xv when men cease to believe in God, they cease to believe in themselves. when religion dies, man loses his belief in the significance of life and too bored to reproduce himself lies down to die amid the mechanical marvels of a materialistic civilisation. every great culture begins, as spengler says, with a strong affirmation of life and ends with a metaphysical turning towards death. 'children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence'.
xxii i entered Harrow in 1902. the boer war, which had faintly disturbed the serene complacency of the victorians, was drawing to a close. the dominant philosophy of the age was the belief in the perfectibility of man and the inevitability of progress. the Church of England appeared to be fighting a rearguard action against a confident secularism. agnosticism was becoming fashionable.
xxx an assertion which outstrips the evidence is not only a blunder but a crime' huxley
xxxiii 'of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown up man, the disappearance of religion puzzled him most. the boy went to church twice every sunday; he was taught to read his bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor his brothers or sisters was religion real. even the mild discipline of the unitarian church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment and never afterwards entered a church. the religious instinct had vanished and could not be revived, although one made in later life many efforts to recover it'. (note: oh the religion of form only missing an actual relationship with God, longing to obey Him ..Oh save me from it..to You.)
xxxviii deism was an even greater danger to the Church of England in the eighteenth century than modernism (church's efforts, in the 19th and early 20th century, to understand the bible in light of current developments in scientific and philosophical concepts.) in the twentieth. 'the Church as it now is, wrote dr. arnold in the early years of the nineteenth century, , no human power can save. within a few years the oxford movement had revolutionised the situation and refuted the pessimists.
xl it is right to speak of the consolations of religion, but wrong to ignore the 'terrible christian truths'. and of these truths none is more terrible than the fact that the individual or the country which rejects what God proposes for our belief must inevitably perish.
in..The religious prospect, canon v.a.demant writes: 'the christian religion is primarily a religion of redemption, a gospel. it is good news, no a philosophy or good advice. the first question which we ask about news is whether it is reliable and the most important thing about christianity is that it is true. 'if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain and your faith also is vain..
CHAPTER 1 - THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO THE MIRACULOUS
sir william ramsy was a convince anti-miraculist when he began his great career as an archaeologist in asia minor, but unlike most anti-miraculist his mind was not closed to evidence which conflicted with his prejudices. in the opening chapter of his book, Luke the physician, which embodied the results of 34 years of research he writes as follows. the question 'shall we hear evidence of not?' presents itself at the threshold of every investigation into the new testament. modern criticism for a time entered on its task with a decided negative. its mind was mad up and it would not listen to evidence on a matter that was already decided...
wherever anything occurs, ramsey continues, that savours of the marvelous in the estimation of the polished and courteous scholar, sitting in his well ordered library and contemplating the world through its windows, it must be forthwith set aside as unworthy of attention and as mere delusion. that method of studying the first century was the method of the later nineteenth century. i venture to think that it will not be the method of the twentieth century. if you have ever lived in asia you know that a great religion does not establish itself without some unusual accompaniments. the marvellous result is not achieved without some marvellous preliminaries'.
the alleged cause of the anti-miraculist attitude of the 19th century was the progress of science...the truth is that every advance of science has reinforced, if only indirectly, the case for miracles.
3..the church, except in the case of galileo, never came into conflict with scientists on a scientific issue. it was the petrifying influence of aristotle that obstructed research. A himself was a great naturalist, but though the observation of nature in general and of the animal kingdom in particular was the basis of his conclusions, those conclusions had constantly to be readjusted to suit the requirements of certain dogmas which A made no attempt either to prove by reason or to check by observation.
thus the aristotelean system of physics had to accommodate itself to the following dogmas.
all matter is made up of four elements, earth, air, fire and water.
the earth is the centre of the universe.
circular movement is the most perfect conceivable and therefore the stars and planets move in concentric circles round the earth.
4..the alleged perfection of the circle and of the figure seven conform not to a scientific but to an aesthetic criterion and aesthetic criteria play a much greater part in the shaping of scientific hypotheses than scientists would be prepared to admit.
kepler's career bridges the mediaeval and the modern attitude to science. he was, at first, greatly influenced by aesthetic criteria. ..in the end observation triumphed over aesthetic prejudices.
why was the circle considered more perfect than the ellipse? probably because it was simpler. simplicity has not only an aesthetic attraction but an obvious appeal to all those oppressed by the complexity of phenomena. it is always tempting to search for a short cut to a solution by eliminating as many unknown factors as possible. 'it is impossible, as ..a.g. tansley remarks, 'to overemphasise the overmastering desire of the human mind for some kind of unification-for having a single consistent or seemingly consistent scheme which appears to include and reconcile contradictory things.' it is, indeed, a natural and human weakness to hope that all difficulties of life will yield to some simple panacea....
5 it is this desire to simplify a complex problem, this urge towards unification which explains the prejudice of the anti-miraculist...the aesthetic criterion invoked in one age to prove that planets must move in circles is invoked a few centuries later to prove that miracles do not occur, for miracles are untidy and unpredictable intrusions into a neat and orderly universe...
6 ..the anti-miraculist fashion might have been less influential but for the fact that it was in accord with political fashion. deism, the belief that God may have created the universe but never interferes in the processes of creation, originated in england at the time of the 'Glorious Revolution' which substituted a limited for an absolute monarch. the king of england has a theoretical right to veto laws which have been approved by parliament. the God of deism has a theoretical right to veto the laws of nature, but neither the king of england nor the King of kings would be so unconstitutional as to exercise these rights. deism might be defined as constitutional theism. miracles are as objectionable to the deist as the arbitrary acts of a constitutional monarch to the liberal. in the sphere of economics constitutional theism found expression in the doctrines of laissez-faire liberalism. God might reign, but he could not rule. malthus, a kindly anglican clergyman, explained that if children were born in excess of the requirements of the labour market, then both parents and children should be left to starve. even God, it seemed, could not veto the laws of political economy.
there is no sounder approach to the problem of miracles than the method which led to the discovery of the planet neptune. the orbit of a planet is determined by the interplay of the major attraction exerted by the sun and the lesser pulls of the other planets. in spite of the complexity of the problem the course of a planet can be accurately predicted. now, before the discovery of the planet neptune, astronomers were bewildered by certain 'perturbations' in the planetary orbits, that is, by their deviations from the orbits as predicted. le verriere subjected these 'perturbations' to a searching analysis and came to the conclusion that they could not be explained in terms of known agencies, that is, as the consequence of the forces exerted by the sun and by the planets known, at that time to exist. he therefore assumed that the perturbations must have been due to the action of an unknown agency, an undiscovered planet. as a result of his calculations the planet neptune was located on sept. 23, 1846, within a degree of the point where le verriere had announced that the undiscovered planet would be found.
7 note that le verriere's discovery began by the proof of a purely negative conclusion, the conclusion that the orbits of the planets could not be wholly explained in terms of known agencies.
the method of le verriere can be employed to solve a problem of infinitely greater importance than the problem of planetary perturbations
the oxford dictionary defines a miracle as a 'marvelous event due to some supernatural agency'. let us define a miracle, provisionally, as a 'perturbation inexplicable in terms of natural agencies'. let us define a miracle, provisionally, as a 'perturbation inexplicable in terms of natural agencies'.
the true scientist will start his investigation unhampered by negative dogmas. he will not assume the non-existence of supernatural agencies, but he will make every effort to explain terrestrial phenomena in terms of natural agencies. like le verriere, he will attempt to exhaust the possibility that a given phenomenon has been caused by known agencies before considering the possibility that it has been caused by an unknown agency.
the scientific approach to this problem is less uncommon in scientific circles than was the case in the 19th century, but the man in the street is still influenced by the negative dogmatism of the old fashioned secularist who repeated with simple faith matthew arnold's remark, 'miracles don't occur'.
8 the 19th century secularist did not test his conclusions by the evidence; he tested the evidence by its conformity to his beliefs. thus strauss, author of the notorious Life of Jesus, laid down as a canon of new testament criticism the principle, 'in the person and acts of Jesus there was nothing supernatural' and he accordingly dates the gospels on the assumption that miracles must be a later interpolation. Zola, like strauss, accepted with simple faith the unproved and unprovable dogma that the natural world is a closed system and that supernatural agencies do no exist. Z's negative faith was proof against the stubborn fact of the two miracles which he himself witnessed at Lourdes, of which the first was the sudden cure of an advanced stage of lupus. Z describes marie lemarchand's condition as he saw her on the way to lourdes. 'it was..a case of lupus which had preyed upon the unhappy woman's nose and mouth. ulceration had spread and was hourly spreading and devouring the membrane in its progress. the cartilage of the nose was almost eaten away, the mouth was drawn all on one side by the swollen condition of the upper lip. the whole was a frightful distorted mass of matter and oozing blood'. S's account is incomplete, for the patient was coughing and spitting blood. the apices of both lungs wee affected and she had sores on her leg. dr. d'Hombres saw her immediately before and immediately after she entered the bath. 'both her cheeks, the lower part of her nose and her upper lip were covered with a tuberculous ulcer and secreted matter abundantly. on her return from the baths i at once followed her to the hospital. i recognised her quite well although her face
9 was entirely changed.instead of the horrible sore i had so lately seen, the surface was red, it is true, but dry and covered with a new skin. the other sores had also dried up in the piscina'. the doctors who examined her could find nothing the matter with the lungs and testified to the presence of the new skin on her face. Z was there. he had said 'i only want to see a cut finger dipped in water and come out healed'. behold the case of your dreams, m. Zola' said the president, presenting the girl whose hideous disease had made such an impression on the novelist before the cure. 'Ah no', said Z, 'i do not want to look at her. she is still too ugly', alluding to the red colour of the new skin. (note: MY desire (ie. hidden DEMAND?) is more important than her RELIEF?) before he left lourdes Z recited his credo to the president of the medical bureau. 'were i to see all the sick at lourdes cured, i would not believe in a miracle'. (note- romans 1.19-20)
the modern sceptic is less dogmatic than Z. many such sceptics would admit the fact that inexplicable cures take place at Lourdes, but refuse to believe that they are due to supernatural agencies. thus professor j.b.s.haldane, F.R.S., the distinguished biologist, who exchanged letters with me which were published under the title Science and the Supernatural and who attacked not only christianity but theism in the course of our correspondence, wrote as follows: 'still, one of two of the more surprising lourdes miracles, such as the immediate healing of a suppurating fracture of 8 years' standing, seem to me to be possibly true and, if so, very remarkable and worth investigating, although if they were shown to be true they would not prove the particular theory of their origin current at lourdes. (p.13) haldane contends that sooner or later science will explain such alleged miracles in terms of natural law.
10 now the question we are seeking to solve is whether supernatural agencies exist. this is the subject of our research. clearly we may as well abandon the research if all evidence which suggests supernatural agencies is to be explained away as as the result of our ignorance. there must be something wrong with a method which starts by assuming the non-existence of an agent whose existence or non-existence is the occasion of our research. this is merely strauss' formula in a modern dress. 'in the phenomena of this terrestrial planet no supernaturalism shall be allowed to remain'.
had le verriere adopted this method he would never have discovered neptune. it is our ignorance, he would have argued, which is responsible for the attribution of these perturbations to an unknown planet. sooner or later science will resolve the apparent discrepancies,and prove that these tiresome perturbations are wholly consistent with our belief that the planetary system, as we know it, is a closed system subject to no external influences.
clearly, if the haldane criterion be accepted, all further investigation is futile. even if supernatural agencies exist we are absolved from recognising their existence, for we can always appeal to the science of the future to explain the 'perturbations' in terms of the agencies which we already know. according to pious legend st. Denis is alleged to have carried his head in his hands after he had been decapitated. had haldane met st. D, he would perhaps have remarked 'very remarkable and worth investigating, but science will one day explain the fact that certain unusual pathological types can survive decapitation for an appreciable time'. similarly le verriere, had he accepted the obligation to explain all planetary perturbations in terms of the planets which were known to him, might have appealed to the science of the future to explain the unaccountable deviations of planets form their predicted courses without prejudice to the accepted hypothesis that the planets then known constituted a closed system. but there must be something wrong with a method of research which effectively debars the investigator from discovering an unknown agent, the nature and reality of which is the subject of research.
11 'how can the assumption', writes ..malcolm grant, 'of unknown laws or of unknown natural cause be better science than the determination to abide by recognised, fundamental, so-to-say necessary and obvious laws, to abide by careful observation and by enlightened failure'.
'enlightened because the failure to discover natural agents throws light on the existence of supernatural agents.
..Grant would not accept the catholic explanation of the lourdes miracles, but the quotation which i have taken from his book, A New Argument for God and Survival ..continues, 'the 'rationalist' who denies the reality of, for instance, all well-attested cures at lourdes (cures of organic diseases) is a fool; but what shall we call the man who assumes and keeps on assuming even after careful study, that they are natural events?'
finally, there are those who contend that God is not included in the scientist's terms of reference and that the scientist cannot reasonably be asked to express a scientific opinion on the miracles at lourdes or elsewhere. his task is to interpret phenomena in terms of natural agents and natural law.
the word Science is derived from scientia, which means knowledge. a correct explanation of a given phenomenon which enlightens us as to its cause is 'scientific', be that cause a natural or a supernatural agent. there is not the least scientific justification for the belief that a particular group of agents must be excluded from the field of research. this is as if le verriere had been restricted by his terms of reference to explaining all planetary 'perturbations' in terms of planetary agents known to, and classified by, astronomers.
12 the scientist is not asked for a positive verdict in support of the existence of supernatural agencies. his more modest role is to answer the question 'can this phenomenon be explained in terms of natural agencies? all that we demand from the scientist is an answer to a question which is within his competence to decide.
there are no doubt some survivors of the victorian rationalists who continue to assert that science has disproved the possibility of miracles. this happens to be the exact reverse of the truth. it is only because we believe in science that we believe in miracles. it is only because we have faith in the account which the scientist gives of natural phenomena that we dare to assert that a particular phenomenon was not cause by natural agents. 'what makes it difficult tor us to believe in miracles, writes Mgr. r.a.knox, is not human science; it is human nescience'. ('lack of knowledge, ignorance; agnosticism) it is because our knowledge of the laws of nature is limited that in case after case which looks like a miracle we cannot be quite certain that those laws have been modified or suspended by a supernatural Power. even of the best attested lourdes miracles we do not say that a 'miracle is theologically certain; we only say that it is, so far, the best account we can give of the facts. we differ from our critics only in this, Mgr. knox continues, that we say, 'it may be a miracle or it may not', whereas they say, 'whatever it is, it certainly is not a miracle'. which side approaches the subject with an open mind and in a spirit of enquiry? which side approaches the subject encumbered with the burden of dogmatic
(note: (in webster, specific tenet of doctrine (thought, idea..?) authoritatively laid down...go to oxford english dictionary: latin, dogma - philosophical tenet; greek dogma, that which seems to one, opinion, tenet, decree, from dokAn - to seem, seem good, think, suppose, imagine.)
preposession? which side faces the facts?'
