The Fair Haven

by Samuel Butler

“But it is very credible if Christ was seen alive after his Crucifixion, and his reappearance, though due to natural causes, was once believed to be miraculous, that this one seemingly well substantiated miracle should become the parent of all the others, and of the prophecies of the Resurrection. Thirty years in all probability elapsed between the reappearances of Christ and the earliest of the four Gospels; thirty years of oral communication and spiritual enthusiasm, among an oriental people, and in an unscientific age; an age by which the idea of an interference with the modes of the universe from a point outside of itself, was taken as a matter of course; an age which believed in an anthropomorphic Deity who had back parts, which Moses had been allowed to see through the hand of God; an age which, over and above all this, was at the time especially convulsed with expectations of deliverance from the Roman yoke. Have we not here a soil suitable for the growth of miracles, if the seed once fell upon it? Under such conditions they would even spring up of themselves, seedless.

“Once let the reappearances of Christ have been believed to be miraculous (and under all the circumstances they might easily have been believed to be so, though due to natural causes), and it is not wonderful that, in such an age and among such a people, the other miracles and the prophecies of the Resurrection should have become current within thirty years. Even we ourselves, with all our incalculably greater advantages, could not withstand so great a temptation to let our wish become father to our thoughts. If we had been the especially favoured friends of one whom we believed to have died, but who yet was not to beholden by death, no matter how careful and judicially minded we might be by nature, we should be blind to everything except the fact that we had once been the chosen companions of an immortal. There lives no one who could withstand the intoxication of such an idea. A single well-substantiated miracle in the present day, even though we had not seen it ourselves, would uproot the hedges of our caution; it would rob us of that sense of the continuity of nature, in which our judgements are, consciously or unconsciously, anchored; but if we were very closely connected with it in our own persons, we should dwell upon the recollection of it and on little else.

“Few of us can realise what happened so very long ago. Men believe in the Christian miracles, though they would reject the notion of a modern miracle almost with ridicule, and would hardly even examine the evidence in its favour. But the Christian miracles stand in their minds as things apart; their prestige is greater than that attaching to any other events in the whole history of mankind. They are hallowed by the unhesitating belief of many, many generations. Every circumstance which should induce us to bow to their authority surrounds them with a bulwark of defences which may make us well believe that they must be impregnable, and sacred from attack. Small wonder then that the many should still believe them. Nevertheless they do not believe them so fully, nor nearly so fully, as they think they do. For even the strongest imagination can travel but a very little way beyond a man’s own experience; it will not bear the burden of carrying him to a remote age and country; it will flag, wander and dream; it will not answer truly, but will lay hold of the most obvious absurdity, and present it impudently to its tired master, who will accept it gladly and have done with it. Even recollection fails, but how much more imagination! It is a high flight of imagination to be able to realise how weak imagination is.

“We cannot therefore judge what would be the effect of immediate contact even with the wild hope of a miracle, from our conventional acceptance of the Christian miracles. If we would realise this we must look to modern alleged miracles—to the enthusiasm of the Irish and American revivals, when mind inflames mind till strong men burst into hysterical tears like children; we must look for it in the effect produced by the supposed Irvingite miracles on those who believed in them, or in the miracles that followed the Port Royal miracle of the holy thorn. There never was a miracle solitary yet: one will soon become the parent of many. The minds of those who have believed in a single miracle as having come within their own experience become ecstatic; so deeply impressed are they with the momentous character of what they have known, that their power of enlisting sympathy becomes immeasurably greater than that of men who have never believed themselves to have come into contact with the miraculous; their deep conviction carries others along with it, and so the belief is strengthened till adverse influences check it, or till it reaches a pitch of grotesque horror, as in the case of the later Jansenist miracles. There is nothing, therefore, extraordinary in the gradual development within thirty years of all the Christian miracles, if the Resurrection were once held to be well substantiated; and there is nothing wonderful, under the circumstances, in the reappearance of Christ alive after his Crucifixion having been assigned to miracle. He had already made sufficient impression upon his followers to require but little help from circumstances. He had not so impressed them as to want no help from any supposed miracle, but nevertheless any strange event in connection with him would pass muster, with little or no examination, as being miraculous. He had undoubtedly professed himself to be, and had been half accepted as, the promised Messiah. He had no less undoubtedly appeared to be dead, and had been believed to be so both by friends and foes. Let us also grant that he reappeared alive. Would it, then, be very astonishing that the little missing link in the completeness of the chain of evidence—absolute certainty concerning the actuality of the death—should have been allowed to drop out of sight?

“Round such a centre, and in such an age, the other miracles would spring up spontaneously, and be accepted the moment that they arose; there is nothing in this which is foreign to the known tendencies of the human mind, but there would be something utterly foreign to all we know of human nature, in the fact of men not anticipating that Christ would rise, if they had already seen him raise others from the dead and work the miracles ascribed to him, and if they had also heard him prophesy that he should himself rise from the dead. In fact nothing can explain the universally recorded incredulity of the Apostles as to the reappearance of Christ, except the fact that they had never seen him work a single miracle, or else that they had never heard him say anything which could lead them to suppose that he was to rise from the dead.

