Silanus the Christian

by Edwin Abbott Abbott

“First, take the statement that the women ‘said,’ or ‘said to themselves,’ ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?’ I am not surprised that someone has altered this into, ‘Who has rolled away the stone for us?’ Improbable though the latter is, it is at all events conceivable. But it is inconceivable that women, going to the guarded door of a prison, should ask, as a literal question, ‘Who will open the door for us?’ Taken literally, Mark’s text implies something almost as absurd as this. But now take it as a prayer to heaven. Then you may illustrate it by the language of the Psalmist, ‘Who will rise up for me against the evil-doers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?’—followed by ‘Unless the Lord had been my help my soul had soon dwelt in silence.’ So the Psalmist says, ‘Who will bring me into the fenced city?’ and then adds, ‘Hast not thou cast us off, O God?’ You see in all these cases the question is really a prayer, a passionate and almost desperate prayer, implying ‘What man will do this for us? No man. No one but God.’ So it is in the Law, ‘Who will go up to heaven? Who will go down into the deep?’ These last words Paul quotes as the utterance of something approaching to despair. So I take the women’s words as having been originally a cry to God, ‘Who, if not God, will roll away the stone!’

“Secondly, note that Mark says nothing about any guards at the tomb. According to him, no obstacle was to be anticipated by the women, in their attempt to enter the tomb, except the weight of the stone, which was ‘exceeding great.’ No other evangelist says this. But I have seen traditions describing the stone as so heavy that twenty men could scarcely roll it, or that it required the efforts of the elders and scribes aided by the centurion and his soldiers. In my opinion the omission of the ‘greatness’ by Matthew and Luke, and the literalising of it by later traditions, arise from a misunderstanding of its poetical and spiritual character. The ‘stone’ was ‘exceeding great’ in this sense, that it could not be moved except by the help of God.

“Thirdly, ‘the women looked up and saw it (i.e. the stone) rolled upward,’ that is, as I take it, to heaven, in a vision. The word here used for ‘look up’ may mean ‘regain sight,’ as though the women were blind to the fact till they had uttered their aspiration (‘who will roll it away?’) and then their eyes were opened. Anyhow, it is more than ‘looked.’ I think it means ‘saw in a vision’.” I was certainly astonished at this use of “look up,” but much more at the “rolling up” of the stone.

“As to Mark’s ‘rolling up’,” said Scaurus, “I have looked everywhere, trying to find his word used by others in the sense of ‘roll away,’ or ‘roll back.’ But in vain. Its use here is all the more remarkable because, when Jacob rolls away the stone for Rachel, the word ‘roll away’ is used. You may say, ‘This shews that the term is not borrowed from Jacob’s story.’ I cannot agree with that. The Christian hymn might contrast Jacob, the type of Christ, rolling the stone merely on one side, with Christ, the fulfilment, rolling it right up to heaven. I should add that a marginal note in Mark inserts an ascension of angels with Jesus at this point.”

In attempting to do justice to this narrative and to Scaurus’s criticisms of it, I felt at a great disadvantage owing to my ignorance of Jewish literature and thought; and at first I was much more disposed to put by the whole story as an inexplicable legend than to accept Scaurus’s explanation. But afterwards, looking at Matthew’s narrative, I found that Matthew described an “angel” as “rolling away the stone,” and as saying to the women, “Fear not.” This seemed decidedly to confirm the conclusion that the women saw “a vision of angels” (a phrase used by Luke) in which vision the stone was seen rolled away—or (as Mark says) “rolled upward”—when the angels went up to heaven. But all this—though it confused and wearied me—did not prevent me from believing that the spirit, or spiritual body, of Christ had really risen from the dead, since I had all along supposed that this alone was what was meant by Christ’s resurrection, in accordance, as it appeared to me, with Paul’s statements. Nothing that Scaurus had said, so far, seemed to me to shake Paul’s testimony to the resurrection.