13 finally, there is the so called historical argument. 'the historical argument, writes haldane, appeals to me. in primitive societies, such as those of west and central africa, all phenomena not understood, ie. all non-violent deaths, are put down to the activity of spirits. as knowledge increases, more and more of them are explained in other ways. there are now rather few left over in which the intervention of spirits is in the least plausible.'
if phenomena may be divided into two classes, those which are directly caused by a supernatural agent and those which are caused by a natural agent, the mistake of incorrect classification is admittedly more likely to be made by a primitive savage than by a modern scientist and the transference of some phenomena from the supernatural to the natural class is a probable result of the advance of science. and yet this sequence of events which is inevitable if miracles occur is cited by haldane as an argument against the occurrence of miracles. 'if A is true, then B must happen, is our case. 'but B happens, therefor A is untrue, replies haldane. his argument is neither historical nor logical.
people who appeal to the so called 'historical argument' often fail to distinguish between the reactions of primitive savages and mediaeval men to the miraculous. all those who were born before the scientific age are assumed to have been equally credulous and to have lived in a constant expectation of miracles. this is very far from the case. miracles occurred in the middle ages as they occur today, but the overwhelming majority of christians then as now, lived and died without witnessing a phenomenon which they believed to be miraculous. history is, in the main, the record of the exceptional and consequently we are tempted to assume that miracles were more common in past ages than our own, a common illusion among the pious. St. gregory, for instance, writing within 6
centuries. of the crucifixion, raises this same complaint, and looks back with much the same regret to the apostolic age.
'ah, but if a mediaeval man', retorts the sceptic, 'had been transported forward through the centuries he would have attributed the voice of the b.b.c. announcer emerging from a portable wireless to some supernatural agency'. would he? some would and others wouldn't. the proportion of the credulous to the critical was no greater in the 13th than in the 29th century. prof. f. m. powicke, the eminent mediaevalist, endorses and makes his own the remark that 'never in the whole history of the world did so many people believe so firmly in so many things, the authority for which they could not test, as do londoners today'. and in any case what concerns us is not the cause of error in classification which leads the uncritical to classify natural events as miracles, or the proportion of people in every age who fall into this error, but whether, in point of fact, there is a basic distinction between those marvels of modern science which we owe to the ingenuity of man and those miracles such as the miracles of healing at lourdes, which the ingenuity of man can neither duplicate nor explain.
haldan's
CHAPTER 2 - MODERN MIRACLES
16 God normally works through secondary causes. the seed is sown, the wheat shoots up and matures and the baker converts the wheat into bread. but in rare and exceptional instances God suspends for a moment the operation of those laws of nature which owe their existence and validity to Him alone and expresses His will more directly and performs without the aid of secondary causes what he is continually doing by means of secondary causes. 'just in the millionth instance He multiplies bread instead of multiplying the wheat', and feeds the 5000 without the intervention of secondary causes.
a miracle is not the violation of a law of nature. an apple falls from the branch of a tree towards the grass immediately below. science insists that this apple will inevitably reach the ground unless an agent arrests its passage through the air. i put out my hand and catch the apple. no law of nature is violated. the law of gravitation, for instance, continues to operate and produces on my outstretched had the sensation of weight, as the hand checks the downward flight of the apple. all that has happened is that my human will had modified some of the effects which normally follow when an apple falls to the ground.
17a miracle might be defined as the modification of the normal course of nature by divine will. that there is no a priori objection to miracles is conceded by the eminent agnostic, john stuart mill. 'the interference..of human will with the course of nature is not an exception to law: and by the same rule interference by the divine will would not be an exception, either'.
a miracle is a form of divine creative activity. 'the a priori (existing in the mind prior to experience)
arguments against the existence of God or against the possibility of miracles with the evidence which we require to prove that God exists and the miracles occur, but at least we can begin our researches unhampered by the negative dogmas of old fashioned secularist. the question as to whether miracles are possible has been decide in the affirmative. the question as to whether miracles happen can be decided, and can only be decided , by examining the evidence for alleged miracles in accordance with the exacting standards of historical and scientific research.
i propose to devote this chapter to an examination of the better attested modern miracles, that is, the miracles at lourdes.....
18 the alleged miracles of lourdes have a special claim to scientific consideration for two reasons. first, because the cures are examined by a specially constituted committee of doctors. christian scientists are notoriously unfriendly to medical scrutiny, but doctors, irrespective of religion or nationality, are invited to serve on the medical Bureau des Constatations which was established in 1882 to test the alleged miraculous cures at lourdes. in peacetime a yearly average of about 500 doctors visit lourdes and as many as 60 doctors have been present at the examination of an alleged miracle. the record office of the Bureau keeps the case sheet of those whose cures it has studied and the certificates brought by the patients from their own doctors are deposited with the reports of the examining doctors at lourdes. the permanence of the cure is only concede d if the subsequent history of the cure has been recorded for a period of years.
in the second place the evidence for supernormal cures at lourrdes is of quite a different character to the evidence for alleged 'faith cures', such as those claimed by the christian scientists. the british medical association appointed in 1909 a committee of doctors and clergymen to examine the claims of christian science and this committee reported in 1914 that there was no evidence for the cure of organic diseases.
20...different specific people and their condition and cure are presented concluding with peter de rudder
de rudder was a belgian farm labourer whose left leg was shattered in 1867 by the fall of a tree. 7 years passed and the bones had not united. de R's doctors advised amputation but de R determined to ask our Lady of Lourdes, venerated at the shrine of Oostacker, near Ghent, to cure his leg. his doctor, van hoestenberghe, who returned to the Faith as a result of the miracle, had given up the case. he testified to de R's condition before the cure in the following words.
'i declare on my conscience and on my soul:
1. i have examined de R a dozen times and my last visit was two or three months before the cure.
2. each time i was able to make the ends of the bones come out of the wound: they were deprived of their periosteum, there was necrosis, (note: greek, mortification, state of death), the suppuration was fetid and abundant and has passed along the tendons...
3. at each examination i introduced two fingers to the bottom of the wound and always felt a separation of 4 to 5 centimetres between the broken parts and this right across their breadth. i was able to turn them about easily.
21 4. a large sequestrum had come away at the beginning and little bits of bone often came away during these years.'
note on 164 professor j.b.s. haldane, f.r.s., recently stated that whereas, when he and i collaborated in our book, he was of opinion that the odds were that de R's bones were united suddenly and that this-in his view-was more probable than the only remaining alternative, a pious fraud, his views had changed since the spanish war. he regarded the catholic organisation in spain as a fountain of lies and he was now of opinion that a pious fraud was the more probable alternative.
professor j.b.s. haldane who has been closely associated with The Daily Worker feels very strongly about tendentious propaganda, but i cannot see the relevance between the alleged inaccuracies of war propaganda, on the one side or the other in a civil war, and the bona fides of those who certified to the cure of de R.
the cure took place on april 7, 1875. on april 15, 1875, 14 parishioners of de R's home town, jobbeke, including senator viscount de bus who had never believed in miracles and m.p. sorge, a free thinker, signed a document to the effect that 'every recourse of surgery having been exhausted, the patient was given up and declared incurable by the doctors and considered as such by all who knew him; that he invoked our lady of lourdes, venerated at oostaker and that he returned cured and without crutches, so that he can do any dind of work as before his accident. we declare that this sudden and admirable cure took place on april 7, 1875'. the statement was signed by 14 witnesses. the document being sealed with the municipal seal, was dated april, 15. 1875 (a week after the cure).
165 de R was examined by dr. affenaer on the day after the cure. on april 9, dr. van hoestenberghe examined de R, and was converted from scepticism to christianity by the clear evidence of miracle.
peter de R's bones were exhumed after his death. 'the left leg shows evident traces of the double fracture and is repaired in such a way that, in spite of the deviation of the superior portion of the bones, which were drawn backwards curing 8 years by the flexor muscles of the thigh, the vertical axis of the left limb keeps the same direction as the axis of the right leg. thus, the weight of the body was equally and normally borne by both sides. moreover, notwithstanding the elimination of an osseus fragment from the broken limb, the two limbs are of equal length' (bertrin, p. 181).
it is sometimes asked why, if these miracles occurred, catholic doctors do not send all their patients to lourdes. the proportion of cures is extremely small and a catholic who had no conviction that he would be the recipient of one of these rare supernatural favours might hesitate to face the journey on the off chance of a cure.
let me reaffirm the fact that it is possible to believe that genuine miracles occur at lourdes and yet reject the catholic interpretation and it is possible to be a catholic and reject the evidence for the miracles, possible at least in this sense that it is not de fide (of the faith) for a catholic to believe in any of these miracles.
21 this testimony was confirmed by witnesses who saw de R a few days before the cure and on the way to oostacker. the driver of the train on which he travelled to oostacker observed the broken leg swinging to and fro and remarked 'there goes a man who is going to lose his leg'. de R entered the Grotto and began to pray. suddenly he felt a strange sensation. he rose, forgetting his crutches, without which he had not taken a single step for 8 years, knelt before the statue of our lady and rising unaided, walked three times round the grotto. he was cured. he was immediately taken to a neighbouring chateau. the restored limb was examined; the two wounds had healed up, leaving two scars. the broken bones had suddenly been united. there was no shortening of the leg, in spite of the fact the de R had lost substantial pieces of bone. the cure was attested by the entire village. the case was examined and re-examined by various doctors and the bones, when exhumed, after de R's death, fully support the above history of the case.
haldane, after reading the Catholic Truth Society pamphlet, A Modern Miracle, wrote: 'i think the odds are that the bones were united and the septic wounds healed, in a few hours, the most probable alternative being a pious fraud enacted by a large number of people. the only remarkable element in the cure is its speed'.
22 this is much as if someone were to remark 'the only remarkable fact about the resurrection was that Christ rose from the dead'. medical science wan no more explain the instantaneous mending of a fracture which had defied the doctors for years than the resurrection of a man who has died.
i am only concerned for the moment to establish the fact that cures, inexplicable by medical science, have taken place at lourdes. cures take place a lourdes which cannot be explained as the results of 'suggestion'. small children and babies, incapable of profiting by 'mental' treatment, have been cured at lourdes of organic disease, as for example the cure of a double club-foot in a two year old child, the miracle occurring at the father, dr. aumaitre, held the child's feet in the water. men have been cured when unconscious or asleep.
the lourdes water has been analysed and is ordinary spring water with no radioactivity. many cures occur without its intervention.
let me conclude with a quotation from a remarkable book, Man the Unknown, which created a sensation in the US, for alexis carrel is one of the most distinguished of modern scientists, a nobel prize winner and one of the more eminent members of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. there are many passages in his book which no convinced catholic could write, but C is descended from french catholic stock and he approaches these problems without the provincial limitations of those scientists who are all influenced by the materialistic fashion of the 19th century.
'the author knows, writes carrel, that miracles are as far from scientific orthodoxy as mysticity...but science has to explore the entire field of reality...he (carrel) began this study in 1902, at a time when documents were scarce, when it was difficult for a young doctor, and dangerous for his future career, to become interested in such a subject..
23 in all countries, at all times, people have believed in the existence of miracles...but after the great impetus of science during the 19th century, such belief completely disappeared. it was generally admitted, not only that miracles did not exist, but that they could not exist. as the laws of thermodynamics make perpetual motion impossible, physiologically laws oppose miracles. such is still the attitude of most physiologists and physicians. however, in view of the facts observed during the last 50 years this attitude cannot be sustained. the most important cases of miraculous healing have been recorded by the medical bureau of lourdes. our present conception of the influence of prayer upon pathological lesions is based on the observation of patients who have been cured almost instantaneously of various affections, such as peritoneal tuberculosis, cold abscesses, osteitis, suppurating wounds, lungs, cancer, etc. the process of healing changes little from one individual to another. often, an acute pain. then a sudden sensation of being cured. in a few seconds, a few minutes, at the most a few hours, woulds are cictrized, pathological symptoms disappear, appetite returns...the only condition indispensable to the occurrence of the phenomenon is prayer. but there is no need for the patient himself to pray or even to have any religious faith. it is sufficient that someone around him be in a state of prayer. such facts are of profound significance. they show the reality of certain relations, of still unknown nature, between psychological and organic processes. they prove the objective importance of the spiritual activities, which hygienists, physicians, educators and sociologists have almost always neglected to study. they open to man a new world.
24 'science, writes carrel, has to explore the entire field of reality'. 'there are few among our ecclesiastics and theologioans, writes dr. inge, who would spend 5 minutes in investigating any alleged supernatural occurrence in our own time. it would be assumed that, if true, it must be ascribed to some obscure natural cause...there is still enough superstition left to win a certain vogue for miraculous cures at lourdes.
it is interesting to contrast the verdict of the scientists with the verdict of the theologians. haldane...believes that some of the lourdes miracles are 'possible true and worth investicating'. alexis carrel began to investigate them in 1902 and came to the conclusion that many of the lourdes miracles were genuine. dr. inge, who professes great reverence for the scientific method, approves the refusal to 'waste five minutes in investigating an alleged miracle.
CHAPTER 3 -THE GOSPELS. THE EXTERNAL EVIDENCE
25 in the first tow chapters i have shown:
1. that there is no scientific or philosophic reason which forbids us to believe in miracles.
