to person and from place to place. The Christian society wrought the miracle by its intense love
for Christ. Accordingly the resurrection does not belong to the history of Christ at all, but to the
inner life of his disciples. It is merely the embodiment of their reviving faith.
This hypothesis was invented by a heathen adversary in the second century and soon buried
out of sight, but rose to new life in the nineteenth, and spread with epidemical rapidity among
skeptical critics in Germany, France, Holland and England.^222
The advocates of this hypothesis appeal first and chiefly to the vision of St. Paul on the way
to Damascus, which occurred several years later, and is nevertheless put on a level with the former
appearances to the older apostles (1 Cor. 15:8); next to supposed analogies in the history of religious
enthusiasm and mysticism, such as the individual visions of St. Francis of Assisi, the Maid of
Orleans, St. Theresa (who believed that she had seen Jesus in person with the eyes of the soul more
distinctly than she could have seen him with the eyes of the body), Swedenborg, even Mohammed,
and the collective visions of the Montanists in Asia Minor, the Camisards in France, the spectral
resurrections of the martyred Thomas à Becket of Canterbury and Savonarola of Florence in the
excited imagination of their admirers, and the apparitions of the Immaculate Virgin at Lourdes.^223
Nobody will deny that subjective fancies and impressions are often mistaken for objective
realities. But, with the exception of the case of St. Paul—which we shall consider in its proper
place, and which turns out to be, even according to the admission of the leaders of skeptical criticism,
a powerful argument against the mythical or visionary theory—these supposed analogies are entirely
irrelevant; for, not to speak of other differences, they were isolated and passing phenomena which
left no mark on history; while the faith in the resurrection of Christ has revolutionized the whole
world. It must therefore be treated on its own merits as an altogether unique case.
(a) The first insuperable argument against the visionary nature, and in favor of the objective
reality, of the resurrection is the empty tomb of Christ. If he did not rise, his body must either have
been removed, or remained in the tomb. If removed by the disciples, they were guilty of a deliberate
falsehood in preaching the resurrection, and then the vision-hypothesis gives way to the exploded(^222) The vision-hypothesis (Visions-Hypothese)was first suggested by the heathen Celsus (see Keim, III. 577), and in a more
respectful form by the Jewish philosopher Spinoza, and elaborately carried out by Strauss and Renan, with the characteristic
difference, however, that Strauss traces the resurrection dream to the apostles in Galilee, Renan (after Celsus) to Mary Magdalene
in Jerusalem, saying, in his Life of Jesus (almost blasphemously), that "the passion of a hallucinated woman gave to the world
a risen God!" In his work on the Apostles, Renan enters more fully into the question and again emphasizes, in the genuine style
of a French novelist, the part of the Magdalene."La gloire de la résurrection (he says, p. 13) appartient à Marie de, Magdala.
Apres Jésus, c’est Marie qui a le plus fait pour la fondation du christianisme. L’ombre créée par les sens délicats de Madeleine
plane encore sur le monde .... Sa grande affirmation de femme: ’Il est resuscité!’ a été la base de la foi de l’humanité."The
vision-theory has also been adopted and defended by Zeller, Holsten (in an able treatise on the Gospel of Paul and Peter, 1868),
Lang, Volkmar, Réville, Scholten, Meijboom, Kuenen, Hooykaas. Comp. Keim, III. 579 sqq. Among English writers the
anonymous author of Supernatural Religion is its chief champion, and states it in these words (vol. III. 526, Lond. ed. of 1879):
"The explanation which we offer, and which has long been adopted in various forms by able critics" [among whom, in a foot-note,
he falsely quotes Ewald] "is, that doubtless Jesus was seen Gr. (wjvfqh), but the vision was not real and objective, but illusory
and subjective; that is to say, Jesus was not himself seen, but only a representation of Jesus within the minds of the beholders."
On the other hand Ewald, Schenkel, Alex. Schweizer, and Keim have essentially modified the theory by giving the
resurrection-visions an objective character and representing them as real though purely spiritual manifestations of the exalted
Christ from heaven. Hase calls this view happily a Verhimmelung der Visionshypothese (Gesch. Jesu, p. 597). It is certainly a
great improvement and a more than half-way approach to the truth, but it breaks on the rock of the empty sepulchre. It does not
and cannot tell us what became of the body of Christ.
(^223) The author of Supernatural Religion (III. 530), calls to aid even Luther’s vision of the devil on the Wartburg, and especially
the apparition of Lord Byron after his death to Sir Walter Scott in clear moonshine; and he fancies that in the first century it
would have been mistaken for reality.
A.D. 1-100.