Silanus the Christian

by Edwin Abbott Abbott

Scaurus proceeded, “This appendix is not at all in Mark’s style, but it is probably very ancient. Luke mentions no appearance of Christ to women. But he describes an appearance to two disciples walking toward a village near Jerusalem; or rather, not to them while walking, for Jesus did not appear to them at first so as to be recognised; he first walked and talked with them and ‘opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.’ Then, in the village, during the breaking of bread, he was recognised by them, and vanished. As regards ‘walking,’ I may mention that the ancient Jews describe God as ‘walking with Israel,’ and I have read in a Christian letter, ‘The Lord journeyed with me,’ meaning ‘enlightened me.’ So the word may be used metaphorically. These two disciples expressly mention a ‘vision of angels’ spoken of by the women, who told them that angels had announced that Christ had risen from the dead; but, according to Luke, the two disciples and their companions disbelieved the women’s tale. And not a word is said by Luke, then or afterwards, about any appearance of Christ himself to women.

“You can see for yourself, Silanus, under what a disadvantage this Mark-Appendix placed these poor, simple, ignorant, honest Christians, when it called as their first witness to the resurrection a woman that had been formerly a lunatic. I believe they have been already attacked by their Jewish enemies on this ground. If they have not been, I am sure they will be. Luke, a physician and an educated man, chooses his ground much more sensibly. First, he omits all direct mention, in his own narrative, of manifestations to women. Secondly, he says, in effect—not in narrative but in dialogue—‘The women did see an apparition, but it was only of angels.’ Thirdly, ‘the men (and men are not liable to the hysterical delusions of women)—the men,’ he says, ‘treated the women’s vision as a mere delusion. The men saw Jesus himself.’ Possibly Luke was influenced by Paul, who in his list of the witnesses of manifestations makes no mention of women. The Law of Moses does not expressly exclude women’s testimony. But Josephus once told me that his countrymen allowed neither women nor slaves to give public testimony. So it is clear that Jewish tradition has interpreted the Law as excluding women, and that Paul, when controverting Jews, would not appeal to the evidence of women, because Jews would not accept it. Perhaps Luke followed in the same path.

“Luke also makes the following attempt to meet the objections of those who might urge that Christ’s apparition was not a rising of the actual body from the grave. He represents Christ as saying to the disciples, ‘Handle me’—as a proof that he was not a disembodied spirit. Now I do not believe that Luke invented this, although he, the latest of the three evangelists, is alone in recording it. Curiously enough, I have only recently been reading a letter—very wild and extravagant but manifestly genuine—written some four or five years ago by a Christian named Ignatius, which throws light on these very words in Luke. A few months after writing it, the man suffered as a Christian here in Rome, and his letters naturally had a vogue. Flaccus sent me a copy as a curiosity. Well, this letter says that when Christ came to his disciples—Ignatius says ‘to those around Peter’ but the meaning is ‘to Peter and his companions,’ that is, ‘to Christ’s disciples,’ as I have explained above—in the flesh, after his resurrection, he said to them, ‘Take, handle me, and see that I am not a bodiless dæmon.’ Then Ignatius adds—and these are the words I want you to mark—‘Straightway they touched him and believed, having been mixed with his flesh and blood.’

“Do you remember my laughing at you as a boy because you translated Diodorus Siculus literally, ‘They touched one another because of extreme need,’ when it ought to have been, ‘They fed on one another’? I quoted to you, at the time, the saying of Pythagoras, ‘Do not touch a white cock,’ i.e. ‘do not feed on it.’ There are many instances of this meaning. Well, the Christians believed that they fed on Christ. His ‘flesh and blood was mixed’ with theirs—or they were ‘mixed’ with his—when they fed on him in their sacred meal. If there were some Greek traditions saying ‘they touched him,’ meaning ‘they fed on him,’ there would naturally be other traditions about ‘touching’ Jesus meaning that they ‘handled’ him. The latter would suggest that they touched the wounds in his body inflicted during the crucifixion.”

