have been mistaken? If she did not see Him, what must have been her feelings at the thought that He had left the world, without allowing her to behold Him? What would have been the feelings of the women, whose beneficence had contributed to His support, or of His intimate friends among the Apostles? Surely all these would have thought it more certain that their companions' report originated in a heated imagination, than that Jesus should have acted thus.

But the idea that a few fanatics only fancied that they saw Jesus alive after His Crucifixion is negatived by an historical fact distinctly affirmed by St. Paul in the face of his opponents in the Corinthian Church. Having mentioned His appearance to Peter and the twelve, St. Paul asserts: “After that, He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.”

Here then we are in possession of direct contemporaneous testimony. This assertion is boldly made in the face of the powerful party who denied St. Paul's [pg 462] apostleship. It is clear that if they had not believed in the truth of his assertion, they would not have lost such an opportunity of throwing discredit upon him by convicting him of falsehood. The Apostle affirms in the presence of his adversaries that there were then living more than 250 persons who believed that they had seen Jesus Christ after He had risen from the dead; and not only so, but that upwards of 500 persons had seen Him on one and the same occasion. If this assertion was false, nothing was easier than for the opponents of the Apostle to refute it.

On the supposition, therefore, that the belief in the Resurrection originated in a delusion, it must have been one on a prodigiously large scale. Unless St. Paul, and the opposing section of the Corinthian Church, who must have represented the opinions of the Church at Jerusalem, were misinformed on this subject, it is necessary to frame an hypothesis which shall not only account for three or four fanatics, fancying that they saw Jesus Christ alive, when it was nothing but the creation of a disordered imagination, but for the fact that more than five hundred persons laboured under a similar delusion. The assertion of the Apostle is express, not that more than five hundred persons were persuaded to believe that some others had seen Jesus Christ after He was risen from the dead, but that they had actually seen Him themselves.

The only way of evading the force of this testimony is either by directly impugning St. Paul's veracity, or by supposing that he made an assertion based on a vulgar rumour. The whole character of the Apostle renders the supposition of a deliberate falsehood incredible, besides the danger already alluded to of certain detection by his opponents. Nor is the other alternative more tenable, that on such a subject he [pg 463] adopted a mere idle rumour. No subject more occupied his mind than the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. For Him he sacrificed everything. To Him he devoted his entire life. Is it conceivable that such a man would not, under the influence of common curiosity, have inquired into the alleged facts of his Master's Resurrection? But these letters prove that he was a man of far more than ordinary curiosity. It is clear from them that he kept himself acquainted with the details of the events which took place in the Churches which he had planted. Messengers were sent by him to supply him with all necessary information. Even in so distant a Church as that of Rome, which he had not even visited, he knew no small number of the chief Christians by name, and took the deepest interest in their affairs. Are we to believe that such a man received such a fact connected with the dearest interests of his life without taking the trouble to ascertain its truth? Moreover, his former character as a persecutor must have rendered it necessary that he should institute a diligent inquiry into the alleged Resurrection of one whom he considered an impostor, and whose adherents he was endeavouring to compel to renounce their allegiance. We must, therefore, conclude that what St. Paul here affirms must have been true, that on one definite occasion several hundreds of persons thought that they had seen Jesus Christ after He was risen from the dead.

But if it is in the highest degree difficult to account for the possibility of three or four of the disciples of Jesus fancying they saw their risen Master, when they saw nothing but a creation of their own imagination, what theory can be framed to account for the fact of several hundreds of persons having become the prey of a similar delusion? Large numbers of persons [pg 464] do not fall into delusions of this kind. Are we to suppose that some of them affirmed that some distant object which they saw was Jesus, and that the remainder accepted the assertion without inquiry? If He had not come near to them, would they not have rushed up to a man, who was believed to have come up again from the grave, and endeavoured to converse with him? Let all history be searched for any fact at all like this. Until something like it can be found, we are justified in pronouncing such a delusion impossible. Nay: however common the belief in ghost stories, it would be impossible to find a case of several hundred persons who believed that, on some one definite occasion, when they were all assembled, they had seen the ghost of a person who had recently been executed, appear before them, and on the strength of this belief, constituted themselves into a new society;—a society which has endured through eighteen centuries? However cynical our views may be, it is impossible to believe that human nature is a lie.