| 140. Debates Concerning the Reality of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus. | ||||
The proposition: a dead man has returned to life, is composed of two such contradictory elements, that whenever it is attempted to maintain the one, the other threatens to disappear. If he has really returned to life, it is natural to conclude that he was not wholly dead; if he was really dead, it is difficult to believe that he has really become living, When we form a correct opinion of the relation between soul and body, not abstractly separating the two, but conceiving them at once in their identity, the soul as the interior of the body, the body as the exterior of the soul, we know not how to imagine, to say nothing of comprehending, the revivification of a dead person. What we call the soul is the governing centre which holds in combination the powers and operations of the body; its function, or rather the soul itself, consists in keeping all other processes of which the body is susceptible in uninterrupted subjection to the superior unity of the process of organic life, which in man is the basis of his spiritual nature: so soon as this regulating power ceases to act, the supremacy in the various parts of the body is assumed by these other, inferior principles, whose work in its prosecution is corruption. When once these have acceded to the dominion, they will not be inclined to render it back to their former monarch, the soul; or rather this is impossibe, because, quite apart from the question of the immortality of the human spirit (Geist), the soul (Seele) as such ceases in the same moment with its dominion and activity, which constitute its existence; consequently, in a revivification, even if resort be had to a miracle, this must consist in the direct creation of a new soul. | ||||
{P.843} Only in the dualism which has become popular on the subject of the relation between body and soul, is there any thing to favour the opinion of the possibility of a revivification properly so called. In this system, the soul in its relation to the body is represented as like a bird, which, though it may for a time have flown out of the cage, can yet be once more caught and replaced in its former abode; and it is to such figures that an imaginative species of thought cleaves, in order to preserve the notion of revivification. But even in this dnalistic view, the inconceivability of such an event is rather concealed than really diminished. For in the most abstract separation, the co-existence of the body and soul cannot be held as indifferent and lifeless as that of a box and its contents; on the contrary, the presence of the soul in the body produces effects, which again are the conditions whereby that presence is rendered possible. Thus so soon as the soul has forsaken the body, there is a cessation in the ltter of those activities which according to the dualistic idea were the immediate expressions of the influence of the soul; at the same time, the organs of these activities-brain, blood, etc. begin to stagnate; a change which is coincident with the moment of death. Thus if it could occur to the departed soul, or be imposed on it by another, to re-enter its former dwelling-place: it would find this dwelling, even after the first moments, uninhabitable in its noblest parts, and unfit for use. To restore, in the same way as an infirm member, the most immediate organs of its activity, is an impossibility to the soul, since in order to effect any thing in the body it has need of the service of these very organs: thus the soul, although remanded into the body, must suffer it to decay, from inability to exercise any influence over it; or there must be added to the miracle of its reconveyance into the body, the second miracle of a restoration of the lifeless bodily organs: an immediate interposition of God in the reglar course of nature, irreconcileable with enlightened ideas of the relation of God to the world. | ||||
Hence the cultivated intellect of the present day has very decidedly stated the following dilemma: either Jesus was not really dead, or he did not really rise again. | ||||
Rationalism has principally given its adhesion to the former opinion. The short time that Jesus hung on the cross, together with the otherwise ascertained tardiness of death by crucifixion, and the uncertain nature and effects of the wound from the spear, appeared to render the reality of the death doubtful. That the agents in the crucifixion, as well as the disciples themselves entertained no such doubt, would be explained not only by the general difficulty of distinguishing deep swoons and the rigidity of syncope from real death, but also from the low state of medical science in that age; while at least one example of the restoration of a crucified person appeared to render conceivable a resuscitation in the case of Jesus also. This example is found in Josephus, who informs us that of three crucified acquaintances whose release he begged from Titus, two died 844 after being taken down from the cross, but one survived. How long these people had hung on the cross Josephus does not mention; but from the manner in which he connects them with his expedition to Thekoah, by stating that he saw them on his return from thence, they must probably have been crucified during this expedition, and as this, from the trifling distance of the above place from Jerusalem, might possibly be achieved in a day, they had in all probability not hung on the cross more than a day, and perhaps a yet shorter time. These three persons, then, can scarcely have hung much longer than Jesus, who, according to Mark, was on the cross from nine in the morning till towards six in the evening, and they were apparently taken down while they still showed signs of life; yet with the most careful medical tendance only one survived. Truly it is difficult to perceive how it can hence be shown probable that Jesus, who when taken from the cross