I remembered my boyish mistake, and I saw clearly that Christians would have had much more excuse for making a similar one. Scaurus added, “This also explains Ignatius’s curious use of ‘take’ (as in Mark and Matthew).” At first I could not understand what Scaurus meant; but on looking at Ignatius’s Greek, which Scaurus gave me, I perceived that the words were not “Take hold of me, handle me,” but “Take,” i.e. “Take me,” or “Take my body (as a whole).” Now “take” is similarly used by Mark and Matthew in the sentence “Take, eat, this is my body,” where Mark omits “eat.”

“Moreover,” continued Scaurus, “Luke goes on to relate that Jesus said to the disciples, ‘Have ye anything to eat?’ and that they gave him some broiled fish, and that he ate in their presence. Christians in Rome have been in the habit—it would take too long to explain why—of using FISH as the emblem of Christ. The sense requires ‘he gave,’ not ‘they gave.’ I think Luke has confused ‘he gave’ with ‘they gave.’ The confusion, in Greek, might arise from one erroneous letter.” After giving me several instances of such confusion, he said, “I should not be surprised if some later gospel stated the fact more correctly, namely, that Christ gave the disciples ‘fish’.” This I afterwards found to be the case in the fourth gospel.

Scaurus then proceeded, “I think, however, that Luke’s error may have arisen in part from another tradition, which he has preserved in the Acts—somewhat like that of the Christian Ignatius which I have quoted above. Ignatius spoke of ‘mixing,’ Luke, in the Acts, speaks of ‘incorporating’—I can think of no better word to give the meaning—saying that Jesus, ‘in the act of being incorporated with’ the disciples, bade them not to depart from Jerusalem till they had received the Holy Spirit. Now this word ‘incorporate’—which is used of men brought into a city, hounds into a pack, soldiers into a squadron, and so on—is adapted to represent that close union which is a mark of almost all the Christians, who say with Paul that they are ‘one body in Christ’ and ‘members one of another.’ But this compact union of Christians is also represented by their Eucharist, so that Paul says to the Corinthians, in effect, not only, ‘Ye are one body,’ but also ‘Ye are one loaf.’ And I rather think that some Christians at the present time, in their Eucharists, pray that, as the grains of wheat scattered in the field are made into one, so the scattered children of God may be gathered into one. I think you must see how easily errors might spring up from metaphors of this kind used in the various churches of the empire, among people varying in language, customs, and traditions, and for the most part illiterate.

“Even in the letter of Ignatius above-mentioned, a scribe has altered the word ‘mixed’ into ‘constrained’ in the margin; and I am not surprised. I do not by any means accuse Luke of dishonesty, nor of carelessness. He did his best. But he was probably a physician—a man of science therefore—and liked to have things definitely and scientifically stated. This word above-mentioned, ‘being made into one compact body with them,’ might easily be supposed to mean ‘partaking of salt with them,’ that is, ‘sharing a meal with them.’ That rendering had the advantage of constituting a definite proof of Christ’s resurrection with a body that might be called in some sense material, since it (i.e. the body) was capable of eating. Then, of course, Luke would adapt his other accounts of the resurrection to this tradition, which he would naturally regard as one of central importance. But, though honest and pains-taking, Luke appears to me to have altered and corrupted what was perhaps, in some sense, a real—yes, I will admit, in some sense, a real—manifestation (if indeed any visions are real) into a mere non-existent physical sign or proof.

“Luke represents Jesus as feeding on his own body in order to satisfy his unbelieving disciples that he is really among them. I can easily imagine how very different may have been the feelings of those simple enthusiasts, the early Galilæan disciples, when they used these words—never dreaming that they would be reduced to dry, evidential prose—in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, praising the Lord for allowing them to ‘sit at His table,’ and to ‘eat and drink with Him,’ or for making them ‘sharers in the sacred food of His body’ and ‘partners of His board.’ It was only, after a generation or more had passed away, outside the atmosphere of Galilee—it was only to a compiler laboriously tracing back the truth through documents—that all these phrases would suggest the thought of Jesus proving his reality by partaking of food that his disciples give to him.