2. that there exists unimpeachable evidence for certain modern miracles.
it is important to establish the reality of modern miracles, before discussing the evidence for the Resurrection, because the principal obstacle to the universal acceptance of the Res is not any defect in the evidence, but the unconscious or conscious acceptance of a negative dogma; the dogma that miracles do not happen. if there were several cases, universally admitted, of men rising from the dead, no historian would hesitate for one moment to believe that Jesus Christ rose form the dead. and for my part i am prepared to concede that if the Res were the only case of a miracle in all history, i might be tempted to return a verdict of 'non proven'.
our next task is to examine the documents which record the Res. our approach to the problems of authorship and dates must be determined by the exacting standards of scientific history. it is, of course, vain to demand a scientific approach to these problems from those who are determined to reject all facts which conflict with their preconceived dogmas. the pietists of secularism who accept with uncritical faith the basic dogma of their cult, the impossibility of miracles, examine the gospels mot to discover when and by whom they were written but to prove a particular thesis. miracles do not occur and therefore any account of a miracle which purports to be by an eye witness must be a later interpolation. of the 19th century critics who adopted this criterion d.f. strauss (1808-74)) was the most notorious. his Life of Jesus for the German People, was published in 1864. that there was nothing supernatural either in the person or in the work of Jesus was the basic principle which S accepted with uncritical faith, 'believing where we cannot prove'...
S began life as a lutheran pastor and his negative faith in the impossibility of miracles was a form of lutheranism, 'justification by faith' rather than justification by argument. S, indeed, was one of the founders of neo Lutheranism.
26 let us begin our study of the new testament with the admitted facts which even S does not dispute. 'it is certain, writes S, that, towards the end of the second century, the same four Gospels which we still possess were recognised by the Church, and repeatedly quoted as the writings of those apostles and of those disciples of the apostles, whose names they bear, by the three most eminent ecclesiastical teachers-Irenaeus in gal, Clement in alexandria and Tertullian in carthage.
Irenaeus, who was bishop of lyons about the year 180 is at great pains to explain why there are exactly four gospels, no more and no less. the church extends throughout the whole world and the world has four quarters. the gospel is the divine breath or wind of life and there are four winds and therefore four gospels. there is a great deal more to the same effect, by Irenaeus' conviction that the fourfold character of the Gospels was divinely arranged is only of interest to us as decisive evidence for the fact that the pre-eminence of the four Evangelists had been long established when Irenaeus began to write. Strauss himself admits that the...(peculiar argument) with which Irenaeus proves the divine necessity for the fourfold character of the Gospel. is evidence of the...(outstanding credit) which these four gospels enjoyed in his day. 'it is plain, writes dr. salmon, that the evidence of I , even if we had no other, takes us back a long way behind his own time. gooks newly come into existence in his time could not have been venerated as he venerated the gospels...we may fairly conclude that the time of their appearance was beyond then living memory'.
27 in his youth i had know polycarp, bishop of smyrna. 'i can recall, he writes in the epistle to florinus, 'the very place where P used to sit and teach, his manner of speech, his mode of life, his appearance, style of his address to the people, his frequent references to St. john and to others who had seen our Lord, his miracles, and His teaching; and how, being instructed himself by those who were eye witnesses of the life of the word, there was in all he said a strict agreement with the scriptures.
there are critics who affect to believe that st. John's gospel was written somewhere about 150, but if this were so what would have been Irenaeus' reaction to patent a forgery? 'no, no! he would have exclaimed, 'this cannot be the work of st. john, for that J written a Gospel, my beloved master Polycarp, his disciple, must have known of that gospel. P used to repeat from memory the discourses which he had from J and could not possibly have been silent about a gospel which would have been J's most precious legacy to the church.
28 Polycarp died a martyr's death at the age of 86 and in the year 155. had the fourth gospel made its first appearance in 150, P would have rejected it with contempt as an obvious forgery. Irenaeus' unquestioning acceptance of the fourth gospel as the work of J is only plausible on the assumption that J's disciple P had never questioned the joannine authorship of the fourth gospel.
within the limits of my space i can only mention the more important of the many second century writers who refer to, or who quote from the four gospels, such as justin martyr, whose 'apology', written about 150 and addressed to the heathen, contains a summary of the life of our Lord and is full of doctrinal and verbal agreements with J. justin tells his heath readers that he is quoting from the 'memories' of our lord, known as gospels-which were composed by the apostles and by those who followed them. he does not, it is true, mention the names of the authors, but then the heathen whom he was addressing would not be interested in suc details.
Tatian, who was justin's pupil, wrote a harmony of the four gospels which he called 'diatessaron'. the earliest extant mention of the names of matthew and mark as recognised authors of gospels is to be found in some fragments of papias, bishop of hierapolis early in the second century. it is papias who is our authority for the fact that mark was the interpreter of peter and 'wrote down accurately all that he remembered of the things which were either said or done by Christ.
papias also tells us that matthew 'wrote the oracles in hebrew and each one interpreted them as he could.
29 the positive arguments for christianity are more than sufficient to support the christian conclusion, but it is only when we consider rival theories that the full strength of our case emerges and for this reason the christian apologist should never be content merely to answer the objections of the sceptic, he should challenge the sceptic to defend his solution. we believe, for instance, that J wrote the fourth gospel not only because the evidence for his authorship is very strong, but also because no sceptic has ever succeeded in producing a plausible theory to account for the acceptance by the second century church of a second century forgery bearing J's name.
the trouble with most sceptics is that they are defective in historical imagination. they approach the problem of the gospels as if the solution could be found by juggling with texts. they never visualise the conditions under which the gospels were written and distributed. they never emerge from the vally of the dry bones and the dry bones of their arguments are never clothed with flesh and blood. they fiddle about with texts, rejecting this passage or that as an 'interpolation'. but never envisage the 'interpolator' as a human being or produce a plausible theory to account for the success of the 'interpolator' in imposing his forgery on the faithful.
you cannot coerce belief. lunacy, as chesterton points out, had its own water tight logic. the fact that a man is in a lunatic asylum does not disprove his thesis that he is the king of england, for if he were the king of england the usurper might be tempted to immure him in a lunatic asylum. his explanation fits some facts as well as yours, but it fits far fewer facts.
30 similarly, the faddist who objects that the 'Matthew' and 'Mark' mentioned by papias are not necessarily the same works as the gospels which we now attribute to those apostles, is as proof against probabilities as the lunatic. his position is as impregnable to direct assault as would be that of a critic who maintained that the works of virgil and horace, referred to by juvenal-who tells us that these works were in the hands of the schoolboys of his time-were not the works which we now ascribe to those authors. and yet, as salmon justly says, it would be infinitely easier to alter secular works in private circulation than to effect revolutionary changes in sacred books read sunday by sunday in the churches. we are asked to believe not only that the old gospels which papias ascribed to matthew and mark disappeared without trace, but also that no biship, presbyter or layman observed that new gospels had been substituted in their place. it would be easier to believe that soviet russia could have substituted the new national anthem for the old International without a single russian being aware of the change.
the theory of new gospels substituted for old is not only inherently improbable, but is not supported by a shred of evidence. we know from eusebius that there was controversy in his time, the first half of the fourth century, about the epistle to the hebrews and the epistle to the corinthians, but eusebius never discusses the authorship of the four gospels, for the good reason that he had never heard the traditional authorship challenged. the absence of any tradition as to the manner of the first publication of the gospels is in itself proof of their antiquity, but more impressive-at least to those who see this problem in terms of human beings rather than of manuscripts-is the fact that the missionary activities of the early church would have been impossible without some authorised record of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. we know from justin martyr's account of the sunday meetings of christians that the reading of the story of Jesus Christ was an established tradition at the weekly meetings of the christians. so long as a church was presided over by apostles, their personal recollections would suffice, but the first requirement of the elders ordained by the apostles to preside over the churches entrusted to their care was a written and authoritative record of our Lord's life and teaching.
31 but once we admit the necessity for gospels in the primitive church, we have gone a long way to prove that the gospels which we now possess are the gospels which were in use in the early years of the church, for it is impossible to produce a plausible explanation for any substantial alteration of or addition to these gospels. nobody has explained how a forger could have obtained credence for a forgery. theophilus of antioch, writing about 180, says: 'writers ought either to have been eye witnesses themselves of the things they assert or at least have accurately learned them from those who had seen them. 'the feeling here expressed is so natural, writes salmon, that i cannot believe that those who were in possession of narratives, supposed to have been written by men of such rank in the church as matthew, mark and luke, could allow them to be altered by inferior authority. little do those who suppose such as alteration possible know of the conservatism of christian hearers. St Augustine, in a well known story, tells us that, when a bishop, reading the chapter about jonah's gourd, ventured to substitute st. Jerome's 'hedera' for the established 'cucurbita', such a tumult was raised, that if the bishop had persevered he would have been left without a congregation. the feeling that resents such a change is due to no later growth of christian opinion. try the experiment on any child of your acquaintance. tell him a story that interests him and when next you meet him tell him the story again, making variations in your recital and see whether he will not detect the change and be indignant at it. i do not believe, in short, that any church would permit a change to be made in the form of evangelical instruction in which its members had been catechetically trained unless those who made the change were men of authority equal to their first instructors...if a bishop of the age of papias had presumed to innovate on the gospel as it had been delivered by those 'which from the beginning were eye witnesses and ministers of the word'. i venture to say that, like the bishop of whom st. augustine tells, he would have been left without a congregation.
32 the sceptic begins his study of the gospels by making as act of faith in the impossibility of the supernatural. his verdict on the authorship and dates is an unscientific deduction from an unproved and false premise. the christian conclusion is, on the other hand, a scientific induction from the facts. the sceptic begins with dogma, the dogma that miracles do no occur and adjust the facts to that dogma. the christian begins with the facts and ends with the dogmas which are alone consistent with and imposed by the facts. the sceptic begins with a prejudgment that miracles co not occur. the christian ends with the post judgment that miracles have been proved to occur. the conflict between the christian and the sceptic is a conflict between post-judice and prejudice.
if it were not for the unscientific prejudice against miracles, nobody would wast time attempting to disprove that the gospels were written by the apostles and disciples of the apostles whose names they bear. 'if we were to apply, writes salmon, to the remains of classical literature the same rigour of scrutiny that is used towards the new testament, there are but few of them that could stand the test.
33...that the gospels were written in the fourth century is a popular error due to a confusion between date of authorship and date of the earliest complete manuscripts.
in the early centuries of our era manuscripts were still, for the most part, written on papyrus, a frail material compared to vellum which began to take the place of papyrus in the third century
34 fragments of papyrus have been recovered from the dry egyptian soil, many areas of which are virtually rainless, but hardly a contemporary papyrus survives from greece, italy, gaul or spain. there are many other reasons why the earlier papyrus gospels should have disappeared. a special effort was made by the persecutors of the church to search fo these manuscripts and to destroy them. the christians themselves, in so far as they were influenced by the expectation of an immediate second coming, would have made no special efforts to preserve them for the benefit of posterity. and even in more modern times the guardians of priceless manuscripts have often been incredibnly careless trustees. thus we owe the preservation of the famous codex sinaiticus of the new testament to pure chance. a german professor, tischendorf by name, discovered 43 leaves of an ancient manuscript in a basket full of paper intended for the stove to which the monks of mount sinai consigned their debris. T obtained these for the asking and secured the res of the codex some years later.
the case for tradition has been immensely reinforced in recent years by the discovery of the chester beatty biblical papyri in 1930. the papyri found in a coptic graveyard, enclosed in one or more jars, near the nile, include fragments of the gospels, written in a small hand which palaeographers assign to the first half of the third century. more recently a small fragment of a papyrus codex containing parts of john 18.31-3,37-8, were discovered by c.h.roberts among the papyri in the john rylands library at manchester. palaeographers assign this fragment to the first half of the second century, a conclusive proof of the early date of the fourth gospel, a gospel which, as we shall see, has been the object of sustained attack. sir frederic kenyon of the british museum sums up the result of these discoveries in his book The Story of the Bible. 'it will now be realized, he writes, what an epoch making addition to our knowledge of the history of the bible has been made by this discovery. instead of our evidence for the text of the greek bible beginning with the fourth century, we now have several witnesses from the third century and one even form the beginning of the second...
35 'for all the works of classical antiquity we have to depend on manuscripts written long after their original composition. the author who is in the best case in this respect is virgil, yet the earliest manuscript of virgil that we now possess was written some 350 years after his death. for all other classical writers, the interval between the date of the author and the earliest extant manuscript of his works is much greater. for livy it is about 500 years, for horace 900, for most of plato 1300, for euripides 1600. on the other hand the great vellum uncials of the new testament were written perhaps some 250 years after the date when the gospels were actually composed, while we now have papyrus manuscripts which reduce the interval by a hundred years. and while the manuscripts of any classical author amount at most to a few score, and in some cases only to a few units, the manuscripts of the bible are reckoned by thousands'.
the case for the traditional authorship and dates of the four gospels is indeed so overwhelmingly strong that there would be little scope for controversy but for the fact that the gospels record miracles.
had the rylands fragment been discovered a century ago we should have been spared libraries of books, all of which can now be relegated to the limbo of exploded theories...