showed all the signs of death, should have come to life entirely himself, without the application of medical skill, According to a certain opinion, however, these two conditions- some remains of conscious lite, and careful medical treatment, were not wanting in the case of Jesus, although they are not mentioned by the evangelists. Jesus, we are told, seeing no other way of purifying the prevalent Messianic idea from the admixture of material and political hopes, exposed himself to crucifixion, but in doing so relied on the possibility of procuring a speedy removal from the cross by early bowing his head, and of being afterwards restored by the medical skill of some among his secret colleagues; so as to inspirit the people at the same time by the appearance of a resurrection. Others have at least exonerated Jesus from such contrivance, and have admitted that he really sank into a deathlike slumber; but have ascribed to his disciples a preconceived plan of producing apparent death by means of a potion, and thus by occasioning his early removal from the cross, securing his restoration to life. But of all {P.845} this our Gospel sources give no intimation, and for conjecturing such details we have no ground. Judicious friends of the natural explanation, who repudiate such monstrous productions of a system which remodels history at will, have hence renounced the supposition of any remains of conscious life in Jesus, and have contented themselves, for the explanation of his revivification, with the vital force which remained in his still young and vigorous body, even after the cessation of consciousness; and have pointed out, instead of premeditated tendance by the hands of men, the beneficial influence which the partly oleaginous substances applied to his body, must have had in promoting the healing of his wounds, and, united with the air in the cave, impregnated with the perfumes of the spices, in reawakening feeling and consciousness in Jesus; to all which was added as a decisive impulse, the earthquake and the lightning which on the morning of the resurrection opened the grave of Jesus, Others have remarked in opposition to this, that the cold air in a cave must have had any thing rather than a vivifying tendency; that strong aromalics in a confined space would rather have had a stupifying and stifling influence; and the same effect must have been produced by a flash of lightning bursting into the grave, if this were not a mere figment of rationalist expositors. | ||||
Notwithstanding all these improbabilities, which are against the opinion that Jesus came to life after a merely apparent death by the operation of natural causes, this nevertheless remains so far possible, that if we had secure evidence of the resuscitation of Jesus, we might, on the strength of such certainty as to the result, supply the omissions in the narrative, and approve the opinion above presented, with the rejection, however, of all precise conjectures. Secure evidence of the resurrection of Jesus, would be the attestation of it in a decided and accordant manner by impartial witnesses. But the impartiality of the alleged witnesses for the resurrection of Jesus, is the very point which the opponents of Christianity, from Celsus down to the Wolfenb ttel Fragmentist, have invariably called in question. Jesus showed himself to his adherents only: why not also to his enemies, that they too might be convinced, and that by their testimony posterity might be precluded from every conjecture of a designed frau on the part of his disciples?Chapter I cannot certainly attach much weight to the replies by which apologists have sought to repel this objection, from that of Origen, who says: Christ avoided the judge who condemned him, and his enemies, that they might not be smitten with blindness; to the opinions of {P.846} the modern theologians, who by their vacillation between the assertion that by such an appearance the enemies of Jesus would have been compelled to believe, and the opposite one, that they would not have believed even on such evidence, mutually confute one another. Nevertheless, it can still be urged in reply to that objection, that the adherents of Jesus, from their hopelessness which is both unanimously attested by the narratives, and is in perfect accordance with the nature of the case, here rise to the rank of impartial witnesses. If they had expected a resurrection of Jesus and we had then been called upon to believe it on their testimony alone: there would certainly be a possibility and perhaps also a probability, if not of an intentional deception, yet of an involuntary self-delusion on their part; but this possibility vanishes in proportion as the disciples of Jesus lost all hope after his death. Now even if it be denied that any one of the Gospels proceeded immediately from a disciple of Jesus, it is still certain from the epistles of Paul and the Acts that the apostles themselves had the conviction that they had seen the risen Jesus. We might then rest satisfied with the Gospel testimonies in favour of the resurrection, were but these testimonies in the first place sufficiently precise, and in the second, in agreement with themselves and with each other. But in fact the testimony of Paul, which is intrinsically consistent and is otherwise most important, is so general and vague, that taken by itself, it does not carry us beyond the subjective fact, that the disciples were convinced of the resurrection of Jesus; while the more fully detailed narratives of the Gospels, in which the resurrection of Jesus appears as an objective fact, are, from the contradictions of which they are convicted, incapable of being used as evidence, and in general their account of the life of Jesus after his resurrection is not one which has connection and unity, presenting a clear historical idea of the subject, but a fragmntary compilation, which presents a series of visions, rather than a continuous history. | ||||
