In any case I am sure we cannot rightly understand the life and mind of Jesus until, by a great effort, we have divested ourselves of our inveterate and vulgar belief that He wrought His mighty works as mere demonstrations of His divine mission, and that He had power to perform any works whatever, quite regardless of the laws of nature. Had that been the case, I do not see how He could have blamed the Pharisees for asking Him to work a sign in heaven. Why should they not have asked it, and why should not He have worked it? Jugglers and impostors were very common in the East; Galilee and Samaria were thronged with professional exorcists: in miracles performed on men there was always the possibility of collusion; any act on earth was open to suspicion of imposture, but in heaven this was the general belief—there could be certainty; no mere magician could work a sign in heaven. “Let but the sun stand still for half a day, and we will believe,” surely this, from the demonstration-point-of-view of miracles, was a very natural request; and if Jesus really had the power of stopping the sun for half a day, and if He felt that His wonder-working faculty was given to Him for the mere purpose of demonstrating His divine power, I cannot understand how He could have refused, much less rebuked, the request of the Pharisees.
But in truth His mighty works or signs were not wrought in this deliberate way for the mere purpose of demonstration. They were the results of an irrepressible pity, appealing to an instinct of power. He could not see a demoniac or a paralytic look trustfully upon Him without longing to help, and in many cases feeling that it was God’s will that He should help. To suppose that He cured all who were brought to Him is absurd, and is contrary (as we have seen above) to the evidence of the earliest Evangelist. He had the power of distinguishing between faith and not faith; had He an equal power of discerning physiological possibilities from impossibilities? Did a kind of instinct tell Him that the restoration of a lost limb was not like the cure of a paralytic, not one of the works “prepared for Him by His Father?” I do not suppose that such physiological distinctions were intellectually known by Christ in His human nature, any more than the modern discoveries of geology, astronomy, or history. But experience and some kind of intuition may have enabled Him to distinguish those cases which He could heal from those (a far more numerous class) which He could not. In performing these “mighty works” of healing, Jesus appears on many occasions to have studiously avoided that very publicity which—on the theory of their being intended as demonstrations—ought to have been a condition of their performance. He takes the patient apart, or expressly warns him to be silent about his cure—acts quite inconsistent with the demonstration-hypothesis. Probably He felt that these works, although they came to Him fresh from His Father’s hands, were not without a danger. Men crowded round Him, not to hear the truth but to see “the miracles.” Instead of recognizing that He did only such works as “the Father had prepared for Him to do,” they thought that He could do “anything He pleased.” I think we ought to feel that the very notion of such a power as this was absolutely revolting to Jesus: “To stop the sun, to call down fire or bread from heaven, to stay the course of rivers, and cast down the walls of cities—doubtless Joshua and Elijah had done these works; but they were not the works that the Father had prepared for the Son to do.” Joshua and Elijah were but servants. He was the Son: and, being the Son, He felt bound to conform Himself each moment to that heavenly Will which He ever felt within Him and saw before Him, which dictated “mighty works” indeed, but always works of love and healing. In one sense He was entirely free; He could do all things because all things were possible with the Father, and the Father and He were one; in another sense He felt Himself less free than any being that had ever assumed the shape of man, because all other human creatures had deviated, but He alone could never deviate, no, not by a hair’s breadth, from the indwelling Will of the Father.
It is for these reasons then that I reject miracles, not because they are impossible, not even because they are a priori improbable, not because they were once useless and are now harmful; but because the facts are against them. If the evidence shewed that miracles had actually occurred, I should be prepared to learn from these materialized parables as reverently as from word-parables, and to believe that God—in order to break down men’s excessive faith in the machine-like order of the visible world, and in order to divert their attention from Sequence to Will—fore-ordained these divergences from the monotonous routine of things. But the evidence does not shew this. The criticism of the Old Testament, and the criticism of the New Testament, and the researches of science, and the closer study of the life of Christ Himself, all converge to this conclusion—that Christ conquered the world, not by working miracles, but by living such a life and dying such a death as might be lived and died by the Son of God, incarnate as a Son of man, and self-subjected to all the physical limitations of humanity; and by bequeathing to mankind, after His death, such a Spirit as was correspondent to His own nature.
