manifestations was not only to convince the apostles personally of the resurrection, but to make
them witnesses of the resurrection and heralds of salvation to all the world.^217
Truth compels us to admit that there are serious difficulties in harmonizing the accounts of
the evangelists, and in forming a consistent conception of the nature of Christ’s, resurrection-body,
hovering as it were between heaven and earth, and oscillating for forty days between a natural and
a supernatural state of the body clothed with flesh and blood and bearing the wound-prints, and yet
so spiritual as to appear and disappear through closed doors and to ascend visibly to heaven. But
these difficulties are not so great as those which are created by a denial of the fact itself. The former
can be measurably solved, the latter cannot. We, do not know all the details and circumstances
which might enable us to clearly trace the order of events. But among all the variations the great
central fact of the resurrection itself and its principal features "stand out all the more sure."^218 The
period of the forty days is in the nature of the case the most mysterious in the life of Christ, and
transcends all ordinary Christian experience. The Christophanies resemble in some respect, the
theophanies of the Old Testament, which were granted only to few believers, yet for the general
benefit. At all events the fact of the resurrection furnishes the only key for the solution of the
psychological problem of the sudden, radical, and permanent change in the mind and conduct of
the disciples; it is the necessary link in the chain which connects their history before and after that
event. Their faith in the resurrection was too clear, too strong, too steady, too effective to be
explained in any other way. They showed the strength and boldness of their conviction by soon
returning to Jerusalem, the post of danger, and founding there, in the very face of the hostile
Sanhedrin, the mother-church of Christendom.- The Theory of Fraud. The apostles stole and hid the body of Jesus, and deceived the
world.^219
(^217) Matt. 28:18-20; Mark 16:15, 16; Luke 24;46-48; John 20:21-23; Acts 1:8.
(^218) So Meyer says, who is one of the fairest as well as most careful exegetes (Com. on John, 5th Germ. ed., p. 643). I will add
the observations of Canon Farrar (Life of Christ, vol. II 432): "The lacunae, the compressions, the variations, the actual differences,
the subjectivity of the narrators as affected by spiritual revelations, render all harmonies at the best uncertain. Our belief in the
resurrection, as an historic fact, as absolutely well attested to us by subsequent and contemporary circumstances as any other
event in history, rests on grounds far deeper, wider, more spiritual, more eternal, than can be shaken by divergences of which
we can only say that they are not necessarily contradictions, but of which the true solution is no longer attainable. Hence the
’ten discrepancies’ which have been dwelt on since the days of Celsus, have never for one hour shaken the faith of Christendom.
The phenomena presented by the narratives are exactly such as we should expect, derived as they are from different witnesses,
preserved at first in oral tradition only, and written 1,800 years ago at a period when minute circumstantial accuracy, distinguished
from perfect truthfulness, was little regarded. St. Paul, surely no imbecile or credulous enthusiast, vouches, both for the reality
of the appearances, and also for the fact that the vision by which he was himself converted came, at a long interval after the rest,
to him as to the ’abortive-born’ of the apostolic family (1 Cor. 15:4-8). If the narratives of Christ’s appearance to his disciples
were inventions, how came they to possess the severe and simple character which shows no tinge of religious excitement? If
those appearances were purely subjective, how can we account for their sudden, rapid, and total cessation? As Lange finely
says, the great fugue of the first Easter tidings has not come to us as a ’monotonous chorale,’ and mere boyish verbal criticism
cannot understand the common feeling and harmony which inspire the individual vibrations of those enthusiastic and multitudinous
voices (vol. V. 61). Professor Westcott, with his usual profundity, and insight, points out the differences of purpose in the narrative
of the four Evangelists. St. Matthew dwells chiefly on the majesty and glory of the Resurrection; St. Mark, both in the original
part and in the addition (Mark 16:9-20), insists upon it as a fact; St. Luke, as a spiritual necessity; St. John, as a touchstone of
character (Introd. 310-315).
(^219) This theory was invented by the Jewish priests who crucified the Lord, and knew it to be false, Matt. 27:62-66; 28:12-15.
The lie was repeated and believed, like many other lies, by credulous infidels, first by malignant Jews at the time of Justin Martyr,
then by Celsus, who learned it from them, but wavered between it and the vision-theory, and was renewed in the eighteenth
century by Reimarus in the Wolfenbüttel Fragments. Salvador, a French Jew, has again revived and modified it by assuming
(according to Hase, Geschichte Jesu, p. 132) that Jesus was justly crucified, and was saved by the wife of Pilate through Joseph
A.D. 1-100.