Modern Skepticism / A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society

by Unknown

Now, in theory, nothing is easier than to say that an excited woman saw Jesus with her mental eye, mistook it for a bodily reality, and communicated her enthusiasm to the rest of His followers. But in practice, such things are not quite so easy. Although it is no hard matter to persuade the credulous to believe in the appearance of ghosts and phantoms, yet I do not know that the whole history of man presents us with a single example of a great institution which owes its origin to such a belief. But even the credulous believers in such apparitions are very difficult to persuade that they have actually seen a man who once had died again restored to life. I doubt whether the entire mass of fictitious literature presents us with anything at all analogous to the supposed belief of the credulous followers of Jesus in the resurrection of their Master. Even persons who have a most imperfect knowledge that nature is governed by law, are quite aware that dead men do not revive. The followers of Jesus could have been hardly more credulous than modern spiritualists, yet these latter have not yet succeeded in erecting a great institution on the basis of an actual resurrection from the dead, or even on the presence of a spirit in a table. Supposing, therefore, that some fanatic follower of our Lord made the mistake in question, it could really have been no easy matter to have communicated this enthusiasm to the rest, damped as their spirits were by the crucifixion. Still more difficult would it have been for any considerable number to have made the mistake of converting a flight of the imagination into an objective fact. At any rate my opponents must concede that to have persuaded any number of men under such circumstances that the crucified Jesus was actually risen from the dead must have required a considerable interval of time.

It would be much more easy to create a belief in a resurrection after the lapse of a century, than within a few years of the event. When we survey a past event through the haze of time, it helps to confuse our ideas as to what is possible. But long intervals of time so convenient for the physical speculator are precisely the things which my opponents have not at their disposal. Seventy years is all which they themselves think it possible to ask for; and as all developments are slow, one or two entirely exhaust it, and they require a multitude to effect their purpose. But not only was it necessary to get some of the enthusiastic followers of our Lord to believe in His resurrection, but also to constitute a society founded on its basis. Until this was done, all development was impossible. But each step requires a considerable interval of time. But how could the Church be held together while the belief in the resurrection was forming?

But even supposing that Jesus by the power of the imagination had been rescued from the grave, it became a very serious question what to do with Him. No amount of credulity could have brought Him into daily communication with His followers. If He continued on earth, His not doing so was a very serious affair. The obvious expedient was that He should be taken up into heaven, from which at some future day he should come back again and take possession of his Messianic throne. Such is the idea adopted by these schools of thought, and they are never wearied with telling us that the chief if not the only article in the primitive belief of the followers of Jesus was His speedy return to realize their expectations of His Messianic glory.

Be it so; for the consequences are very serious to the position of those whose views I am combating. His followers then expected Him to return as the Jewish Messiah. Now nothing is more certain than as long as this expectation lasted there could have been no development in the direction of the Christ of the Gospels. How long, then, did this state of stagnation last in the bosom of the Church? When did it occur to the followers of Jesus that the expectation of the speedy return of their Master was a baseless one, and that they must set themselves to work to develop a different conception of a Christ? It is a fact that such beliefs do not speedily die out, and that they can survive many a disappointment. The modern prophetic School affords a striking proof of the tenacity of such hopes. They have repeatedly prophesied that the Advent will happen in our times; and notwithstanding the falsification of their predictions, I believe that they still cling to this belief. At any rate it has required a long interval of time to undeceive them; and as credulity was, according to the views which I am combating, the leading trait of the followers of Jesus, it must have been a considerable interval of time before they could have been persuaded to part company with their darling expectation. But as long as a Jewish Messiah satisfied their aspirations, the Church could have developed no new Messianic conceptions.

But to afford something like a basis for reasoning, I will suppose these obstacles to have been surmounted; that the work of development has commenced, and that the womb of the Church is at last become pregnant with its future Christ. Fresh and ever-increasing difficulties present themselves for solution.

Let it be observed that, after they have effected the resurrection, all which has been accomplished was to repair the damage inflicted on the Church by the crucifixion, and to restore to it, as a necessity of its existence, a living instead of a dead Messiah. That Messiah was still the Messiah of Judaism. They have scarcely advanced a stage in the creation of the Gospels, and of the Christ therein delineated,—not to say of the entire moral and spiritual teaching of the New Testament.

Let us observe the steps of the process by which the metamorphose must have been effected. It is, say my opponents, very uncertain whether the historic Jesus ever attempted to perform a miracle. But according to the conceptions of the times, His followers thought that the Messiah ought to have performed them. To supply the defect, they invented a mass of miraculous stories, and in their fond credulity thought that Jesus had actually performed them, and thus the delusion of His miraculous wonder-working was propagated in the Church. But all experience proves that mythic and legendary miracles are grotesque. Yet those in the Gospels are all sober ones, and stamped with a high moral tone. They must therefore have undergone a succession of developments before they could have assumed their present form. Still a Jewish Messiah has yet to be transformed into the Jesus of the Evangelists. After a while a happy thought occurs to these uninstructed Jews. They determine to invest the Teacher with whom they had habitually conversed with a character at once divine and human. The mythic faculty is again invoked, and the human Jesus, by the aid of development after development, gradually assumes the aspect of the divine Christ. In a similar manner they feel that the moral aspect of the Messiah of their fondest expectations must undergo a change, and in due time the triumphant King becomes the meek and the lowly Jesus, and the morality of Pharisaism becomes that of the New Testament.

Few persons are at all aware of the enormous difficulties which would have beset any persons who, whether consciously or unconsciously, set themselves to metamorphise a Jew of the year 30 into the Christ of the Gospels. Familiarity with the character induces numbers to think that poets or fabulists, inventors of myths and legends, might easily have created it. To form a correct estimate of the difficulty, it is necessary to transport ourselves out of the nineteenth century into the Jewish atmosphere of thought and feeling of the century which preceded the Advent. A starting-point it must have had. There could have been no other than it.

Let it be observed that before the elaboration of the Jesus of the Gospels, those who fabricated the conception were wholly without a model to guide them. All ancient fact or fable fails to furnish anything at all analogous to this great character. Such models as they had would have guided its inventors wrong. The only ones which they possessed were the popular Messianic conceptions of the period, and the prevailing Jewish ideas of religion and morality. Besides these, they might have fallen back on the general ideas contained in the Old Testament Scriptures and the apocryphal books. The ideal of a Jewish hero would certainly not have helped them in forming the conception of the Evangelical Jesus. One apocryphal book has been frequently referred to as affording considerable aid—the Book of Enoch. I have fully discussed this subject elsewhere,[109] and the conclusion to which I have arrived is, I think, incontrovertible, that even if we grant that its Messianic portions were composed prior to the Christian era (a concession which I am by no means prepared to make), the aid which it would have afforded the mythologists who invented the Christ of the Gospels would have been inconsiderable. To avoid a lengthened controversy as to its date, I am quite willing that these schools of thought should make all the use they can of them.

Let me point out a few of the difficulties which must have beset the path of the inventors of the great portraiture of the Gospels.