they saw and heard the self-same Jesus in bodily shape and form; and that they were by this baseless
vision raised all at once from the deepest gloom in which the crucifixion of their Lord had left
them, to the boldest faith and strongest hope which impelled them to proclaim the gospel of the
resurrection from Jerusalem to Rome to the end of their lives! And this illusion of the early disciples
created the greatest revolution not only in their own views and conduct, but among Jews and Gentiles
and in the subsequent history of mankind! This illusion, we are expected to believe by these
unbelievers, gave birth to the most real and most mighty of all facts, the Christian Church which
has lasted these eighteen hundred years and is now spread all over the civilized world, embracing
more members than ever and exercising more moral power than all the kingdoms and all other
religions combined!
The vision-hypothesis, instead of getting rid of the miracle, only shifts it from fact to fiction;
it makes an empty delusion more powerful than the truth, or turns all history itself at last into a
delusion. Before we can reason the resurrection of Christ out of history we must reason the apostles
and Christianity itself out of existence. We must either admit the miracle, or frankly confess that
we stand here before an inexplicable mystery.
Remarkable Concessions.—The ablest advocates of the vision-theory are driven against
their wish and will to admit some unexplained objective reality in the visions of the risen or ascended
Christ.
Dr. Baur, of Tübingen (d. 1860), the master-critic among sceptical church historians, and
the corypheus of the Tübingen school, came at last to the conclusion (as stated in the revised edition
of his Church History of the First Three Centuries, published shortly before his death, 1860) that
"nothing but the miracle of the resurrection could disperse the doubts which threatened to drive
faith itself into the eternal night of death (Nurdas Wunder der Auferstehung konnte die Zweifel
zerstreuen, welche den Glauben selbst in die ewige Nacht des Todes verstossen zu müssen
schienen)."Geschichte der christlichen Kirche, I.39. It is true he adds that the nature of the
resurrection itself lies outside of historical investigation ("Was die Auferstehung an sich ist, liegt
ausserhalb des Kreises der geschichtlichen Untersuchung"), but also, that "for the faith of the
disciples the resurrection of Jesus became the most solid and most irrefutable certainty. In this faith
only Christianity gained a firm foothold of its historical development. (In diesem Glauben hat erst
das Christenthum den festen Grund seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung gewonnen.) What history
requires as the necessary prerequisite of all that follows is not so much the fact of the resurrection
itself [?] as the faith in that fact. In whatever light we may consider the resurrection of Jesus, whether
as an actual objective miracle or as a subjective psychological one (als ein objectiv geschehenes
Wunder, oder als ein subjectiv psychologisches), even granting the possibility of such a miracle,
no psychological analysis can penetrate the inner spiritual process by which in the consciousness
of the disciples their unbelief at the death of Jesus was transformed into a belief of his resurrection
.... We must rest satisfied with this, that for them the resurrection of Christ was a fact of their
consciousness, and had for them all the reality of an historical event." (Ibid., pp. 39, 40.) Baur’s
remarkable conclusion concerning the conversion of St. Paul (ibid., pp. 44, 45) we shall consider
in its proper place.
Dr. Ewald, of Göttingen (d. 1874), the great orientalist and historian of Israel, antagonistic
to Baur, his equal in profound scholarship and bold, independent, often arbitrary criticism, but
superior in religious sympathy with the genius of the Bible, discusses the resurrection of Christ in
his History of the Apostolic Age (Gesch. des Volkes Israel, vol. VI. 52 sqq.), instead of his Life ofA.D. 1-100.