“He himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.”[163]
The eleven had taken the helm quietly, as a matter of course, when the ship seemed to be disabled. They had been faithful in a little and straightway they are called unto much, they are [pg 241] chosen for witnesses of the Supreme Event in the history of Man, of the Resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
It is this character of witnesses which distinguishes the Apostles from all other depositaries of a Master's cause. This was the charge that governed the disposition of their lives. Other men might organise churches and set forth the teaching of the Lord, but in the character of appointed witnesses of the Resurrection they stood alone. Before the Resurrection they are told
“And ye also bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning,”[164]
and afterwards it is as witnesses that they are singled out by our Lord, “And ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judæa and Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.”[165] In this distinctive light too they regard themselves. When a successor to Judas has to be appointed, St Peter says, “of these must one become a witness with us of his resurrection”[166] and Peter and all the Apostles say, before the Sanhedrin, “We are witnesses of these things.” Peter again, speaking to the brethren from Joppa calls the Apostles “witnesses chosen before of God.”[167]
I find in the Twelve a special fitness for the particular work which it fell to them to perform. [pg 242] They brought to the attestation of the Resurrection the concurring evidence of eleven eyewitnesses, simple, truthloving, matter-of-fact men, of different types of mind.
The unanimity of the eleven, both as to their testimony and as to their adoption of a particular course of conduct has been less dwelt on by Apologists than I should have expected. If one or two could have been gained over by the Scribes to dissent from the account of the rest, the moral force of the evidence would have been lost. The chances against the agreement of the entire body in an illusion or a misrepresentation are enormous. But an event so transcendent as to wipe out of the minds of the witnesses everything else—“all trivial, fond records” would efface small subjective differences by the overwhelming force of the objective impression; and the occurrence of such an event would account for that perfect agreement in action among men who had not uniformly agreed before, which is among the many striking phenomena which the book of the Acts of the Apostles discloses to our own view.
The chosen witnesses have exactly the qualities which a judge would point out to a jury, as grounds for giving particular weight to their evidence on questions of fact coming within their view. I must say something more on this point.
Nothing carries more weight with a jury than the impression that the witness has an intense [pg 243] belief in the truth of what he says. Such an impression the Apostles conveyed; the possibility that they should themselves doubt in the slightest about any fact to which they speak never occurs to their mind; all through the Acts and the Epistles the atmosphere is one of certainty, settled and serene. The Apostles had not been always so assured; we find them in the Gospels impatient for clearer statements and more decisive signs: “Now speakest thou plainly and speakest no parable” they regard as high praise. But after the Resurrection all this is changed, they are then quite certain of the fact that Christ is Divine, and they have given up trying to understand the ways and forms in which the Divine power might show itself. They had probably, once thought, like Naaman, that it must operate something after the fashion which absolute power uses upon earth. They have got past this when we meet with them in the Acts.
I have spoken of the difference of character among the Apostles for this reason. That eleven men, and a particular eleven, should all have agreed in an account of what they said they had seen, when by so doing they gained none of the objects of human desire, is hard to explain unless we suppose that they were convinced of the truth of their report. If, however, these men had but one mind among them, either because one or two master spirits controlled the rest, or because they had been so carefully drilled into uniformity that [pg 244] they could not help judging alike, then the value of this unanimity would disappear, for the eleven would become, virtually, only one or two. Now that the Apostles were men of independent minds is clear from what we hear of their disputings by the way, and from the offence taken at James and John when they ask for seats on the right and left at their Master's side; and, indeed, the Gospel portraiture of all the Apostles leaves on us the impression that they were of different types of character and had personalities that were strongly marked.