But Scaurus’s next remarks dealt with this matter, and greatly shook my faith. “I had almost forgotten,” he said, “to speak of Christ’s appearance to Paul. It was clearly a mere image of Paul’s thought, called up by his conscience—nothing more. I need write no further about it. Flaccus has sent you Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. If you are curious, look there, and you will find enough and more than enough. My belief is, that, if Stephen had not seen Christ, Paul would not have seen Christ. That puts the matter epigrammatically, and therefore (to some extent) falsely; for all epigrams are partly false. But it is mainly true. There may have been other Stephens whom Paul persecuted. But Stephen, I think, summed up the effect of all. Read what Paul says to the Romans about the persecuted and their conquest of persecutors:—‘Bless them that persecute you’; that is, instead of resorting to the fire of vengeance against one’s enemy, use, he says, the refiner’s fire of kindness, ‘for in doing this thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head’; finally, ‘Be not conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good.’ Read this. Then reflect that Paul ‘persecuted.’ Then read the Acts and see how he persecuted Stephen, and how Stephen interceded for his enemies. I take it that Paul is writing from experience—that the intercession of Stephen ‘overcame’ Paul (he would say ‘overcame,’ I should say ‘hypnotized’ him) and compelled Paul to see what Stephen saw, namely, Jesus raised from the dead and glorified. Read the Acts and see if I am not right.”

It had not occurred to me before, while I was reading what Flaccus’s letter said incidentally about the inclusion of the Acts of the Apostles in my parcel, that this book would probably give me Luke’s account of the conversion of the apostle Paul, which had been so much in my thoughts, in my conjectures, and even in my dreams. Now, therefore, although barely a dozen lines of Scaurus’s letter remained to read, I immediately put them aside and took up the Acts. Here I found that I had been wrong in most of my wild anticipations about the circumstances of Paul’s conversion; but I had been right in supposing that the conversion took place near Damascus, and that the utterance of Christ would contain the words, “I am Jesus.” Moreover the words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” accorded (not indeed exactly but as to their general sense) with my dream about the Christian martyrs—how they looked at me, as though saying, Why didst thou rack me? Why didst thou torture me?; and how they blessed me, and looked up to heaven; and how they made me fear lest I, too, should be compelled to look up and see what they saw.

Now therefore once more I was seized with a kind of fellow-feeling for Paul as he journeyed to Damascus. I began again to imagine his efforts to prevent himself from thinking of Stephen, and from seeing Stephen’s face looking up to heaven, and from hearing Stephen’s blessing. It seemed to me that I, too, should have rebelled as Paul rebelled at first, striving against my conscience, like the bullock that kicks against the goad. Then I asked, “Should I have done what Paul did afterwards? Should I, too, have been ‘overcome’ as Paul was, being brought under the yoke?” I thought I might have been.

But was it seemly or right that a free man should be brought under a “yoke”? That was the question I had now to answer. I seemed to have come to the branching of the paths. All depended on the nature of the “yoke.” What was it? On the one hand, Paul said it was “the constraining love of Christ.” He had made me feel that there was nothing base in it, nothing to be ashamed of. Nay, under Paul’s influence, this “yoke” had begun to seem an ensign of the noblest warfare, a sign of royalty, the emblem of service undertaken by God Himself, the yoke of the risen Saviour, the Son of God, enthroned by the Father’s side in heaven, and in the hearts of men on earth. But on the other side stood Scaurus, maintaining that all these Jewish stories were dreams—not falsehoods, but self-deceits more dangerous than falsehoods. He had also convinced me that the gospels contained an unexpected multitude of errors and exaggerations and disproportions. This I could not honestly deny. Thus the gospels flung me back—or at least, as interpreted by Scaurus, seemed to fling me back—from the faith to which I was just on the point of attaining through the epistles. In my bewilderment I was no longer able to say clearly and firmly as before, “Nevertheless the moral power of the gospel is attested by facts that Scaurus and Arrian both admit, facts that Epictetus would be only too glad to allege for himself—by myriads of souls converted from vice to virtue. Does not this moral power rest on reality?”