If we compare with this account of the resurrection of Jesus, the precise and internally consistent attestation of his death: we must incline to the other side of the dilemma above stated, and be induced to doubt the reality of the resurrection rather than that of the death. Hence Celsus chose this alternative, deriving the alleged appearance of Jesus after the resurrection, from the self-delusion of the disciples, especially the women, either dreaming or waking; or from what appeared to him still more probable, intentional deception: $ and more modern writers, as, for example, the Wolfenb ttel {P.847} Fragmentist, have adopted the accusation of the Jews in Matthew, namely, that the disciples stole the body of Jesus and afterwards, fabricated, with slender agreement, stories of his resurrection and subsequent appearances. This suspicion is repelled by the remark of Origen, that a spontaneous falsehood on the part of the disciples could not possibly have animated them to so unflinching an announcement of the resurrection of Jesus amid the greatest perils; and it is a just argument of modern apologists that the astonishing revolution from the deep depression and utter hopelessness of the disciples at the , to the strong faith and enthusiasm with which they proclaimed him as the Messiah on the succeeding Pentecost, would be inexplicable unless in the interim something extraordinarily encouraging had taken place - something, in fact, which had convinced them of his resurrection. But that this cause of conviction was precisely a real appearance of the risen Jesus, - that, indeed it was necessrily an external event at all - is by no means proved. If we chose to remain on supernatural ground, we might with Spinoza suppose that a vision was produced by miraculous means in the minds of the disciples, the object of which was to make evident to them, in a manner accordant with their powers of comprehension and the ideas of their age, that Jesus by his virtuous life had risen from spiritual death, and that to those who followed his example he would grant a similar resurrection.With one foot at least on the same ground stands the supposition of Weisse, that the departed spirit of Jesus really acted on the disciples whom he had left behind; in connection with which he refers to the apparitions of spirits, the impossibility of which remains unproved. In order to escape from the magic circle of the supernatural, others have searched for natural external causes which might induce the belief that Jesus had risen and had been seen after his resurrection. The first impetus to this opinion, it has been conectured, was given by the circumstance that on the second morning after the burial his grave was found empty, the linen clothes which lay in it being taken first for angels and then for an appearance of the risen Jesus him- {P.848} self; but if the body of Jesus was not reanimated, how are we to suppose that it came out of the grave? Here it would be necessary to recur to the supposition of a theft: unless the intimation of John, that Jesus on account of haste was laid in a strange grave, were thought available for the conjecture that perhaps the owner of the grave caused the corpse to be removed: which however the disciples must subsequently have learned, and which in any case has too frail a foundation in the solitary statement of the fourth gospel. | ||||
Far more fruitful is the appeal to the passage of Paul 1 Cor. xv.5ff., as the most appropriate starting point in this inquiry, and the key to the comprehension of all the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection. When Paul there places the Christophany which occurred to himself in the same series with the appearances of Jesus in the days after his resurrection: this authorizes iis, so far as nothing else stands in the way of such an inference, to conclude that, for aught the apostle knew, those earlier appearances were of the same nature with the one experienced by himself. | ||||
Now with respect to the latter as narrated to us in the Acts (ix.1ff.; xxii.3ff.; xxvi.12ff.), it is no longer possible, after the analysis of Eichhorn and Ammon, to retain it as an external, objective appearance of the real Christ; even Neander does not positively dare to maintain more than an internal influence of Christ on the mind of Paul, only appending in a very beseeching manner the supposition of an external apearance; and even that internal influence he himself renders superfluous by detailing the causes which might in a natural manner produce such a revolution in the disposition of the man thus: the favourable impression of Christianity, of the doctrine, life and conduct of its adherents, which he had here and there received, especially on the occasion of the martyrdom of Stephen, threw his mind into a state of excitement and conflict, which he might indeed for a time forcibly repress, perhaps even by redoubled zeal against the new sect, but which must at last find vent in a decisive spiritual crisis, concerning which it need not surprise us that in an oriental it took the form of a Christophany. If according to this we have in the apostle Paul an example, that strong impressions from the infant Christian community might carry an ardent mind that had long striven against it, to a pitch of exaltation which issued in a Christophany, and a total change of sentiment: surely the impression of the sublime personalityot Jesus would suffice to inspire into his immediate disciples, struggling with the doubts concerning his Messiahship which his death had excited in them, the experience of similar visions. They who think it necessary and desirable in relation to the Christophany of Paul {P.849} to call in the aid of external natural phenomena, as thunder and lightning, may also seek to facilitate the explanation of the appearances of the risen Jesus which his immediate disciples believed themselves to have' previously had, by the supposition of