Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (873 page)

Lastly, on the presupposition that Jesus by his resurrection returned to a purely natural existence, what conception must be formed of his end? In consistency he must be supposed, whether at the end of a longer
^†
or a shorter time after his resuscitation, to have died a natural death; and accordingly Paulus intimates that the too intensely affected body of Jesus, notwithstanding it had recovered from the death-like rigidity produced by crucifixion, was yet completely worn out by natural maladies and consuming fever.
^‡
That this is at least not the view of the Evangelists concerning the end of Jesus is evident, since two of them represent him as taking leave of his disciples like an immortal, the others as being visibly carried up to heaven. Thus before the ascension, at the latest, if until then Jesus had retained a natural human body, it must have undergone a change which qualified him to dwell in the heavenly regions; the sediment of gross corporeality must have fallen to the earth, and only its finest essence have ascended. But of any natural remains of the ascended Jesus the Evangelists say nothing; and as the disciples who were spectators of his ascension must have observed them had there been such, nothing is left for the upholders of this opinion but the expedient of certain theologians of the Tübingen school, who regard as the residuum of the corporeality of Jesus, the cloud which enveloped him in his ascension, and in which what was material in him is supposed to have been dissolved and as it were evaporated.
^§
As thus the Evangelists neither represent to themselves the end of the earthly life of Jesus after the resurrection as a natural death, nor mention any change undergone by his body at the ascension, and moreover narrate of Jesus in the interval between the resurrection and ascension things which are inconceivable of a natural body:

they cannot have represented to themselves his life after the resurrection as natural, but only as supernatural, nor his body as material and organic, but only as transfigured.

In the point of view held by the Evangelists, this conception is not contradicted even by those particulars which the friends of the

* Comp. on this subject especially Weisse, ut sup. s. 339 ff.

† Brennecke, biblischer Beweis, dass Jesus nach seiner Auferstehung noch 27
Jahre leibhaftig auf Erden gelebt, und zum Wohle der Menschheit in der Stille fortgewirkt habe. 1819.

‡
Ut sup. s. 793, 925. Comp. Briefe über den Rationalismus, s. 240.

§ Noch etwas über die Frage: warum haben die Apostel Matthäus und Johannes nicht ebenso wie die zwei Evangelisten Markus und Lukas die Himmelfahrt ausdrücklich erzählt? In Süskind’s Magazin, i7, s. 165 ff.purely natural opinion respecting the life of the risen Jesus are accustomed to urge in their support. That Jesus ate and drank was, in the circle of ideas within which the gospels originated, as far from presupposing a real necessity, as the meal of which Jehovah partook with two angels in the tent of Abraham: the power of eating is here no proof of a necessity for eating.
^*
That he caused himself to be touched, was the only possible mode of refuting the conjecture that an incorporeal spectre had appeared to the disciples; moreover, divine existences, not merely in Grecian, but also (according to the passage above quoted, Gen. xxxii. 24) in Hebrew antiquity, sometimes appeared palpable, in distinction from unsubstantial shades, though they otherwise showed themselves as little bound by the laws of materiality as the palpable Jesus, when he suddenly vanished, and was able to penetrate without hindrance into a room of which the door was closed.
^†

It is quite another question, whether on our more advanced position, and with our more correct knowledge of nature, those two different classes of particulars can be held compatible with each other. Here we must certainly say: a body which consumes visible food, must itself be visible; the consumption of food presupposes an organism, but an organism is organized matter, and this has not the property of alternately vanishing and becoming visible again at will.
^‡
More especially, if the body of Jesus was capable of being felt, and presented perceptible flesh and bones, it thus exhibited the impenetrability of matter, proper to it as solid: if on the other hand he was able to pass into closed houses and rooms, unhindered by the interposition of walls and doors, he thus proved that the impenetrability of solid matter did not belong to him. Since then according to the evangelical accounts he, must at the same time have had and not have had the same property: the evangelical representation of the corporeality of Jesus after the resurrection is manifested to be contradictory. And this contradiction is not of such a kind that it is divided among the different narrators; but the accotint of one and the same Evangelist includes those contradictory features within itself. The brief account of Matthew, it is true, implies in the embracing of the feet of Jesus by the women (v. 9) only the attribute of palpability,

* Joann. Damasc. de f. orth 4, 1.

† The vagueness of the conception which lies at the foundation of the evangelical accounts is well expressed by Origen, when he says of Jesus:
After the resurrection, he existed in a form which held the mean between the materiality of his body before his passion, and the state of the soul when altogether destitute of such body
(c. CeIs. ii. 62.)

‡ Hence even Kern admits that he knows not how to reconcile that particular in Luke with the rest, and regards it as of later, traditional origin (Hauptthats., ut sup. s 50). But what does this admission avail him, since he still has, from the narrative of John, the quality of palpability, which equally with the act of eating belongs to the “conditions of earthly life, the relations of the material world,” to which the body of the risen Jesus, according to Kern’s own presupposition, “was no longer subjected.”
?
without at the same time presenting an opposite one; with Mark the case is reversed, his statement that Jesus appeared
in another form
(v. 12) implying something supernatural, while on the other hand he does not decidedly presuppose the opposite; in Luke, on the other hand, the permission to touch his body and the act of eating speak as decidedly in favour of organic materiality, as the sudden appearance and disappearance speak against it; but the members of this contradiction come the most directly into collision in John, where Jesus, immediately after he has entered into the closed room unimpeded by walls and doors,
^*
causes the doubting Thomas to touch him.

§ 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 impossible, 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.

* Many fathers of the church and orthodox theologians held the capability thus exhibited by Jesus of penetrating through closed doors, not altogether reconcileable with the representation, that for the purpose of the resurrection the stone was rolled away from the grave, and hence maintained
: resurrexit Christus clauso sepulchro, sive nondum ab ostio sepulchri revoluto per angelum lapide.
Quenstedt, theol. didact. polem. 3, p. 542.

† Comp. Schleiermacher’s Weihnachtsfeier, s. 117 f.Only in the dualism which has become popular on the subject of the relation between body and soul, is there anything 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 dualistic 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 latter 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 anything 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 regular 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 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 of himself, without the application of medical skill.
^†

According to a certain opinion, however, these two conditions — some remains of conscious life, 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 be 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