XX
THE MANIFESTATION OF CHRIST
My dear ——,
You wish to draw my attention to the Resurrection of Christ. “That,” you say, “is either miraculous or nothing. The arguments by which you appear to be driving miracles into non-existence—expelling them first from profane history, then from the Old Testament, then step by step from every part of the New—cannot make a stand at your convenience, so as to except the Resurrection. Yet even St. Paul makes the Resurrection of Jesus the basis of his own belief and Gospel. If, therefore, that final miracle falls to the ground, the Pauline Gospel falls with it: and to that downfall I fear your arguments all tend, although you yourself do not see it or wish it.”
I entirely deny the quiet assumption of your first sentence; which, as it stands (but I am sure you cannot mean it), affirms that the Resurrection of Christ “is either miraculous or nothing.” I assert, without fear of contradiction, that if the phenomena which convinced the earliest disciples and St. Paul of the reality of the Resurrection of Christ, were not miraculous but natural, they constitute the most wonderful event in the history of the world. But what you wish to say, I suspect, is this: “By the Resurrection of Christ I mean the Resurrection of the body; now if Christ’s body was raised again, the act must have been miraculous.” But how if the Resurrection was spiritual? St. Paul himself speaks of a “spiritual body,” not a material body, as rising in the Resurrection. Do you suppose that a “spiritual body” can be touched? Or that St. Paul could have touched the presence that appeared to him when he heard the words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Now if the Resurrection of Christ was spiritual and not material, there may have been no suspension at all of the laws of material nature, but simply a real, spiritual fact, manifested to the world according to certain laws by which spiritual facts are manifested to the senses.
But this theory, you will reply, although possibly consistent with the Pauline narrative, is inconsistent with the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. It certainly is. But it is quite certain—however unprepared you may possibly be for the statement—that the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, taken altogether, cannot be compared, for weight, with the Pauline evidence. You know that the oldest Gospel (St. Mark xvi. 8) terminates (probably because it was left incomplete) with a vision of angels who speak of the tomb as empty and of Christ as risen; but not a word about Christ’s resurrection itself. The next Gospel in chronological order (St. Matthew’s) mentions one appearance of Christ to some women, and another to some disciples in Galilee; but as to the last it is said that “some doubted.” Not till we come to St. Luke’s Gospel do we find detailed appearances of Jesus to disciples in or near Jerusalem, in the course of which Jesus is present at a meal and offers to eat, as evidence that He is no mere spirit. In the last Gospel of all (St. John’s) there is added an appeal to the sense of touch; and in an Appendix to that Gospel, Jesus is represented as inviting the disciples to a repast of fish and bread, apparently miraculously supplied and prepared (“they see a fire of coals there and fish laid thereon, and bread,” John xxi. 9), which He distributes to the disciples. Afterwards he holds a long discourse with them. Similarly long discourses between the risen Saviour and the disciples are recorded in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, which we know to have been written after the Gospel of St. Luke. You see how unsatisfactory all this is. The further back we go, and the nearer to the event, the more meagre and shadowy does the evidence become. It does not appear in a form ample and cogent until a period so late as to throw irresistible doubt upon its truth. How can we possibly answer the doubter’s natural question, “If there was this unanswerable evidence of the material resurrection of Jesus, why was it suppressed for two generations?” Moreover, some of these later accounts, which relate the handling of the body of Jesus, or the presence of Jesus at the breaking of bread, might be literal misinterpretations of some traditions concerning visions of Christ accompanying the “handling of the body of the Lord Jesus” in the Lord’s Supper. It is very significant that St. Peter—whose allusions in the Acts of the Apostles to his personal evidence concerning the Resurrection of Christ are of the briefest kind—is introduced by St. Luke as mentioning only one definite kind of manifestation of Jesus; and that is one in which the Apostles “did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead” (Acts x. 41). Lastly, there are traces of interpolations, or additions, at a very early date in the post-resurrection chapters of St. Luke, and probably of St. Matthew and St. John; and in dealing with the post-resurrection narrative of the life of Christ some of the earliest Fathers quote passages not found in our Gospels but agreeing somewhat with the suspected additions in the third and fourth Gospel. The sum of all is, so far as my own experience goes, that after a patient and prolonged study of the evidence, with every desire, and indeed I may say with an intense anxiety (at one period of my life), to justify myself in continuing to believe all that I once believed, I now rise from the perusal of the last chapters of the Gospels and the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, with the conviction that something certainly happened to persuade the Apostles that their Master had verily risen from the dead, but what that something was, the evidence, so far as it can he obtained from the Gospels, does not enable us to determine.