similar incidents. Only it must be observed, that as Eichhorn's explanation of the event in the life of Paul proved a failure from his maintaining as historical every single detail in the Now Testament narrative, as the blindness of Paul and his cure, the vision of Ananias etc, which he could only transform into natural occurrences by a very strained interpretation: so it would inevitably render impossible the psychological explanation of the appearances of Jesus, to acknowledge as historical all the Gospel narratives concerning them, especially those of the tests which Thomas applied by touching the wounds of Jesus, and which Jesus himself afforded by taking material nourishment; and indeed these narratives, from the contradiction which they are show to present, have not the slightest claim to such a character. The two first Gospels, and our chief informant in this matter, the apostle Paul, tell us nothing of such tests, and it is quite natural that the Christophanics which, in the actual experience of the women and apostles, may have floated before them as visions of much the same character as that which Paul had on the way to Damascus, when once received into tradition, should by reason of the apologetic effort to cut off all doubts as to their reality, be continually more and more consolidated, so that the mute appearances became speaking ones, the ghostlike form was exchanged for one that ate, and the merely visible body was made palpable also. | ||||
Here however there presents itself a distinction, which seems at once to render the event in the story of Paul unavailable for the explanation of those earlier appearances. To the apostle Paul, namely, the idea that Jesus had risen and appeared to many persons was delivered as the belief of the sect which he persecuted; he had only to receive it into his conviction and to vivify it in his imagination until it became a part of his own experience: the earlier disciples, on the contrary, had before them as a fact merely the death of their Messiah, -the notion of a resurrection on his part they could nowhere gather, but must, according to our conception of the matter, have first produced it; a problem which appears to be beyond all comparison more difficult than that subsequently presented to the apostle Paul. In order to form a correct judgment on this subject, we must transport ourselves yet more completely into the situation and frame of mind into which the disciples of Jesus were thrown by his death. Durng several years' intercourse with them he had constantly impressed them more and more decidedly with the belief that he was the Messiah; but his death, which they were unable to reconcile with their Messianic ideas, had for the moment annihilated this belief. Now when, after the first shock was past, the earlier {P.850} impression began to revive: there spontaneously arose in them the psychological necessity of solving the contradiction between the ultimate fate of Jesus and their earlier opinion of him-of adoptiiiginto their idea of the Messiah the characteristics of sufferino- and death. As, however, with the Jews, of that age to comprehend meant nothing else than to derive from the sacred scriptures: they turned to these, to ascertain whether they might not perhaps find in them intimations of a suffering and dying Messiah. Foreign as the idea of such a Messiah is to the Old Testament, the disciples, who wished to find it there, must nevertheless have regarded as intimations of this kind, all those poetical and prophetic passages which, like Isa. liii., Ps. xxii., represented the man of God as afflicted and bowed down even to death. Thus Luke states as the chief occupation of the risen Jesus in his interview with the disciples, that beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself, i. e. that Christ ought to have suffered such things (xxiv. 2G f.; 44 if.). When they had in this manner received into their Messianic idea ignominy, suffering and death, the ignorniniously executed Jesus was not lost, but still remained to them: by his death he had only entered into his Messianic glory (Luke xxiv. 26), Jn which he was invisibly with them always, even to the end of the world (Matt, xxviii. 20.). But how could he fail, out of this glory, in which he lived, to give tidings of himself to his followers? and how could they, when their mind was opened to the hitherto hidden doctrine of a dying Messiah contained in the scriptures, and when in moments of unwonted inspiration their hearts burned within them (Luke xxiv. 32), how could they avoid conceiving this to be an influence shed on them by their glorified Christ, an opening of their understanding by him (v. 45), indeed, an actual conversing with him? Lastly, how conceivable is it that in individuals, especially omen, these impressions were heightened, in a purely subjective manner, into actual vision; that on .others, even on whole assemblies, something or other of an objective nature, visible or audible, sometimes perhaps the sight of an unknown person, created the impression of a revelation or appearance of Jesus: a height of pious enthusiasm which is wont to appear elsewhere in religious societies, peculiarly oppressed and persecuted. But if the crucified Messiah had truly entered into the highest form of blessed existence, he ought not to have left his body in the grave: and if in precisely such Old Testament passages as admitted of a typical relation to the sufferings of the Messiah, there was at the same time expressed the hope: you will, not leave my soul in hell, neither will you allow your holy one to see corruption (Ps. xvi. 10; Acts ii. 27.); while in Isa. liii. 10, he who had been represented as led to the slaughter and buried, was yet promised a prolongation of his days: what was more natural to thedisciples than to reinstate their earlier Jewish ideas, which the had disturbed, {P.851} namely, that the Christ remains for ever (John xii. 34), by means of an actual revivification of their dead master, and, as it was a Messianic attribute one day to call the dead bodily from the grave, to imagine him also as returning to life in the manner of a resurrection? | ||||