CHAPTER 4 - THE GOSPELS, THE INTERNAL EVIDENCE
37 no responsible critic maintains that the gospels are the work of eye witnesses who deliberately set down what they knew to be untrue. those who reject the miraculous element in the gospels either maintain that the gospels were written by eye witnesses who mistook for miracles phenomena which were capable of a natural explanation, or that the gospels were written many years after the events which they described by men who were not eyewitnesses of those events. paulus (1761-1851) adopted the former hypothesis in his Life of Christ, published in 1828. there was nothing, he insists, miraculous about the feeding of the five thousand. a lot of greedy people had concealed their own stores of food but were shamed into sharing them with their hungry neighbours when Christ and the apostles began to distribute their own scanty supplies. again our Lord seemed to walk on the water, but this was an optical illusion for, in fact he was walking on the bank.
strauss was too intelligent to be impressed by such puerilities. 'if the gospels, he writes, are genuine historical sources, it is impossible to eliminate the miraculous from the life of Jesus. and consequently s maintained that the gospels were legendary accounts put together many years after the events they purported to describe.
if the gospels are mainly fictitious, with a small substratum of fact overlaid by legend, it is difficult to explain
38 the success of the evangelists in creating a character who lives as no character in fiction lives. it is only the greatest of dramatists and novelists who can create such characters of odysseus, dido, hamlet and don quixote with a universal appeal transcending the limitations of the author's age and of the author's nation, but no character, in ancient or in modern literature, has the same timeless universal appeal as Jesus. it is strange that creative genius such as this should have left no other mark in the literature of the age. why, for instance, are the parables, if the parables are fictitious, unique? why was the knack of inventing such discourses confined to this small group of writers? renan, who rejects as unreliable the gospel record or what our Lord did, accepts as trustworthy the report of what our Lord said. he speaks of the 'naturalness, the ineffable truth, the matchless charm of the synoptic discourses; their profound hebrew turn; the analogies they present to the saying of the jewish doctors of the same time; their perfect harmony with the scenery of galilee...a kind of brilliance, a divine force, underlines these words, if i may say so,. detaches them from the context and enables the critic easily to recognise them. the true words of Jesus, so to say, reveal themselves. when they are touched in this chaos of traditions of unequal authenticity we feel them vibrate'
now if these discourses had been invented, similar discourses could have been invented. 'actually, it is,as salmon remarks, a little surprising that the men who were so deeply impressed by our lord's teaching and who so fully imbibed the spirit of it, should never have attempted to imitate its form. in point of style we travel into a new country when we pass from the synoptic gospels and to the apostolic epistles...among early uninspired christian writers there were several imitators of the apostolic epistles, but only one, hermas, who attempted to imitate the parables and that with such poor success that we need the less wonder that others did not try the experiment.
not enough has been made of the fantastic contrast between the new testament and the apocryphal new testament. if is a pity that the anti miraculists who assert that this or that gospel was forged in the second century, are not confronted more frequently with the second century forgeries purporting to be the work of the apostles. 'among the prayers and the discourses of the apostles, writes dr. montague james in his preface to The Apocryphal New Testament, in the spurious Acts some utterances may be found which are remarkable and even beautiful...but the authors do not speak with the voices of paul or of john, or with the quiet simplicity of the first three gospels. it is not unfair to say that when they attempt the former tone they are theatrical and when they essay the latter they are jejune.
the contrast between the discourses of our lord which we know to have been invented and the discourses recorded in the gospels compels even anti miraculists like renan to accept the latter as genuine records of what our Lord said.
now records of conversation which carry conviction are not very common. johnson's table talk survives because boswell kept a careful and contemporary record of what johnson said. Goethe's table talk has been preserved because eckermann was boswellian in his methods. i can speak from personal experience on the contrast between conversation recorded at the time and conversation recorded in later years. when i was a boy i was puzzled by the contrast between the conversation of boys as recorded in school stories and the actual conversation of my
40 friends. i came to the conclusion that these school stories were written by adults who had forgotten how they themselvestalked as boys and i decided to keep a careful record of the conversation of my contemporaries as the basis for a school story which i proposed to write when i had left school. an american author, mr. edward mack, in a two volume study of the public school system ...has described my book The Harrovians as 'the inauguration of a new type of fiction', but the book owed such merits as it possessed to the efforts i made as a boy to record conversation within a few hours of the conversation taking place. in a more recent book i tried to give some impression of the table talk of a most brilliant conversationalist but, because i had taken no notes at the time, i could only remember a few bon mots, and my attempt ended in failure.
all those who, like renan and many of the anti miraculists, accept as genuine the record of our Lord's discourses and reject as spurious the record of his miracles are committed to the unlikely hypothesis that the apostles were surprisingly accurate as ear witnesses and hopelessly inaccurate as eye witnesses, but this is contrary to all human experience, for reports of what was seen are almost invariably more accurate than reports of what was said. accurate ear witnesses are far less common than accurate eye witnesses. if we maintain that the evangelists should be believed when they report what our Lord said we are compelled to accept one of the following three hypothesis.
1. that one of more of the apostles wrote down the discourses of our lord at the time they were delivered or shortly afterwards.
2. that the evangelists were aided by supernatural inspiration.
3. that the discourses were invented by the evangelists.;
41 the first and second of these hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, but the second (supernatural inspiration) is not admissible at this stage of our inquiry, for the documents on which we base our belief in the resurrection must be examined and must be proved to be reliable by the exacting standards of scientific history before we can even begin to speculate on the possibility of inspiration.
if we reject the first two hypothesis and defend the only remaining possibility, that the gospels are works of fiction, there is no reason why the gospel of matthew should be more convincing that the admittedly fictitious gospel of pseudo matthew, and, on this hypothesis it is difficult to explain the contrast between the saying of Jesus as recorded by st. matthew and the sayings of Jesus as recorded by the pseudo matthew. let us test this theory by comparing the following passage from matthew:
'consider the lilies of the field how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet i say unto you, solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven shall he not much more clothe you, o ye of little faith'.
with the following passage from pseudo matthew:
'Jesus went to school a second time. 'say alpha'. Jesus 'tell thou me first what beta is, and I will tell thee what alpha is'. the master smote him and died'.
Jesus (to his parents): 'what you say is well enough for ordinary people. I have no earthly father. when i am lifted up from earth I will make all mention of your descent to cease. I know when you were born and how long you have to live'. all cried out in wonder. 'we have never heard the like'. Jesus: 'does this surprise you? I will tell you more. I have seen abraham'.
even more striking is the contrast between the miracles of the gospels and the miracles described by this pseudo matthew.
42 'when Jesus was in galilee at the beginning of His fourth year He was playing by the jordan and made seven pools. a boy spoiled them and was struck dead. the parents complained. joseph asked mary to admonish Jesus she begged him no to do such things and He, not willing to grieve her, smote the back side of the dead boy with his foot and bade him rise, which he did and Jesus went on with his pools. Jesus took clay from the pools and made 12 sparrows on the sabbath. a jew saw it and spoke to joseph, who spoke to Jesus. Jesus clapped His hands and bade the sparrows fly away. all marvelled, and some went and told the chief priests and pharisees. the son of annas broke up the pools with a stick and Jesus with a word withered him up'.
the Jesus of pseudo matthew is a mere magician. the vulgar marvels which He performs are unredeemed by beauty, have no relevance to character and no organic relationship to environment. they are nothing more than crude manifestations of vindictive and arrogant power, but in the gospels the miraculous element is interwoven into the very texture of human stories which carry complete conviction. 'Christ's miracles', as bishop gore remarks, were incidental ans issued from a pity that knew that it had power to heal men's sickness and to supply their physical needs, and could not refrain from using it'. and again and again these miracles give occasion for sayings and gestures of Christ which bear the hallmark of authenticity.
whereas neither the Jesus of the apocryphal gospels nor the minor characters ever come to life, least of all in the miracle scenes, the characterisation in the gospel miracles is masterly...
49 'Gospel' means good news and it was to propagate the good news of God that the gospels were written. it is the paradox of the gospels that the loveliness which is the note of all great art was the unintended by product of the work of men who were only interested in propaganda.
if, however, we are to judge the gospels by the criterion of fiction we have to account for the curious fact that work which in many unpractised writers invariably observe. the infallibility of the author is a basic convention of imaginative fiction. loose ends and and unsolved conundrums are intolerable in a novel. the evangelists, on the other hand, leave many things which perplex us unexplained because they themselves did not know the explanation. indeed, they are so preoccupied with the central theme that they sometimes provide no clues even to mysteries to which they knew the answer. mark for instance describes the young man who followed, as Christ was being led away from the garden of gethsemane: 'and a certain young man followed Him, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and they laid hold on him. but he, casting off the linen cloth, fled from them naked'....
50 the gospels are full of gaps which a fiction writer would have filled in. the story of the woman taken in adultery would be one of the most perfect short stories in fiction but for one striking omission. tolstoy, had he been capable of writing such a story and of inventing that sublime touch, Jesus stooping down and writing of the ground, as though He heard them not, could never have resisted telling us what Jesus wrote...
CHAPTER 5 - THE VINDICATION OF ST. LUKE
53 (william) ramsay in his famous book The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament tells us that he began to prepare for his life work by reading every available book describing journeys in asia minor, among others, the acts of the apostles. 'i began to do so without expecting any information of value regarding the condition of asia minor at the time when paul was living. i had read a good deal of modern criticism about the book and dutifully accepted the current opinion that it was written during the second half of the second century by an author who wished to influence the minds of people in his own time by a highly wrought and imaginative description of the early church. his object was not to present a trustworthy picture of facts in the period about a.d. 50, but to produce a certain effect on his own time by setting forth a carefully coloured account of events and persons of that older period. he wrote for his contemporaries, not for truth'. the first change of judgment was provoked by a point of geography. critics were unanimous in stating that luke had blundered badly by writing as if iconium was not in lycaonia. R's discoveries in asia minor confirmed in every detail the accuracy of the lukan geography. moreover he proved that where luke differed from his modern critics in intricate details of local government in the roman empire, luke was invariably right and his critics invariably wrong.
at thessalonica, for instance. the magistrates are called politarchs. now there is no ancient author who uses this name in connection with thessalonica and consequently luke's use of the word was cited by 54 hostile critics as an example of his inaccuracy. his critics were unaware that an old arch at the modern salonika bore an inscription that it had been raised by 7 politarchs. once again modern discovery had vindicated the ancient author against modern critics. again, luke's description of the ruler at cyprus as proconsul was once denounced as a mistake and is now admitted to be accurate. herod agrippa I, shortly before his death is described as king; we now know that he held this title for the last 3 years of his government, though there had been no king in judaea for the previous 30 years, nor for many centuries afterwards. equally correct is the title of governor or procurator applied to both felix and festus.
'that the Acts contained and described a series of improbable incidents was a view that has not been tenable or possible since 1890 except through total disregard of recent advance in knowledge. it had by that time become evident that every incident described in the acts is just what might be expected in ancient surroundings. the officials with whom paul and his companions were brought in contact are those who would be there. every person is found just where he ought to be: proconsuls in senatorial provinces, asiarchs in ephesus, strategoi in philippi, politarchs in thessalonica, magicians and soothsayers everywhere. the difficulties which the apostles encountered were such as they must inevitably meet in ancient society. the magistrates take action agains them in a strictly managed roman colony like pisidian antioch or philippi, where legality and order reigned; riotous crowds try to take the law into their own hands in the less strictly governed hellenistic or hellenic cities like iconium and ephesus and thessalonica. lystra is an exceptional case; but in lystra the roman element was weak from the beginning
55 and quickly melted into the older population. yet how differently does the catastrophe proceed in antioch and in philippi or in iconium and Thessalonica and ephesus. the variety is endless, as real life is infinitely varied. a work composed in late time for hortatory purposes would have no such variety and no such local truth.
'legal proceedings are taken against paul and his friends in many places and accusations have to be made in each case according to the forms of the roman law. the accusation varies in each case; it is nowhere the same as in any other city; yet it is everywhere in accordance with roman forms'.
'there is one delicacy of terminology-so delicate that it has never been sufficiently noted-which characterises the language of Acts. we are too apt to think and speak of the population in all those anatolian cities as hellenes, when we desire to speak accurately; but that is really inaccurate. there was a certain generic character in the population of those cities, if we set aside the italians, ie. roman citizens; but in a roman colony this native population was the plebs (ochlos), while in a hellenistic city like iconium it was called the hellenes. luke is right in this: he used the term 'multitude' (ochlos) at antioch and lystra, but hellenes at iconium'.
'further study of acts, 13-21, showed that the book could bear the most minute scrutiny as an authority for the facts of the aegean world and that it was written with such judgement, skill, art and perception of truth as to be a model of historical statement. it is marvellously concise and yet marvellously lucid...
'the more i have studied the narrative of the Acts and the more i have learned year after year about graeco-roman society and thoughts and fashions and organisation
56 in those provinces, the more i admire and the better i understand. i set out to look for truth on the borderland where greece and asia meet and found it here. you may press the words of luke in a degree far beyond any other historian's and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment'.
R, as we have seen, began his work strongly prejudiced against the Acts. as he remarks in his book St. Paul, The Traveller and the Roman Citizen: 'the ingenuity and apparent completeness of the tubingen theor had at one time completely convinced me' but long before he had completed his researched he came to the conclusion that the Acts is one of the most reliable of authorities for the state of the roman empire in the first century and that he was fully justified in 'placing the author of Acts among the historians of the first rank'.
long before R began his researches, critics of all schools had recognised that the so called 'we sections, that is the section in which luke writes in the first person plural, were almost certainly the works of eye witnesses. thus dr. s. davidson, the author of a well known Introduction to the New Testament, in which the anti miraculist position is adopted, writes of these 'we' sections that they are 'chracterised by a circumstantiality of detail, a vividness of description, an exact knowledge of localities, an acquaintance with the phrases and habits of seamen, which betray one who was personally present'.
a scientific critic would begin by comparing the 'we' sections with the rest of the Acts. if he could find no stylistic differences between the 'we' sections and the rest he would accept, if only as a working hypothesis, the fact that the Acts was the work of a single author. the anti miraculist is more concerned to prove his basic doma than to discover the truth. he stars from the assumption that
57 as much as possible of the new testament has to be proved to be spurious and that as little as possible must be conceded to be the work of eye witnesses. if forced to concede the genuineness of eye witness authorship of any part of the new testament he abandons just so much of his theory as he can no longer defend and clings with even greater tenacity to the rest.
the anti miraculist seems to assume that he is dispensed form the obligations binding on all other historians, the obligation to support his arguments with proof...
58 in his book The Medical Language of St. Luke, dr. hobart has proved the perfect unity of authorship throughout the whole of the third gospel and the Acts. such slight differences between one part of the lukan writings and another are, as Ramsay remarks, 'a mere trifle in comparison with the complete identity in language, vocabulary, intentions, interests and method of narration' (Luke the Physician, p7).
the anti miraculist davidson concedes that these linguistic resemblances are very striking and, with the tenacity of the anti miraculist, falls back on a new hypothesis. 'it is clear that the writer of the book was not a mere compiler but an author', an author who worked up his material into a homogeneous whole. but this theory rises new difficulties, for if we are expected to accept the hypothesis of a second century compiler who worked his heterogeneous materials into an artistic unity with consummate skill we may ask why the join ups between the 'we' sections and the rest of the Acts are so inartistic....