“We are therefore not unwilling to accept the facts recorded in the fourth Gospel, in so far as they inform us of things which came under the knowledge of the writer. Mary found the tomb empty. Ignorant alike of what had taken place and of what was going to happen, she came to Peter and John to tell them that the body was gone; this was all she knew. The two go to the tomb, and find all as Mary had said; on this it is not impossible that a wild dream of hope may have flashed upon their minds, that the aspirations which they had already indulged in were to prove well founded. Within an hour or two Christ was seen alive, nor can we wonder if the years which intervened between the morning of the Resurrection and the writing of the fourth Gospel, should have sufficed to make the writer believe that John had had an actual belief in the Resurrection, while in truth he had only wildly hoped it. This much is at any rate plain, that neither he nor Peter had as yet heard any clearly intelligible prophecy that their master should rise from the dead. Whatever subsequent interpretation may have been given to some of the sayings of Jesus Christ, no saying was yet known which would of itself have suggested any such inference. We may justly doubt the caution and accuracy of the first founders of Christianity, without, even in our hearts, for one moment impugning the honesty of their intentions. We are ready to admit that had we been in their places we should in all likelihood have felt, believed, and, we will hope, acted as they did; but we cannot and will not admit, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, that they were superior to the intelligence of their times, or, in other words, that they were capable critics of an event, in which both their feelings and the primâ facie view of the facts would be so likely to mislead them.

II. “Turning now to the narrative of what passed when Peter and John were gone, we find that Mary, stooping down, looked through her tears into the darkness of the tomb, and saw two angels clothed in white, who asked her why she wept. We must remember the wide difference between believing what the writer of the fourth Gospel tells us that John saw, and what he tells us that Mary Magdalene saw. All we know on this point is that he believed that Mary had spoken truly. Peter and John were men, they went into the tomb itself, and we may say for a certainty that they saw no angel, nor indeed anything at all, but the grave clothes (which were probably of white linen), lying in two separate places within it. Mary was a woman—a woman whose parallel we must look for among Spanish or Italian women of the lower orders at the present day; she had, we are elsewhere told, been at one time possessed with devils; she was in a state of tearful excitement, and looking through her tears from light into comparative darkness. Is it possible not to remember what Peter and John did see when they were in the tomb? Is it possible not to surmise that Mary in good truth saw nothing more? She thought she saw more, but the excitement under which she was labouring at the time, an excitement which would increase tenfold after she had seen Christ (as she did immediately afterwards and before she had had time to tell her story), would easily distort either her vision or her memory, or both.

“The evidence of women of her class—especially when they are highly excited—is not to be relied upon in a matter of such importance and difficulty as a miracle. Who would dare to insist upon such evidence now? And why should it be considered as any more trustworthy eighteen hundred years ago? We are indeed told that the angels spoke to her; but the speech was very short; the angels simply ask her why she weeps; she answers them as though it were the common question of common people, and then leaves them. This is in itself incredible; but it is not incredible that if Mary looking into the tomb saw two white objects within, she should have drawn back affrighted, and that her imagination, thrown into a fever by her subsequent interview with Christ, should have rendered her utterly incapable of recollecting the true facts of the case; or, again, it is not incredible that she should have been believed to have seen things which she never did see. All we can say for certain is that before the fourth Gospel was written, and probably shortly after the first reappearance of Christ, Mary Magdalene believed, or was thought to have believed, that she had seen angels in the tomb; and this being so, the development of the short and pointless question attributed to them—possibly as much due to the eager cross-questioning of others as to Mary herself—is not surprising.

“Before the Sunday of the Resurrection was over, the facts as derivable from the fourth Gospel would stand thus. Jesus Christ, who was supposed to have been verily and indeed dead, was known to be alive again. He had been seen, and heard to speak. He had been seen by those who were already prepared to accept him as their leader, and whose previous education, and tone of mind, would lead them rather to an excess of faith in a miracle, than of scepticism concerning its miraculous character. The Apostles would be in no impartial nor sceptical mood when they saw that Christ was alive. The miracle was too near themselves—too fascinating in its supposed consequences for themselves—to allow of their going into curious questions about the completeness of the death. The Master whom they had loved, and in whom they had hoped, had been crucified and was alive again. Is it a harsh or strained supposition, that what would have assuredly been enough for ourselves, if we had known and loved Christ and had been attuned in mind as the Apostles were, should also have been enough for them? Who can say so? The nature of our belief in our Master would have been changed once and for ever; and so we find it to have been with the Christian Apostles.

“Over and above the reappearance of Christ, there would also be a report (probably current upon the very Sunday of the Resurrection), that Mary Magdalene had seen a vision of angels in the tomb in which Christ’s body had been laid; and this, though a matter of small moment in comparison with the reappearance of Christ himself, will nevertheless concern us nearly when we come to consider the narratives of the other Evangelists.”