Meanwhile, if the body of Jesus was interred in a known place, and could there (so far as we are not at liberty to suppose a theft, or an accidental removal) be sought for and exhibited: it is difficult to conceive how the disciples in Jerusalem itself, and not quite two days after the interment, could believe and declare that Jesus was risen, without refuting themselves, or meeting with refutation from their adversaries, (to whom however they appear to have made the first disclosure as to the resurrection of their Messiah at Pentecost.) by ocular demonstration of the grave. Now it is here that the narrative of the first gospel, which has been unjustly placed below the others, presents an explanatory and satisfactory indication. According to this gospel also the risen Jesus does indeed appear in Jerusalem, but only to the women, and so entirely as a mere preparation for a succeeding interview, indeed, so superfluously, that we have already questioned the truth of this appearance, and pronounced it to be a ater modification of the legend of the angelic appearance, which Matthew nevertheless also included in his narrative, The sole important appearance of Jesus after the resurrection occurs, according to Matthew, in Galilee, whither an angel, and Jesus himself on the last evening of his life and on the morning of the resurrection, most urgently, directed his disciples, and where the fourth gospel also, in its appendix, places an appearance of the resuscitated Jesus. That the disciples, dispersed by their alarm, at the execution of their Messiah, should return to their home in Galilee, where they had no need, as in the metropolis of Judea, the seat of the enemies of their crucified Christ, to shut the doors for fear of the Jews, was natural. Here was the place where they gradually began to breathe freely, and where their faith in Jesus, which had been temporarily depressed, might once more expand with its former vigour. But here also, where no body lay in the grave to contradict bold suppositions, mightgradually be formed the idea of the resurrection of Jesus; and wiien this conviction had so elevated the courage and enthusiasm of his adherents that they ventured to proclaim it in the metropolis, it was no longer possible by the sight of the body of Jesus either to convict themselves, or to be convicted by others. | ||||
According to the Acts, it is true, the disciples so early as on the next Pentecost, seven weeks after the , appeared in Jerusalem with the announcement of his resurrection, and were themselves already convinced of it on the second morning after his burial, by appearances which they witnessed. But how long will it yet be {P.852} until the manner in which the author of the Acts places the first appearance of the disciples of Jesus with the announcement of the new doctrine, precisely on the festival of the announcement of the old law, be recognized as one which rests purely on dogmatical grounds; which is therefore historically worthless, and in no way binds us to assign so short a duration to that time of quiet preparation in Galilee? As regards the other statement-it might certainly require some time for the mental state of the disciples to become exalted in the degree necessary, before this or that individual amongst them could, purely as an operation of his own mind, make present to himself the risen Christ in a visionary manner: or before whole assemblies, in moments of highly wrought enthusiasm, could believe that they heard him in every impressive sound, or saw him in every striking appearance: but it would nevertheless be conceived, that, as it was not possible that he should be held by the bonds of death (Acts ii. 24), he had passed only a short time in the grave. As to the more precise determination of this interval, if it be held an insufficient explanation, that the sacred number three would be the first to suggest itself; there is a further idea which might occur, whether or not it be historical that Jesus was buried on the evening before a sabbath, namely, that he only remained in the grave during the rest of Ihc sabbath, and thus rose on the morning after the sabbath, which by the known mode of reckoning might be reconciled with the round number of three days. | ||||
When once the idea of a resurrection of Jesus had been formed in this manner, the great event could not be allowed to have happened so simply, but must be surrounded and embellished with all the pomp which the Jewish imagination furnished. The chief ornaments which stood at command for this purpose, were angels: hence these must open the grave of Jesus, must, after he had come forth from it, keep watch in the empty place, and deliver to the women, who (because without doubt women had had the first visions) must be the first to go to the grave, the tidings of what had happened. As it was Galilee where Jesus subsequently appeared to them, the journey of the disciples there, which was nothing else than their return home, somewhat hastened by fear, was derived from the direction of an angel; indeed, Jesus himself must already before his death, and, as Matthew, too zealously adds, once more after the resurrection also, have enjoined this journey on the disciples. But the further these narratives were propaated by tradition, the more must the difference between the locality of the resurrection itself and that of the appearances of the risen one, be allowed to fall out of sight as inconvenient; and since the locality of the death and resurrection was not transferable, the appearances {P.853} were gradually placed in the same locality as the resurrection, in Jerusalem, which, as the more brilliant theatre and the seat of the first Christian Church, was especially appropriate for them. | ||||