59...the determination of anti miraculists to assign as late a date as possible to the Acts is mainly inspired by the anxiety to discredit the third gospel, for the great majority of anti miraculists concede that the author of st. luke and the author (or compiler) of the Acts are one and the same person. 'one need not, wrote renan, waste time proving a proposition which has never been seriously contested'. if then we can show that the Acts was written by a close travelling companion of st. paul's, it follows that the third gospel must also be the work of somebody in close contact with eye witnesses of the events described, and if this be admitted it is very difficult, or even as strauss maintained, 'impossible to eliminate the miraculous from the life of Jesus'.
it was, therefore, vital to the position of the anti miraculists to refute R's vindication of luke as a historian. a distinguished reviewer of R's St.Paul the Traveler,
60 ended his review with the words, 'if luke is a great historian, what would the author of this book make of luke 2.1-3? nothing more was needed, for this brief question was deemed sufficient.
monsignor knox's translation of these verses is as follows: 'it happened that a decree went out at this time from the emperor augustus, enjoining that the whole world should be registered. (footnote; 'registered. the douai has 'enrolled'. both knox and the douai are more accurate than the 'taxed' of the A.V.) this register was the one first made during the time when cyrinus (foot. 'cyrenius, AV) was governor of syria. all must go and give in their names each in their own city.
st. luke in this chapter makes 5 statements, all of which were rejected by the anti miraculist critics as demonstrably false, all of which have been since proved to be true. these statements are:
1. that cyrinus was governor when joseph was alleged to have gone to bethlehem, for the date of this journey must have been, according to st. luke, before herod died and cyrinus, according to the critics, was never governor a syria during herod's lifetime.
2. that augustus issued a decree ordering a census.
3. that there was a regular system of census under the empire.
4. that the head of the household had to return to his original home to be registered.
5. that the head of the household had to be accompanied by his wife.
on all these points luke has been proved to be right and his critics wrong. his vindiction is partly the result of recent discoveries in egypt of census papers which had been preserved in the dry soil and partly the result of
61 R's explorations in asia minor. 'in every case, writes R, that has been sufficiently tested, luke has been proved to state, not merely correctly in a superficial and external fashion, but correctly with insight and fine historic sense, the facts of history and of roman organisation in municipal and provincial and imperial government. such progress as the present writer has been enabled to make in discovery is largely due to the early appreciation of the fact that luke is a sage guide...nowhere is the whole range of historical study has there ever been such a complete revolution of opinion'.
and what, you may ask, was the effect on the antimiraculist? wilcken who collaborated with mitteis in a study of the papyri found in egypt (Papyruskunde) is a stubborn anti miraculist and therefore constrained to reconcile the now admitted accuracy of luke on these contested points, with his determination to believe that the story of the nativity was unadulterated legend....'accordingly, he writes, joseph and mary in the legend of luke must both go to bethlehem.' it is, however, as R drily remarks, 'contrary to every canon of historical criticism that the story should be set aside as a legend because all the details in it are true...luke's narrative used to be called a legend, because if was historically false. now it is called by wilcken a legend because every detail has been demonstrated to be exactly correct. there is no way of satisfying those people who have made up their minds. whatever proof they advance for their opinion is shattered; but they pluck victory of the jaws of defeat and in the disproof of their former argument they find a new one. one thing alone they reckon
CHAPTER 6 -THE FOURTH GOSPEL
63 the determination with which the fourth gospel has been attacked is principally due to the difficulty of reconciling the traditional authorship with the denial of the deity of our Lord and for this reason unitarians, open and camouflaged, have been as anxious as avowed atheists to discredit this gospel. in point of fact, as we shall see. the proclamation of our Lord's deity is uncompromising in all four gospels, and the fourth gospel presents no more exalted conception of our Lord's dignity than the synoptics. it is only because the proportion of such passages is greater in the fourth gospel than in the synoptics that a special effort has been made to prove that this gospel was not written by a disciple of our Lord.
64 it is difficult to believe that either polycarp or irenaeus could have failed to protest against the sudden appearance of a gospel ascribed to st. john unless that gospel had been ascribed to john from the date of its first publication to the church. 'if the fourth gospel be a forgery it has had, as salmon remarked, the most wonderful success ever forgery had; at once received not only by the orthodox, but by the most discordant heretics-by judaising christians, gnostics, mystics-all of whom owned the necessity of reconciling their speculations with the sayings of this gospel.
eusebius has preserved for us a passage from clement of alexandria, born in the middle of the second century, in which clement explains the special purpose with which the fourth gospel was written: 'last of all, john, perceiving that the bodily (or external) facts had been set forth in the other gospels, at the instance of his disciples and with the inspiration of the Spirit composed a spiritual gospel'. it is therefore not surprising that john omitted much that the synoptics relate. there was no need to re-tell everything which they had told. john's purpose was
65 not to write a complete biography but rather to expound the doctrine of the incarnation.
now, though john nowhere contradicts the synoptics there are many apparent discrepancies which are difficult to resolve, discrepancies which a forger, writing with the synoptics before him, would certainly have removed. it is a pure illusion to suppose that the second century was an uncritical age. the contempt with which the Fathers of that age spoke of the apocryphal gospels is some indication of the difficulty which would have been encountered by a forger seeking to impose a spurious gospel on the church. dr. j.p.arendzen in his valuable book The Gospels, Fact, History or Legend? gives many instances (pages 85-7) of the quickness of second century christians to detect and to denounce spurious writings. 'when bishop serapion of antioch', writes dr. arendzen, on his visit in the parish of rhossos found a christian reading, the so called gospel of peter, it was not long before he fulminated against it. the gnostic Acts of John, written about s.d. 106, were set aside and yet we are asked to believe that at the beginning of the same century a whole christian community was taken in by a gospel purporting to come from the son of zebedee'. ...
there is nothing in the gospel which contradicts and there is very little which does not support the traditional view that the gospel was written by john in extreme
66 old age, towards the very end of the first century. it was, for instance, in the second century that the sea of galilee came to be known as the sea of tiberius, and the way in which john introduces the name as ('the sea of galilee, which is that of tiberias'-4.1) would seem, writes dr. sanday, to point exactly to the period of transition from the one form to the other.
if the gospel had been written by a second century christia, we must credit the forger with an intimate knowledge, not only of the scenery of palestine, but also of the outlook and prejudices of a jewish contemporary of our Lord's....
further the writer is familiar with the external aspect of the Temple, a heap of ruins in the second century and also with its history. ' the jews then said, six and forty years was this temple in building'. according to josephus the building of the temple was begun about 20-19 bc, 40 years from bc 19 brings us to a.d 27 which is in full accord with the chronology of our Lord's life.
66 the messianic idea', writes salmon, that pervades the gospel is not that which prevailed after the gnostic heresies arose, but that which existed before jerusalem was destroyed, when the jews still expected the messiah to be a deliverer who should extablish a temporal sovereignty and make the jews the rulers of the surrounding nations... john represents the prudent jewish rulers as resolved to put down the prophesying of Jesus, because they feared that the political consequences of His assertion of His kingdom would be an unsuccessful revolt against foreign rule, the result of which would be that the romans would come and take away their place and nation...remember that the state of jewish feeling which i have described was quelled by the destruction of jerusalem and judge whether it is portable that a writer of the next century would have been able to throw himself into the midst of these hopes and feelings and to reproduce them as if they were part of the atmosphere which he had himself breathed'. on the other hand john reveals no knowledge of the controversies raised by the gnostic heresies which broke out early in the second century.
67 three times in the course of the fourth gospel the author claims to write as an eyewitness and again and again the writer seems specially concerned to record the reactions of the disciples to the events which he describes...
many passages impress me with the conviction that i am reading the evidence of an eyewitness, as for instance, the story of the woman taken in adultery and the effect produced of john by the empty sepulchre, but perhaps the
68 passage above all others, in which the accents of the disciple 'whom Jesus loved' are most unmistakable, is the conclusion of the last chapter of the fourth gospel. peter, to whom our Lord had foretold the death 'by which he was to glorify God', 'turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved...seeing him, peter asked Jesus: and what of this man, Lord? Jesus said to him: if it is my will that he should wait till i come, what is that to thee? do thou follow Me. that was why the story went round among the brethren that this disciple was not to die'....
we must indeed credit our hypothetical forger of the second century with consummate skill, if indeed this convincing picture is the invention of a later writer. dr. james drummond's book Character and authorship of the Fourth Gospel (1905), which appeared shortly after the turn of the century, was all the more valuable as an index of the reaction in favour of the traditional authorship because dr. drummond's bias was certainly not in favour of tradition. one gets the impression that his concessions in favour of the trustworthiness of the gospel are made without enthusiasm. dr. drummond draws attention to the fact that the author of the fourth gospel often 'specifies particular days, for no apparent reason except that he remembered them and sometimes even mentions the hour. he often names the disciple who was the speaker, even
69 when the remark is not of consequence'. moreover, the writer frequently connects an incident with a particular place for no discoverable reason other than the fact itself. this precision of detail is admitted by wrede, a hostile critic and a convinced anti miraculist, to be a 'trump-card' in the hands of the defenders of the gospel. dr. drummond is well aware that the only alternative to the belief that the fourth gospel was written by an eye witness is the theory that it was written by a genius.
'it is sometimes said, he writes, that to produce an untrue narrative possessing such verisimilitude as the gospel, would have been quite beyond the capacity of any writer of the second century, such an author would be without example, such a work would be a literary miracle'.
70 ...adolf deissman, professor of theology at berlin, like harnack, a liberal protestant with anti miraculist leanings, stated in 1929, that he was convinced that the fourth gospel was 'the work of a personal disciple of Jesus who later came under the predominant influence of the pauline Christ-mysticism and pauline-Christ cult'. in the last decade of the nineteenth century, harnack, at one time a leader of the most radical school of biblical criticism, created a sensation by informing the astonishsed world of german scholarship in the famous preface to his Chronologie der alt-christlichen Literature that the oldest literature of the church could be relied on for most of its details, and that in the whole new testament there was only one writing, the traditional authorship of which could be denied with confidence, the so-called second epistle of peter. he summed up the result of the labours of 20 years (1876-96) as constituting an unmistakable 'return to tradition'. the recent discoveries, referred to in a previous chapter and in particular the papyrus fragment of the fourth gospel dating back to the beginning of the second century, have, of course, accelerated this 'return to tradition'. but though the majority of modern anti miraculists would be prepared to concede that the author of the fourth gospel was an eyewitness whose name was john, the unpleasantness of
71 conceding so much to the traditionalists is mitigated by their refusal to admit that the author of the fourth gospel was john the son of zebedee. in an abridged quotation, which is to be found in a seventh century epitome of the fifth century history of philip of Sid, papias refers to john and also in the same passage to john the elder. it is by no means clear whether papias really means to speak of two johns, or whether he has failed by slovenliness of composition to make it clear that he is merely naming john twice over, but this shadowy figure of papias, john the elder, has been credited with the authorship of the fourth gospel. we are bidden to believe that it was john the elder who leaned on our lord's bosom at the last supper and who is described in the fourth gospel as the beloved disciple. the only fact in support of this theory, is an alleged statement by papias that both the sons of zebedee were slain by the jews, for which there is no independent evidence whatever and which is at variance with the unquestioned tradition of the early christians that john had died a natural death.
CHAPTER 7 - THE CLAIM
73 'christianity and 'divinity' are words, the sharp edges of which have been blunted by the erosion of unbelief. a hundred years ago men who accepted the first article of the Nicene Creed (' I believe in one God'), but who denied the deity of our Lord described themselves correctly as Unitarians. today many Us claim the christian name and profess to believe in the divinity of our Lord, a concession, the value of which is weakened by the fact that they also believe in their own divinity, for all good men, so we are told, have a spark of the divine. divinity is a question of degree. God was more manifest in Jesus that in the greatest of the saints. the difference between Jesus and st. francis of assisi is a difference, not of kind, but of degree. historic christianity, on the other hand, has always insisted that Jesus Christ is unique, differing from the saints, no only in degree, but also in kind. to be a christian, in any honest and intelligible sense of the word, is to believe that Jesus of nazareth claimed in the words of the nicene creed to be 'the only begotten son of God, Begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God,
74 Light of Light, true God of true God, Begotten not made, Being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made', and proved this claim by rising from the dead. the good word 'divinity' is gone beyond recall. it has been annexed by Us, avowed or camouflaged. let us, therefore, substitute the words 'Deity' or 'Godhead', until such time as these words are, in turn, annexed and drained of all meaning by the Us.
the special efforts which have been made to discredit the fourth gospel were inspired, as we have seen, by the fact that the Christology of john is particularly offensive to the U, open or disguised. but the difference between the Christology of john and of the synoptics is a difference of degree and not a difference of kind. there are far more passages in john than in any of the other gospels of which the deity of our Lord is the theme, but the Godhead of Christ is as strongly, though not as frequently, asserted in the synoptics as in the fourth gospel. whereas john and paul were principally concerned to expound the implications of Christology, the synoptics addressed themselves to people who wee less interested in theology than john, but who hungered for the human story of our Lord. it was their task to write the memoirs of Christ, leaving to others to develop the doctrine of Christ's person and nature. the epistles are, of course, earlier than the fourth gospel and the christology of the epistles is as explicit as the christology of john. paul, for instance, writes of 'hid dear Son who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: for in Him were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominations, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him and in Him. and He is before all and by Him all things consist'. col. 1.15-7.
