The Fair Haven

by Samuel Butler

Our error has been that instead of demurring to the relevancy of the issue raised by our opponents, we have accepted it. We have thus placed ourselves in a false position, and have encouraged our opponents by doing so. We have undertaken to fight them upon ground of their own choosing. We have been discomfited; but instead of owning to our defeat, and beginning the battle anew from a fresh base of operations, we have declared that we have not been defeated; hence those lamentable and suicidal attempts at disingenuous reasoning which we have seen reason to condemn so strongly in the works of Dean Alford and others. How deplorable, how unchristian they are!

The moment that we take a truer ground, the conditions of the strife change. The same spirit of candid criticism which led us to reject the account of Matthew in toto, will make it easy for us to admit that those of Mark, Luke, and John, may not be so accurate as we could have wished, and yet to feel that our cause has sustained no injury. There are probably very few who would pin their faith to the fact that Julius Cæsar fell exactly at the feet of Pompey’s statue, or that he uttered the words “Et tu, Brute.” Yet there are still fewer who would dispute the fact that Julius Caesar was assassinated by conspirators of whom Brutus and Cassius were among the leaders. As long as we can be sure that our Lord died and rose from the dead, we may leave it to our opponents to contend about the details of the manner in which each event took place.

We had thought that these details were known, and so thinking, we had a certain consolation in realising to ourselves the precise manner in which every incident occurred; yet on reflection we must feel that the desire to realise is of the essence of idolatry, which, not content with knowing that there is a God, will be satisfied with nothing if it has not an effigy of His face and figure. If it has not this it falls straight-way to the denial of God’s existence, being unable to conceive how a Being should exist and yet be incapable of representation. We are as those who would fall down and worship the idol; our opponents, as those who upon the destruction of the idol would say that there was no God.

We have met sceptics hitherto by adhering to the opinions as to the necessity of accuracy which prevailed among our forefathers, and instead of saying, “You are right—we do not know all that we thought we did—nevertheless we know enough—we know the fact, though the manner of the fact be hidden,” we have preferred to say, “You are mistaken, our severe outline, our hard-and-fast lines are all perfectly accurate, there is not a detail of our theories which we are not prepared to stand by.” On this comes recrimination and mutual anger, and the strife grows hotter and hotter.

Let us now rather say to the unbeliever, “We do not deny the truth of much which you assert. We give up Matthew’s account of the Resurrection; we may perhaps accept parts of those of Mark and Luke and John, but it is impossible to say which parts, unless those in which all three agree with one another; and this being so, it becomes wiser to regard all the accounts as early and precious memorials of the certainty felt by the Apostles that Christ died and rose again, but as having little historic value with regard to the time and manner of the Resurrection.”

Once take this ground, and instead of demurring to the truth of many of the assertions of our opponents, demur to their relevancy, and the unbeliever will find the ground cut away from under his feet independently of the fact that the reasonableness of the concession, and the discovery that we are not fighting merely to maintain a position, will incline him to calmness and to the reconsideration of his own opinions—which will in itself be a great gain—he will soon perceive that we are really standing upon firm ground, from which no enemy can dislodge us. The discovery that we know less of the time and manner of our Lord’s death and Resurrection than we thought we did, does not invalidate a single one of the irresistible arguments whereby we can establish the fact of His having died and risen again. The reader will now perhaps begin to perceive that the sad division between Christians and unbelievers has been one of those common cases in which both are right and both wrong; Christians being right in their chief assertion, and wrong in standing out for the accuracy of their details, while unbelievers are right in denying that our details are accurate, but wrong in drawing the inference that because certain facts have been inaccurately recorded, therefore certain others never happened at all. Both the errors are natural; it is high time, however, that upon both sides they should be recognised and avoided.

But as regards the demolition of the structure raised in the seventh and eighth chapters of this book, whereinsoever, that is to say, it seems to menace the more vital part of our faith, the ease with which this will effected may perhaps lead the reader to think that I have not fulfilled the promise made in the outset, and have failed to put the best possible case for our opponents. This supposition would be unjust; I have done the very best for them that I could. For it is plain that they can only take one of two positions, namely, either that Christ really died upon the Cross but was never seen alive again afterwards at all, and that the stories of His having been so seen are purely mythical, or, if they admit that He was seen alive after His Crucifixion, they must deny the completeness of the death; in other words, if they are to escape miracle, they must either deny the reappearances or the death.

Now in the commencement of this work I dealt with those who deny that our Lord rose from the dead, and as the exponent of those who take this view I selected Strauss, who is undoubtedly the ablest writer they have. Whether I shewed sufficient reason for thinking that his theory was unsound must remain for the decision of the reader, but I certainly believe that I succeeded in doing so. Perhaps the ablest of all the writers who have treated the facts given us in the Gospels from the Rationalistic point of view, is the author of an anonymous work called The Jesus of History (Williams and Norgate, 1866); but this writer (and it is a characteristic feature of the Rationalistic school to become vague precisely at this very point) leaves us entirely in doubt as to whether he accepts the reappearances of Christ or not, and his treatment of the facts connected both with the Crucifixion and Resurrection is less definite than that of any other part of the life of our Lord. He does not seem to see his own way clearly, and appears to consider that it must for ever remain a matter of doubt whether the Death of Christ or His reappearance is to be rejected.

It is evident that it was most desirable to examine both sets of arguments, i.e., those against the Resurrection, and those against the completeness of the Death; I have therefore mainly drawn the opinions of those who deny the Death from the same pamphlet as that from which I drew the criticisms on Dean Alford’s notes. I know of no other English work, indeed, in which whatever can be said against us upon this all-important head has been put forward, and was therefore compelled to draw from this source, or to invent the arguments for our opponents, which would have subjected me to the accusation of stating them in such way as should best suit my own purpose. The reader, however, must now feel that since there can be no other position taken but one or other of the two alluded to above, and since the one taken by Strauss has been shewn to be untenable, there remains nothing but to shew that the other is untenable also, whereupon it will follow that our Saviour did actually die, and did actually shew Himself subsequently alive; and this amounts to a demonstration of the miraculous character of the Resurrection. If, then, this one miracle be established, I think it unnecessary to defend the others, because I cannot think that any will attack them.

But, as has been seen already, Strauss admits that our Lord died upon the Cross, and denies the reality of the reappearances. It is not probable that Strauss would have taken refuge in the hallucination theory if he had felt that there was the remotest chance of successfully denying our Lord’s death; for the difficulties of his present position are overwhelming, as was fully pointed out in the second, third, and fourth chapters of this work. I regret, however, to say that I can nowhere find any detailed account of the reasons which have led him to feel so positively about our Lord’s Death. Such reasons must undoubtedly be at his command, or he would indisputably have referred the Resurrection to natural causes. Is it possible that he has thought it better to keep them to himself, as proving the Death of our Lord too convincingly? If so, the course which he has adopted is a cruel one.