But we have not yet touched on the evidence of St. Paul and to this we now pass. Here at last we stand on firm ground. Here for the first time we find (in St. Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians xv. 8), the unquestionable evidence of an eye-witness, probably recorded several years before the appearance of any Gospel now extant. No one who is competent to form an opinion on the question can for a moment doubt St. Paul’s assertion that Christ “appeared” to him, and that some such appearance as that recorded thrice in the Acts, converted him from a persecutor into an apostle of Christianity. We have just been asking, “What was that unknown something—possibly some manifestation of Jesus after death—which inspired the Twelve with the conviction and the faculties necessary to overcome the world?” Now we seem to have found the answer. An appearance that overcame and converted a recalcitrant enemy might well satisfy and imbue with confidence loving disciples, longing to believe. Especially might this be the case if Jesus had predicted, as I believe He did predict, that His work would not be cut short by death, but that in Him would be fulfilled the saying of Hosea: “In the third day he shall raise us up and we shall live in his sight.” Although these words may have been neglected or not understood at the time when they were uttered, they may have well recurred to the minds of the Disciples, after their Master’s death, with a powerful effect. To urge that the despair of the Twelve could be a greater obstacle than the vehement and bigoted antagonism of Saul, in the way of their receiving a vision of their beloved Master, is a paradox so pedantical that it is scarcely worth mentioning. You cannot have forgotten, too, how St. Paul himself assumes that the appearances of the Saviour to himself, and to the original Apostles, were of the same kind and on the same footing: “He appeared unto Cephas, he appeared unto James, he appeared unto five hundred brethren ... and last of all he appeared unto me also.” In the two latest Gospels these “appearances” have been magnified into accounts that represented Jesus as possessed of flesh and bones, as capable of eating, as reclining at a meal, and as entering into long and familiar discourses: naturally we ask as to St. Paul’s, the indisputably earliest account of a manifestation of Christ, what traces it exhibits of similar distortions and exaggerations? You know the answer. There are no such traces. The manifestation to St. Paul is plainly admitted by the accounts in the Acts to be what is commonly called subjective. The “subjectivity” of some of the earlier manifestations of Jesus to the disciples is dimly suggested by some passages in the Gospels which describe how “some doubted” and others failed to recognize Him; but it is not merely suggested, it is plainly expressed, in the accounts of the manifestation to St. Paul. The Apostle is clearly stated to have seen a sight and heard words, which other people, his companions, with the same opportunities for seeing and hearing, did not see and did not hear. Putting aside some slight discrepancies in the three accounts given in the Acts[[27]]—discrepancies easily and naturally explicable, and valuable as shewing that the accounts have not been arbitrarily harmonized we may say that this is the substantial result: the Lord Jesus appeared to St. Paul in what is called a vision. I myself firmly believe that there was a spiritual act of Jesus simultaneous with the conveyance of the manifestation to the brain of the Apostle. But none the less, however coincident it may have been with a spiritual reality, if there was no presence of a material body, the manifestation of Jesus to St. Paul must be placed in the class of visions: and if it was not seen by others who had the same physical means of seeing, it must be called, in some sense, “subjective.”
Yet this vision sufficed for him and for the world. In the strength of this vision, (followed, no doubt, by subsequent visions and communings with the Lord Jesus), the Thirteenth Apostle, the intruder, as he might be called—not “chosen of men,” like Matthias, not called by Christ in the flesh did the great work of which you and I, with millions of others, are now joint inheritors. Think of it; Is it not a remarkable instance of “men working one thing while God worketh another” to see the Apostles with due form and ceremony electing their substitute for the Traitor to be the solemnly ordained Twelfth Apostle, henceforth unnamed in Holy Writ and all the while the Holy Spirit preparing a Thirteenth! And for this Thirteenth Apostle, who never looked on the face of Christ, never heard a single word of His doctrine, it has been reserved to tell us perhaps more about the meaning of Christ’s teaching and certainly to give us more cogent proof of His Resurrection than all the other Apostles and Evangelists put together! Truly the last has been first! And in the strength of his proof of Christ’s Resurrection—mere vision though we may call it—this Thirteenth Apostle, in the face of persecutions outside the Church, and discouragements and jealousies inside the Church, first converted the Roman empire to the Christian faith; then, fifteen centuries afterwards, reconverted and purified a large section of the Church from mediæval corruptions; and now, as I believe, some nineteen centuries afterwards, is on the point of still further purifying the Church from antique superstition and from modern materialism!