75 now luke must have been saturated with the Christological doctrine of paul and yet luke related the story of the crucifixion as a mere record of what happened, without attempting to develop, at least in that context, the pauline interpretation of that unique event. moreover, as the reader will see, the christological texts which i am about to quote are drawn, not only from john but also from the synoptics and the epistles. it would indeed be easy to prove that the apostles believed in the deity of our Lord without ever quoting from john. the apostles believed, not in the God-inspired prophet of the Us, but in a Christ who in the words of the nicene creed 'had been Begotten of His Father before all worlds'.
before abraham was, I am. john 8.58 ye shall see the Son of Man ascend up where He was before. john 6.63 the glory which I had with Thee before the world was. john 17.5 and He is before all things and by Him all things consist. col. 1.17
john and paul proclaim that Christ is not merely inspired by God but the equal of God. I in them and Thou in Me; that they may be made perfect in one; and the world may know that Thou hast sent Me and hast loved them, as Thou hast also loved Me. john 17.23
paul habitually couples the name of our Lord with the name of God on terms of equality.
again, both john and paul teach that it is only through Christ that we have access to the Father: 'for by Him we have access both in one Spirit to the Father'. those who still believe that the christology of john is a second century development should re-read john and the pauline epistles. it is impossible to deny the resemblance between the pauline and joannine christology. if we turn from the fourth gospel to the synoptics we find
76 the same insistence of the deity of our Lord. it is not a human if God-inspired prophet who said: " every one therefore that shall confess Me before men, I will also confess him before My Father who is in heaven...he that receiveth you, receiveth Me: and he that receiveth Me, receiveth Him that sent Me'. 'and Jesus coming, spoke to them, saying: all power is given to me in heaven and in earth...and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world'. matt. 10.32,40;28.18,20
matthew represents our Lord as predicting that when the nations shall be summoned before the judgment-seat of God, Christ will be seated on the throne of glory passing judgment on the human race. moreover, judgment will be determined by our attitude to Him, 'inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me'. matt. 25.40
all the synoptics agree that Jesus was condemned for blasphemy by the high priest because he declared that He was the son of God matt. 26.65; mark 14.62; luke 22.69
CHAPTER 8 - THE PROOF
78 every war produces a spate of books from people who explain how war could have been averted if only their advice had been followed and from generals who prove that the campaigns which they lost could in fact have been won, had they received the support which they demanded. one is left with the vague impression that the world is divided into innocent men who write books and guilty men who don't
many years ago two books were written by and a third book was edited by 'guilty men' who mad no attempt to conceal their guilt, who offered no defence for their sins and who never pleaded extenuating circumstances. one of these guilty men, called matthew, described the weakness and the cowardice of himself and of the other apostles in the garden of gethsemane. three times he tells us the apostles, whom our Lord had commanded to 'watch and pray' fell asleep and in the moment of his arrest they forsook him and fled. mark, who wrote at the dictation of peter confirms the account given by matthew ('and he cometh and findeth them sleeping and saith unto peter, simon, sleepest thou? couldst thou not watch one hour/') and mark, at peter's dictation, records the great denial as a simple statement of unadorned fact. 'but he began to curse and to swear, saying: i
79 know not this man of whom ye speak. and for the second time the cock crew. and peter remembered the word that Jesus had said unto him: before the cock crow twice, thou shalt thrice deny me. and he began to weep'.
because courage is the basic virtue, there is no weakness to which men are more reluctant to confess than cowardice. the story of those last scenes in the garden of gethsemane is not the kind of story that any of the actors would be in the least likely to invent.
'if evidence were needed, as mr. morison remarks in his notable work Who Moved the Stone? of the highest standard of veracity prevailing in the early church, we have it here in its most convincing form'.
87 (talking of the four different accounts with respect to the resurrection (which all provide different angles, as it were) be it noted that my thesis is not that the accounts cannot be reconciled, but only that such reconciliation in every detail would be contrary to all human experience. and it should be noted that a statement beginning 'jones' evidence is inaccurate and therefor the inerrancy of scripture is not disproved by an accurate record of what witnesses who were far from inerrant described....
..the witnesses of those events and of the subsequent appearance of our Lord testified to what they themselves remembered and it would be contrary to all experience if their recollections agreed down to the smallest detail. if, for instance, joanna saw two angels and mary, in the language of the law courts, was only prepared to swear to the presence of one angel, there would be no necessary contradiction between the two accounts.
88 it seems to be improbable that any of the evangelists would have given an account which he knew to be inconsistent with the accounts of a predecessor without attempting to justify the correction of what he believed to be inaccurate in the earlier work. 'the authentic text of mark, writes canon h.h.streeter, contains 661 verses. matthew reproduced the substance of over 600 of these'. luke also made great use of the subject matter of mark, but luke never suggests that mark's account is misleading in any detail. the argument is equally valid if we adopt canon streeter's view that mark is older than matthew or the traditional view that matthew is older than mark. john, who wrote with the synoptics before him, was writing for men to whom the main facts were known. his habit of trusting to the previous knowledge of his readers is responsible for some strange omissions, of which the most remarkable ifs the absence of any account of the Last Supper. this omission is the stranger because it is to the sixth chapter of john that we must turn for the first clear and definite exposition of the eucharistic doctrine, 'whoso eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood hath eternal life...for My flesh is meat indeed and My blood is drink indeed'. and yet john, who was the first to expound the eucharistic doctrine, thought it unnecessary to repeat the description already given of the institution of the eucharist at the last supper. no argument, therefore, can be based on the omission by any of the evangelists of incidents recorded by other evangelists.
john, who entered the empty tomb and who was an eyewitness of the appearances of the risen Lord would, we may be sure, have corrected anything in the synoptic gospels
89 which he knew to be false. the fact that neither john nor any of the other evangelists seems to be aware of discrepancies between their accounts and the accounts of their predecessors convinces me that if we knew what they knew, we should possess the key to the apparent inconsistencies in their narratives and however puzzling some of these apparent discrepancies may be, 'the substantial truth under circumstantial variety', to which all four evangelists bear witness is that Jesus was buried in the tomb of arimathea and that the tomb was empty in the early hours of the fist easter sunday.
CHAPTER 9 - THE 'COLLECTIVE HALLUCINATION' HYPOTHESIS
90 the anti miraculist does not deny that the disciples believed that they had seen the risen Lord, but he asserts that they were victims of 'collective hallucinatios'. anti miraculists suffer from the collective illusion that a polysyllabic phrase is a satisfactory substitute, both for proof and for explanation. the question at issue is whether- a. it was the risen Lord whom the disciples saw or b. whether they merely imagined that they saw the risen Lord
to assert that they suffered from collective halucination is merely to translate b. into a polysyllabic phrase.
in his attitude to hallucinations the anti miraculist is unscientific. he postulates what is his business to prove. he assumes that he can invoke the particular variety of hallucination which suits his brief. the scientific historian, on the other hand, realises that hallucinations have their own laws and that it is his business to investigate those laws before postulating 'collective hallucination' as a solution to the problem of the resurrection.
we must not confuse hallucination with mal-observation. a clever conjurer can deceive his audience and they may fail to observe things which only a keen sighted and quick witted person would detect and the resultant hallucination is due to mal-observation. abnormal people who are mentally unbalanced suffer from isolated illusions. normal people under abnormal circumstances may suffer hallucinations.
91 many years ago mr. claud elliot, now head master of eton, and i, searched a pyrenean peak on which a friend of ours had been killed. we had travelled all through the night from london and started on our search party within an hour or two of arriving at the little inn from which he started for his last climb. we were out of training and tired and the stain of the search gradually began to tell. every time we turned a corner we expected to see our friend; again and again we thought we say his body stretched out on the rocks and heard the other members of the party shouting that they had found him. a vulture hovering near the cliff, as vultures will often hover for days before attacking a dead body, provided a macabre touch. these hallucinations were vivid while they lasted, but they never lasted for more than a second or two.
monsignor knox, in one of his sermons, quotes my experiences on the pyrenean search party and adds, 'isn't it possible, ask the critics of our religion, that the people who thought they saw our Lord after His resurrection were in the same position as that?'
to which we answer no. what ever position they were in, they were not in the same position as that. rather, they were exactly in the opposite position. a halucination means seeing something else and mistaking it for what you are looking for, as arnold lunn did in that pyrenean peak; these people saw what they were looking for and, one and all, mistook it for something else. mary magdalene did want to find the crucified and it would have been natural enough if she had seen the gardener and mistaken him for our Lord. the curious thing is that she saw our Lord and mistook Him for the gardener. the two disciples on the emmaus road, who were thinking about our Lord and talking about Him as they went, might have been pardoned if they had recognized His figure, wrongly, in that of some casual passer by. but the fact is that they thought He was a casual passer by when they really met Him. the apostles in the upper room might easily have seen a ghost and taken it for their master; but they didn't, they saw their master and took Him for a ghost. and again by the lake side, they might have been deceived by the accents of a strange voice and thought it was His. it is more significant that they should have been deceived by the accents of His voice and thought it was a strange one. they didn't run away with their first impressions and tell unauthenticated stories of a miracle. they examined their first impressions and only by examination learned the miraculous truth'.
and as monsignor knox remarked on another occasion, 'nobodyis sure that he has found a half crown in his pocket as a man who puts his hand into a pocket expecting it will contain a solitary copper'.
exhaustion, strain and fear, all play..their part ..
93 it is indeed ironical that those who cannot accept the resurrection because it is unique are driven to postulate something no less unique, a 'collective hallucination' of a type not paralleled in all the records of human illusion, an illusion which has had an infinitely greater effect on the course of history than any admitted fact.
94 "if you say, writes thomas aquinas, that no on has seen a miracle performed, i will reply this, 'it is agreed that the whole world worshipped idols and persecuted the faith of Christ, so the histories of the pagans record. but all were converted to Christ, wise, noble, rich, powerful and great men at the preaching of simple men, who were both poor and few. this was either done miraculously or not. if it was done miraculously my point is proved. if it was not, i say that there could not be a greater miracle than that all the world should have been converted without miracles. (de symbolo apostolico)
no serious critic denies that paul wrote the first epistle to the corinthians in which he records the principal appearances of the risen Lord to the disciples. it is therefore impossible to maintain as an alternative to the theory of 'collective hallucination' the hypothesis that the story of these appearances is a second century myth. that the disciples believed that they had seen the risen lord is admitted by atheists, agnostics, unitarians, Jews and modernists.
our problem is to account for the origin of a belief so contrary, not only to human experience, but also to their own expectations, for the disciples hoped for an earthly triumph, and refused to believe that Jesus would be rejected by His own people. and because they did not wish to believe in the cross, they found no room in their minds for the resurrection which, like the cross, had been foretold. very significant in this context is the conversation of two disciples with the risen Christ whom they had failed to recognize on the walk to emmaus. they told him how the chief priests and our rulers handed Christ over to be sentenced to death. 'for ourselves, we had hoped that it was He who was to deliver israel, but now, to crown it all, today is the third day since it befell' and they describe
95 with no apparent conviction, the finding of the empty tomb by the women and also by some of the apostles 'but of Him they saw nothing', and it is clear that these disciples at least were unpersuaded by the fact that the women reported 'that they had seen a vision of angels who said that He was still alive'. it was not until they returned to Jerusalem that the disciples who walked to emmaus learned that 'the Lord had appeared to simon'. the reluctance to accept the evidence of women is a convincing touch, for if the story had been invented we may be very sure that the discovery of the empty tomb would not have been attributed to women. 'the mind of the first century about women, writes mr. h.p.v. nunn, in his valuable book What is Modernism? even in christian circles is clearly seen in the epistles and in the first gospel where we are told that the disciples marvelled that our Lord even spoke to a woman...if the story is true, no further explanation of the important part played in it by women is needed. it is only another proof of the honesty of the witnesses of the resurrection who admitted the slowness and lack of faith of the apostles and the ready faith of the women'...N quotes, very appositely in this connection, ..augustine's 'Thou hast given power to men to form an idea about themselves from others and to believe many things about themselves on the authority, even of feeble women.
it was no sudden hallucination which converted the disciples, but stubborn fact which prevailed against stubborn doubts. it was not only thomas that doubted. 'and seeing Him, writes matthew of the appearance on the mount of galilee, they adored: but some doubted. even after the resurrection the disciples were still so far from understanding the message of the cross that they asked Him 'Lord, dost Thou mean to restore the dominion to
96 israel here and now? acts 1.6, for they were still dominated by the jewish belief that the approval of God was shown by the prosperity of the righteous and His disapproval by misfortune and death.
'i have been young, exclaimed the psalmist, and now am old and i have not seen the just forsaken, nor his seed seeking bread. but the unjust shall be destroyed together: the remnants of the wicked shall perish.
it was not until john entered the tomb and found it empty 'and the napkin that had been about his head not lying with the linen clothes' that 'he saw and believed. for as yet they knew not the scriptures that He must rise again from the dead.
it was difficult for the disciples to believe in the resurrection because this belief conflicted with all human experience. it was difficult to believe in Christ because loyalty to Christ involved a breach with the church of their fathers. we are tempted to forget that the disciples were jews, for the influence of christian art is so strong that we tend to think of them as nordic or latin christians and not as asiatic jews. religion is never more powerful than when it is closely associated with the national loyalties of an oppressed race, as for instance in palestine under the romans or in serbia during the turkish occupation or in ireland during the long anglo-protestant ascendancy. it was as difficult for the disciples to break away from the synagogue as it would have been for irish peasants during the penal times to apostatise from the catholic church.
it is inconceivable that a mere hallucination could have provoked and maintained this spiritual dislocation of their lives, a dislocation which involved a complete breach with their past. sooner or later the remonstrances of those who loved them and the bitter reproaches of those who despised them as apostate must have eroded their faith in the objective
97 reality of what they believed that they had seen. as the opposition increased and as the possibility of marytrdom became more and more apparent, their confidence in the hallucination must inevitably have weakened. moreover, no hallucinations are identical and inevitably as the memory of the phantoms faded the disciples must have begun to compare their own memories of what they believed that they had see and the inevitable discrepancies must have reinforced their growing doubts. finally, these men had to stand the supreme test of martyrdom and they were not of the stuff of which martyrs are made, for they abandoned Jesus and fled at the moment of His arrest and peter subsequently denied Him.
it is very hard for a man to eradicate even small failings, for character is stubborn in its resistance to change. the disciples were average men, neither heroes nor cowards, but subject-as ordinary men are subject-to collapse under great strain and it is difficult to believe that a mere hallucination could have transformed these men, who panicked in gethsemane, into the dynamic apostles who were not only ready to break with their church, their relations and their friends, but who also proved themselves undaunted by flogging, imprisonment and the ever present prospect of martyrdom. nothing but a certitude, rock-like in quality, could have produced this amazing transformation. 'somehow the rugged fishermen, writes morrison, peter and his brother andrew, the characteristically doubting thomas, the seasoned and not too sensitive taxgatherer, matthew, the rather dull philip, intensely loyal but a little slow of apprehension, do not fit easily into the conditions required for an absolutely unshakable collective hallucination. and if it is not both collective and unshakable it is of no use to us. the terrors and the persecutions which these men ultimately had to face and did
98 face unflinchingly, do not admit of a half hearted adhesion secretly honeycombed with doubt. the belief has to be unconditional and of adamantine strength to satisfy the conditions. sooner or later, too, if the belief was to spread it had to bite its way into the corporate consciousness by convincing argument and attempted proof'.
