Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (874 page)

his restoration to life.|| But of all

* Joseph. vita, 75.
And when 1 was sent by Titus Caesar with Cerealius and 1,000 horsemen, to a certain village called Thecoa, in order to know whether it were a place fit for a camp, as I came back, I saw many captives crucified; and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind; and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of then:, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician’s hands, while the third recovered.
For the arguments of Paulus on this passage, see exeg. Handb. 3, b, s.
786; and in the Appendix, s. 929 ff.

† Bretschneider, über den angeblichen Scheintod Jesu am Kreuze, in Ullmann’s und Umbreit’s Studien, 2832, 3, s. 625 ff.; Hug, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Verfahrens bei der Todesstrafe der Kreuzigung, Freiburger Zeitschr. 7, s. 144 ff.

‡ Bahrdt, Ausführung des Plans und Zwecks Jesu. Comp. on the other hand, Paulus, exeg. Handb. 3, b, 793 f.

|| Xenodoxien, in der Abh.: Joseph und Nikodemus. Comp. on the other hand KIaiber’s Studien der würtemberg. Geistlichkeit, 2, 2, s. 84 ff.this our evangelical 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 the cave must have had anything rather than a vivifying tendency; that strong aromatics in a confined space would rather have had a stupefying 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 rationalistic 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 Wolfenbüttel 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 fraud on the part of his disciples?
^§
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

* Paulus, exeg. Handb. 3, b, s.
785
ff
.
L. J. 1
,
b, s. 281 ff.

† Schuster, in Eichhorn’s alIg. Biblioth. 9, s 1053.

‡ Winer, bibl. Realw. 1, s. 674.

§ Orig. c. Cels. ii. 63. Comp. the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist, in Lessing, s. 450, 60, 92 ff.; Woolston, Disc. 6. Spinoza, ep. 23, ad Oldenburg, p. 558 f. ed. Gfrörer.

|| Ut sup. 67. 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, — rnutually 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 evangelical 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 connexion and unity, presenting a clear historical idea of the subject, but a fragmentary 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 Wolfenbüttel

* Comp. Mosheim, in his translation of the work of Origen against Celsus, on the passage above quoted; Michaelis, Anm. zum fünften Fragment, s. 407.

† Hase, L. J., § 049; Diss.:
librorum sacrorum de J. Chr. a mortuis revocato atque in coelum sublato narrationem collatis vulgaribus illa ætate Judæorum de morte opinionibus interpretari conatus est
C. A. Frege, p. 12 f. ; Weisse, die evang. Gesch. 2, s. 362 ff.

‡ Orig. c. Cels. ii. 55.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 death of Jesus, 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 necessarily an external event at all is by no means proved. If we chose to remain on supranatural 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 connexion with which he refers to the apparitions of spirits, the impossibility of which remains unproved.
^||
ln 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 conjectured, 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

* The 5th Fragment, in Lessing’s 4th Beitrag. Woolston, Disc. 8.

† Ut sup. 56.

‡ Ullmann, Was setz die Stiftung der Christlichen Kirche durch einen Gekreuzigten voraus? In his Studien, 1832, 3, s. 589
f. (Röhr); Briefe über den Rationalismus, s. 28, 236. Paulus, exeg. Handb. 3, b, s. 826 f.; Hase, § 146.

§ Spinoza, ut sup.

|| Die evang. Gesch. 2, s. 426 ff.himself:
^*
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.
5
ff.),
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 us, 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. 1 ff, xxii. 3 ff., xxvi 12
ff), 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 appearance; 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 personality of 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

* Versuch über die Auferstehung Jesu, in Schmidt’s Bibliothek, 2, 4, s 545 ff
.

† Ibid., s. 537
;
Kaiser, bibl. Theol. 1
,
s. 258 f.; Frege, ut sup. p. 13.

‡ In his allg. Bibliothek, 6, i, s. 1
ff
.

§ Comm. exeg. de repentina Sauli — conversione. In his opusc. theol.; Fortbildung des Christenth. 2, 1, Kap. 3. Comp. also my Streitschriften, 2tes Heft, s. 52 ff.