so potent was the influence of this alleged hallucination that the disciples, whose nerve had failed in gethsemane, returned to jerusalem prepared to measure themselves against the brilliant and unscrupulous camarilla (note: a group of unofficial or private advisors to a person of authority) which had already crucified their master. if the anti miraculist hypothesis be sound, this was a hopeless venture, a last desperate flicker of the fanaticism which should have died with their master on the cross. and yet they won. this heterogeneous collection of galilean peasants not only provoked a schism in their own church, but within twenty years had left their mark in every town from caesarea to troas of the mediterranean littoral and within 50 years had begun to disturb the peace of the roman empire. it is easy to take the past for granted and thus to discount the overwhelming obstacles which christianity had to overcome before it could hope to make the faintest impression on the sophisticated world of roman society and roman letters. 'Jesus has not been ignored, writes prof. adolf deissman, by pagan authors. He is also mentioned by the old jewish texts-and also as we shall see by the great jewish historian josephus. but it was not until christianity began to disturb the roman peace that allusions to this troublesome sect begin to appear in roman literature, as for instance in the works of tacitus, suetonius and pliny. 'christianity, writes deissmann, was a religious movement among the lower classes, at first a small hidden mustard seed. the men of literature and the whole aristocracy, had they noticed it in the period of its beginnings,
99 would not have mentioned it, regarding it as a despicable, proletarian movement. thus, the fact that even later on early christianity was only seldom mentioned by pagan authors is simply due to its social structure. the gospels are not quoted in the graeco-roman literature just because these thin modest little books are never found on the bookstalls of the great capitals, but like a kind of secret literature they were hidden in the houses of those unknown people who, with a few exceptions composed the christian brotherhoods'. the roman intelligentsia was as uninterested in this obscure criminal, executed by a roman procurator, as the victorians would have been in some sudanese fanatic executed by the sentence of a british court martial. if we translate the triumph of the disciples into modern terms we have to imagine the worship of some obscure mahdi replacing the worship of Christ in st. paul's cathedral. 'we cannot insist, as morison so justly remarks, on the strict reign of causality in the physical world and deny it in the psychological. the phenomenon which here confronts us is one of the biggest dislodgements of events in the world's history and it can only be accounted for by an initial impact of colossal drive and power...does this rather heterogeneous body of simple foll, reeling under the shock of the crucifixion, the utter degradation and death of their leader, look like the driving force we require?'
CHAPTER 10 - THE EMPTY TOMB
100 even if collective hallucination could be invoked to explain the belief of the disciples that they had seen the risen Lord, the sceptic would still have to account for the empty tomb. the fact that the tomb was empty was not denied by the enemies of christianity when the disciples first began to preach the resurrection. the pharisees made no attempt to prove that the body of Jesus had not been buried in the tomb which the women visited on easter sunday or that the body of Jesus was still in the tomb in which He had been buried 'it is impossible, writes morison, to read the records of the period without being profoundly impressed by the way in which, for friend and foe alike, the tomb of Jesus sinks into utter and undisturbed oblivion...no one pretending to have an intimate and special knowledge seems to have said: 'not here was He ultimately buried, but there'. instead of these quite natural consequences flowing from so extraordinary an event, we get this stony appearance of indifference. from the moment that the women return from the garden the tomb of Jesus passes, historically, into complete oblivion...the assumption that the tomb was empty seems to have been universal. the only controversy of which we have any record, and it was clearly a heated one, was on the vexed question as to whether the disciples had secretly removed the body'. the tomb was infinitely important because it was completely ignored...
101 the forgotten tomb was only remembered when the tomb had passed into history.
the disciples could have given no clearer proof of their own serene unquestioning certitude than their readiness to preach the resurrection in jerusalem itself within a few hundred yards of the tomb, from which the body could be produced to refute them if their faith was vain.
..seven weeks after the resurrection a galilean fisherman collected a crowd in jerusalem and began to tell them about the resurrection and on that very day, the day of pentecost, peter baptised 3000 converts. a
102 staggering achievement and yet...we are not staggered. because it is so natural for us to be christian, we forget how unnatural it was for the jewish contemporaries of peter to accept his belief in the resurrection of a galilean peasant whose execution had been a nine days wonder in jerusalem...
though anti miraculists are unhampered by any sense of obligation to produce evidence in support of their alternatives to the resurrection , no anti miraculist has affirmed that the pharisees did, in point of fact, produce the body of Jesus. on the contrary their ingenuity is concentrated on the attempt to explain why the pharisees were unable to confront the apostles with the dead body of the man whose resurrection they were preaching.
let us consider the various hypotheses which have been put forward by the anti miraculists.
1. Jesus did not die on the cross, but recovered in the tomb from which He subsequently escaped.
we are asked to assume that Jesus could have escaped from a tomb which was closely guarded. but if we accept the implied theory that the story of the guards is a christian invention we have still to explain the ultimate disappearance of His body. if He rejoined the disciples and died surrounded by His followers, His tomb would have been known and venerated as a shrine. if, on the other hand, He left them once again and vanished completely from their ken, some hint of the confusion and perplexity which this unexplained disappearance must have caused would have found its way into christian literature. and, finally it is, as strauss himself insists, 'impossible to believe that a man who had crept, half dead, out of the grave, weak and ill, needing medical attention, bandaging and indulgence and who must finally have yielded to his sufferings, could have produced on the mind of His disciples the impression that He had triumphed over death and the grave, the prince of life, and yet it was this impression which was the basis of their future ministry. such a resuscitation could only have weakened the impression which He mad on them in life and in death and could not possibly have transformed their sorrow into enthusiasm or their reverence into worship.
2. the women made a mistake and went to the wrong tomb.
this theory, which has been defended among others by prof. kirsopp lake, d.d. and mr. p. gardner-smith, is the kind of theory which could only be advanced by learned men who are more familiar with texts than with human beings. people with less learning but more sense will not need to be told that if the belief in the resurrection
104 began when the women visited the wrong tomb, it would have ended when the pharisees invited all concerned to inspect the body of Jesus in the right tomb.
3. the sepulchre in which Jesus was first buried was never intended to be a permanent tomb. joseph of arimathaea removed the body and transferred it to another sepulchre.
no adequate motive has been suggested for a proceeding on behalf of which no evidence has ever been produced. joseph was a man of principle, 'a noble councillor'. so mark describes him, 'who was looking for the kingdom of God'. if joseph had moved the body of Jesus to another tomb, he must have known that peter was the victim of an illusion when he asserted that the body of Jesus 'had not seen corruption'....he would not have allowed the disciples of the master whom he revered to base their teaching on a lie.under the influence of his gentle correction, the resurrection would have been preached in the form in which it is often preached today, as a spiritual resurrection and the appearances of our Lord explained as a vision of a phantom and not as the objective appearance of the actual body which joseph had buried in the tomb.
it should also be noted that joseph must have been assisted in his task by two or three servants. why should these servants have maintained silence when they could have refuted by word the birth of a new religion which they knew to be based on an illusion? no explanation has been suggested to account for the conspiracy of silence into which joseph and his servants must have entered, if this hypothesis be accepted.
4. 'it is quite possible, writes strauss, that it (the body)
105 was thrown into some dishonourable place with those of other executed criminals, and in this case His disciples may have, at first, had no opportunity of seeing the body. later, when they preached the resurrection, even their opponents would have found it difficult to recognise His body and to provide proofs of its identity.
of the controversy, which this theory postulates, about the identity of a corpse, exhumed from a common grave, there is no hint in the records and literature or traditions of the period.
note, once again, the recurring contrast between the christian who offers proof in support of his claims and the anti miraculist who offers none. quod gratis affirmatur, gratis negatur. that which is without argument affirmed can be denied without argument, but if argument be needed to demolish this fantasy, such argument is not difficult to provide.
loisy, who adopts this hypothesis, attempts to render it more plausible by the statement that the body of Jesus was not at the disposal of the disciples. loisy, who would, perhaps, have been less highly praised for his scholarship had his scholarship been enlisted on behalf of orthodoxy here betrays his ignorance of roman law, under which pilate was compelled to hand over the body of Jesus to whoever demanded it. to admit that the disciples gave way to a fit of panic in gethsemane does not compel us to concede that they were consistently base and cowardly. had this been the case they would have deserted Jesus when He first began to attract the hostility of the pharisees. it is difficult to believe that they would have allowed their beloved master's body to be thrown into an..(dishonourable place) without making the least attempt to give it that decent burial which the laws of rome permitted. 'the weakest and least esteemed of christians
106 of a later age, writes mr. nunn, would never have allowed such a thing to happen to the bodies of their martyred friends, as the genuine martyrologies and the catacombs bear witness. but the final and the conclusive refutation of this hypothesis is the fact that if the body of Jesus had been buried in a common pit, the pharisees would, at least, have made an effort to exhume it to refute the resurrection.
5. the disciples stole the body from the tomb.
this was the hypothesis advanced by the pharisees and therefore should take priority, for reasons to be explained, of all hypotheses put forward by modern sceptics. if the disciples had stolen the body of Jesus, they would have known that He had died the death of a deluded fanatic and that He had not risen from the dead. why should the disciples conspire to impose upon the world a new religion which they knew to be false? a spontaneous falsehood, as origen pointed out, could not have nerved the disciples to announce with such unflinching courage a doctrine which was so perilous in its probable consequences. what occult compensation could have nerved them to break with their church and their friends and to accept martyrdom in the propagation of what they themselves knew to be a monstrous and superfluous lie. 'i readily believe, wrote pascal, those witnesses who get their throats cut.
107 .... to put it more simply, the sanhedrin knew what they could get away with.
jowett was once asked for a definition of tragedy. he
108 replied, 'a beautiful hypothesis killed by a fact. there may have been many such tragedies as the sanhedrin passed in review a succession of beautiful hypotheses to explain the empty tomb, hypotheses, all of which were killed by facts...
..when peter was summoned before the council and refused to cease preaching Christ, many of the council wished to put him to death, but gamaliel 'a doctor of the law and respected by the people' warned them 'if this work be of men it will come to naught. but if it be of God you cannot overthrow it. and they consented to him'. they would probably not have consented had they been wholly convinced by their assertion that the disciples had stolen the body of Jesus and were therefore preaching something which they knew to be false. had the pharisees been able to suggest an explanation of the empty tomb which quieted all reasonable doubts it is inconceivable that this explanation would not have been recorded by the great jewish historian josephus. J was born
109 within 10 years of the crucifixion. he was a member of a distinguished priestly family and attached himself to the party of the pharisees at the age of 19. when the jewish revolt broke out in the year 66, J was chosen by the sanhedrin at jerusalem to be commander in chief in galilee. he was captured after the all of the fortress of jotapata and was a witness of the destruction of jerusalem and the temple.
J had associated from his youth with distinguished scholars. he possessed to a pre-eminent degree the intellectual curiosity of a great historian. it is inconceivable that so great a historian with such peculiarly intimate relations with the priestly nobility should have been left in ignorance of any satisfactory explanation of the empty tomb, if such explanation in point of fact existed. and yet here is what he actually wrote about the Jesus whose claims he was prepared neither to accept nor to deny. 'about this time lived Jesus, a man full of wisdom, if one may call him a man. for he was a doer of incredible things and the teacher of such as gladly accepted the truth. he thus attracted to himself many jews and many of the gentiles. he was the Christ. on the accusation of the leading men of our people, pilate condemned him to death upon the cross. nevertheless, those who had previously loved him, still remained faithful to him. for on the third day he again appeared to them living, just as, in addition to a thousand other wonderful things, prophets sent by God had foretold. and at the present day the race of those who call themselves christians after him has not ceased. (jewish antiquities, chapter 18)
the genuineness of this passage has been attacked, but no criticism has met the objection that this passage occurs in all the codices and manuscripts of josephus' work. it
110 is asking a great deal of the reader to expect him to believe that all the codices and manuscripts were tinkered with by christians, and that in every case the same identical interpolation was surreptitiously introduced into the original text.
the tendency of modern critics is to accept the genuineness of this famous passage. harnack regards this as proved almost beyond doubt and critics, who do not err on the side of conservatism support this view...
our next witness is justin martyr who was converted to christianity about 130 in his thirtieth year. among his works is the record of a disputation in the city of ephesus with tryphon, one of the most celebrated israelites of the day. justin discusses in great detail the principal arguments whereby contemporary jews sought to refute and to discredit christianity and the dialogue is of great interest for the light which it throws on the early evolution of christian apologetics. and it is clear from this dialogue that the jews of the second century still repeated and made their own explanation of the empty tomb...
111 toward the end of the second century celsus published his famous attack on christianity. the intimate and exact knowledge which he displays of jewish history and jewish though compel us to believe that he would have been aware of the strongest arguments against the resurrection current among the jews, but, he too, insists that the disciples had stolen the body.
...it is not until the beginning of the third century that we find the first hint of an alternative explanation in the terrible passage of De Spectaculis xxx in which tertullian rejoices at the prospect of beholding the torments of those who persecuted the christians. 'this is He, exclaims
112 tertullian to the jews, 'whom you bought from judas. this is He whom the disciples stole away in secret, that it might be said that He had risen', so far there is no breach with tradition, but T hints, with bitter irony, at an even more absurd explanation when he adds 'unless it was the gardener who removed the body, for fear that his lettuces should be trampled down by the crowd of visitors.
CHAPTER 11 - THE TESTIMONY OF PAUL
113 in the fifteenth chapter of the first of these epistles (corinthians) paul affirms 'that Christ, as the scriptures had foretold, died for our sins, that He was buried and then, as the scriptures had foretold, rose again on the third day. that He was seen by cephas, then by the eleven apostles and afterwards by more than 500 of the brethren at once, most of whom are alive at this day, though some have gone to their rest. then He was seen by james, then by all the apostles; and last of all, i, too, saw Him'.
114 in the first phase of the jewish-christian controvrsy sau of tarsus was the outstanding figure on the side of the pharisees, and this for many reasons. he was a man with whom one instinctively associated the big word 'genius'. even the bitterest opponents of christianity have never denied his greatness. on the contrary there is a tendency to exaggerate his achievement and to give him credit for founding the christian church...
paul was a superb advocate. he adjusted his appeal instinctively to the mood and temper and beliefs of the different audiences which he addressed, the greeks for instance on the areopagus, or felix or against agrippa. he was a master of the art of dividing the opposition, as for instance in his speech before the Council, recorded in acts 23. how subtly he contrived to drive a wedge between the pharisees who did and the sadducees who did not believe in a future life!
when he entered the jew-christian controversy, as a partisan of the priests he must inevitably have exploited to the full his forensic genius in a desperate attempt to discover a satisfactory solution to the problem of the empty tomb and the fanatic hatred with which he persecuted the christians was inevitable once he had accepted the theory that it was the disciples who had stolen the body. this upright and profoundly religious man had an immense reverence for the truth. even the author of the article on
115 paul in the jewish encyclopaedia, who does not find it easy to write with sympathy of one whom he regards as the greatest of apostates from judaism, concedes that he was 'a mighty battler for truth'. it is easy to appreciate the loathing with which sal of tarsus must have regarded this heretical sect whose leaders were deliberately attempting to impose upon their fellow countrymen a new religion which they knew to be fraudulent.
the serenity with which stephen went to his death may well have shaken him. men do not die for what they know to be false, but stephen's death produced no immediate weakening in saul's determination to destroy christianity. on the contrary he was on his way to organise a further persecution in damascus when his life was revolutionised by an experience which anti miraculists have tried in vain to explain away.
if the vision on the damascus road was a hallucination, it was one of those hallucinations which seem peculiar to the new testament record, a hallucination which was revolutionary in its radical transformation of character and outlook. we know something of the effect of ordinary hallucinations, the gradual weakening of character and the disintegration of mind, but as we read the letters of paul's middle and later life we find, as morison rightly says, no trace of any weakening, 'rather the coming to maturity of a fine intellect, an intensely logical and ordered mind...when saul was really convinced that he had seen the risen Jesus the immense and overpowering significance of the empty tomb swept for the first time into his mind. it was as though the great stone itself had crashed away his last defences. he saw that if the disciples were not deceivers, they then were right-right through the whole range and gamut of their claim. he realised why you could not associate a martyrdom so glorious as that of stephen with a
116 vulgar deception involving connivance with the abduction of a corpse. he began to understand why peter was so sure and why everyone connected with this strange movement was so unaccountably joyous and so immovably convinced.
CHAPTER 12 - CHRISTIANITY WITHOUT MIRACLES
117 liberal protestants, catholic modernists and anglican modernists with negligible exceptions believe in the possibility of dissociating christianity from the belief in miracles...
if Jesus was nothing more than an inspired prophet, clearly no miracles were needed to recommend His teaching to the world, and it is easy to understand why those who, in effect, deny the deity of our Lord find it easy to dispense with miracles...
118 ...it is not surprising that men should boggle at this tremendous claim, but it is plain foolish to pretend that it is more difficult to believe that Jesus rose from the dead than that the son of a jewish carpenter was the creator and the sustainer of the universe. the very reverse is the case. spiritualists who accept the miracles but who deny the Godhead of Jesus are more logical than those who pretend to accept His divinity and yet repudiate the unique corroboration which He provided for a unique claim.
the holiness of His life and the beauty of His teaching would not have persuaded any of His contemporaries that He was God and of our contemporaries there are none who would be prepared for one moment to consider His claims to be divine had not missions of christians accepted those claims because of their miraculous endorsement.
the early christians accepted Christ as a divine teacher because they believed in His miracles. some of His sayings can be paralleled in rabbinical and even in classical literature
119 plato, for instance, had urged men to repay evil with good, but it was left to the christian saints to practise what plato preached. the modern secularist, the product in some ways of a christian tradition, often writes as if the paradoxes of Christ are nothing more than the truisms of progressively minded humanitarians. but why should we love our enemies? a roman would have dismissed the suggestion with contemptuous laughter. an occasional philosopher might preach such sentiments but the world had to wait until Christ had risen from the dead before these sterile moralisings could be transformed into action. in every age there have been thousands of christians who have patterned their lives on Christ. how many have patterned their lives on plato? men have married poverty, laughed in the flames and jested on the rack, not only because they were impressed by the moral beauty of the parables, but also because they believed in the miracles which the modernist rejects. modernists admit that christianity would not have survived the crucifixion, had not the disciples been subsequently convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead and yet they are naive enough to believe that christianity could continue to survive after repudiating a belief, which they concede to have been indispensable to the primitive church.
modernism is a parasite which draws such vitality as it possesses from the dogmas which it denies. it is only because all catholics and the great majority of anglicans and Free Churchmen still believe in the resurrection that there are still pulpits from which a non-miraculist christianity can be preached.
the belief in the Godhead of our Lord and the belief in the resurrection stand and fall together. those who repudiate the resurrection have set their feet on a road which leads from christianity to unitarianism, open or camouflaged. ...
120 three assumptions are implicit in the apologetics of modernism.
Assumption A. the modernist welcomes but the traditionalist distrusts the discoveries of modern science.
modern scientific research has gone some way to establish the reality of many of those psychical phenomena which modernists have always attributed to fraud or mal-observation..
...the case then stand thus. the discoveries of modern science in so far as they have any bearing on the question have weakened the anti miraculist case and are therefore welcomed by the traditionalist.
nothing, of course, could be less scientific than the modernist approach to the problem of miracles, for david strauss defined, once and for all, the guiding principle which all true modernists accept, the great dogma that 'in the works and person of Jesus there was nothing supernatural allowed to remain'.
exactly,. for the
121 modernist, as for strauss, this negative dogma is essential, but there is nothing in the least scientific in deductions based on an unproved dogma.
it is not with science that the modernist established his concordat but with the pseudo science popular with all those who are anxious to exclude the Creator from all influence on His creation. ..
Assumption B. the modernist welcomes but the traditionalist distrusts the results of modern scholarship and biblical criticism.
it is not, as we have seen, the traditionalist but the modernist who is embarrassed by modern discoveries, such as those of ramsay in asia minor or the rylands fragment of john, assigned by palaeographers to the beginning of the second century.
Assumption C. intellectual integrity is the distinguishing note of modernist scholars. unconscious dishonesty is only too common in the apologetics of the traditionalists.
few apologists, religious or political as the case may be, are wholly successful in resisting the temptation to overstate their own case and to misrepresent their opponent's case, but the temptation is more difficult to resist in the case of modernism for the good reason that the unadorned facts point to the traditional conclusion. modernists, incapable of conscious dishonesty, sometimes stoop to the very questionable methods in their attempt to avoid orthodox conclusions. i have a great admiration for dr. inge. he has the courage to defy the fashion of the moment and has often defended unpopular cases....
122 'a dramatic vindication, writes dr. inge, of God's omnipotence in the world of phenomena was precisely what the contemporaries of Christ desired to see and it was precisely what He did not come to earth to provide. a wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign. verily I say unto you, there shall no sign be given unto this generation'. and at this point dr. inge breaks off the quotation from matt. 12.39. matthew continues with a reference to the miracle of jonas and a prediction of the miracle of the resurrection 'but the sign of the prophet jonas. for as jonas was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale; so shall the son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth'.
thus the words which dr. inge omits from his truncated quotation flatly contradict the forced interpretation which he deduces from the words which he quotes...
123 the modernist pretention to monopolise 'modern scholarship' and 'scientific criticism' is nothing but an audacious camouflage for the neo lutheran rule of faith, for there is nothing scientific about a scissors and paste criterion which assumes the inerrancy of all texts which accord with modernist presuppositions and rejects as interpolations all those that do not...
126 ...like roman stoicism, which in many ways it resembles, modernism presupposes a reasonable income and a good education. modernism is over represented in academic circles and unknown in the slums. modernists send no missions to the negroes and would make no converts if they did. modernism is the fad of the few and can never be the religion of the many. its noblest literature seems to me to be open to much the same criticism as that which augustine passed on the writings of the platonists. 'in these pages there is no trace of the face of compassion, the tears of penitence...a broken and a contrite heart. no man in these writings hears the voice of one who called, 'come unto Me all ye who labour'...
dr. major, an unconquerable optimist, expects that modernism will make the christian religion universal and provide the church with an apologetic which will win the english people to Christ. now whether modernism be true is a question of opinion, but whether modernism attracts the modern man is a question of fact, which can be settled by the simple and well tried scientific method of counting noses. dr. major has only to make a tour of churches next sunday to discover that modern men are not filling the churches in which timeless truths are reinterpreted to adjust them to the latest fad, disguised as 'modern thought'. whatever else modern man may want, it is clear that he does not want modernism.
CHAPTER 14 - CONCLUSION
147 ...the real difficulty of the christian apologist is not the inadequacy of the evidence by the invincible prejudice which no evidence can overcome. if resurrections from the dead were infrequent, but none the less universally admitted phenomena, no historian would dare to dispute the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
christian apologists are too apologetic. they should insist on their opponents defining their own beliefs, for nothing is easier than to show that whatever be the difficulties of the christian position they are trivial indeed compared to the difficulties of all rival solutions. i remember an argument about the resurrection with a champion of mechanistic evolution. because he did not want to accept christianity he assumed that he was entitled to reject it merely because there was no completely satisfactory explanation of some minor difficulty, but his faith in Darwinism was completely unaffected by the major difficulty of reconciling a theory of slow and gradual evolution with the record of the rocks, so eloquent in their testimony of the suddenness with which the new types appear. it is contrast and contrast only which reveals the granite strength of the christian case....
148...it is, for instance, instructive to compare the clear light of christian rationalism...with the murky mists of rival philosophies, such as, for instance, the great heresty of the 19th century, the dogma of a purely mechanistic mindless evolution, the belief that 'natural selection', a purely, negative force, is an adequate substitute for divine creative power, as if the existence of weeds in a garden could be explained by the hypothesis that the gardener had not removed them. the same anti miraculist prejudice influenced men to reject the resurrection and to accept darwinism, the least rational of all rival theories of evolution. the sudden and overwhelming success of darwinism was due, not to the positive arguments in its favour, but to the negative prejudice against the intrusion of the Creator into the work of creation-as is, indeed, admitted by leading darwinists. the doctrine of a slow mindless evolution is irreconcilable with the geological record....berg, a soviet scientist working under a government slavish in its admiration of darwin...brushes aside with contempt the appeal to the imperfections of the geological record and comments on the fact that this record 'in no way displays transitional forms between phyla and classes and, possibly, not even between orders. thus we are ignorant of transitional forms not only between vertebrates and invertebrates, fishes and tetrapods, but even between the cartilaginous (chondrichthyes, such as sharks, etc.) and higher fishes (osteicht):
149 in spite of a wonderful affinity between reptiles and birds, no transitional forms between them are known'.
the evolutionist feels justified in arguing from the absence of fossils that the more recent forms were not in existence at a time when the earliest sedimentary rocks were deposited, but he will not allow the anti evolutionist to draw any deductions from the absence of all those intermediate types which the evolutionary theory demands.
the geological record is assumed to be completely trustworthy when it tells in favour of the evolutionist and completely untrustworthy when it tells against him. 'in answer to the question, wrote huxley, what does an impartial survey of the positively ascertained truths of palaenotology testify in relation to the common doctrines of progressive modification?...i reply: it negatives these doctrines, for it either shows us no evidence of such modification or demonstrates such modification as has occurred to have been very slight.
huxley , like berg, was impressed 'by the sharpness of the lines of demarcation between the natural groups and the absence of transitional forms', but by 1857 he was 'feeling that some workable hypothesis must be found respecting the origin of known organic forms to replace the untenable creation theory'. why 'untenable'? uncongenial, no doubt, to all those who are influenced, as we all are to a greater or lesser degree, by the mental climate of the age.
'i am, however, thoroughly persuaded', wrote the great biologist, yves delage, in 1903, 'that one is or is not a transformist, not so much for motives deduced from natural history, as for motives based on personal philosophic opinions'. that is, on the anti miraculist prejudice. 'if there existed some other scientific hypothesis beside that of descent to explain the origin of species, many transformists
150 would abandon their present opinion as not being sufficiently demonstrated...if one takes his stand upon the exclusive ground of facts it must be acknowledged that the formation of one species from another species has not been demonstrated at all'...
..spengler, author of The Decline of the West, whose philosophy was pantheistic rather than theistic writes: 'palaeontology furnishes the most conclusive refutation of darwinism. according to the laws of probability, fossil deposits are only test samples (stichproben). each sample should therefore represent a different phase of evolution, and in this case there would be no transitional forms, no boundaries, and also no species. instead of this we find completely stable and unchanging forms persisting through long ages, forms which have not evolved in accordance with the principle of adaptation, but appear suddenly and in their final form and thereafter instead of evolving towards more perfect adaptation, become rarer and die out, while quite other types emerge again'.
152 the evidence for christianity is overwhelming and cumulative and neither begins nor ends with the resurrection.
153 there is a fine phrase of tertullian's, christus perturbatur, which sums up the experiences of the long centuries when 'Christ was being thought', and when men were looking for the revelation which was to come. the argument from prophecy reinforces the arguments based on the contemporary evidence. again, the arguments for the resurrection are reinforced by the argument from experience, the experience of generation after generation of christian men, christians for whom the resurrection is not an academic fact, but the central reality of their lives. such christians will always be a small minority, but without them no purely historical arguments would convert the world.
but let us not belittle the appeal to history, for the evidence of the christian centuries points to one conclusion. under the influence of christianity good men become saints and even the worst of men do not sink to the lowest depths.
156...Freudianism, the last and vilest of modern superstitions, is completely anti rational. the Fr is engaged in cutting off the branch on which he is sitting. his denial that truth is ascertainable by rational processes leads to the conclusion that all rational discussion of Fr is engaged in cutting off the branch on which he is sitting. his denial that truth is ascertainable by rational processes leads to the conclusion that all rational discussion of Fr is impossible. Fr is a form of puritanism. the essence of
157 puritanism is the distrust of the legitimate pleasure which is the result of gratifying the natural appetites. in the third century the manichees attacked the pleasures of sex, of wine and meat. at the end of the 10th century manicheism reached its logical climax in the catharist heresy which condemned the appetite for life, praised suicide, and taught that a mother who had committed the sin of procreation might atone for her sin by murdering her child. in the 16th century the appetite for beauty was condemned and the glories of mediaeval glass and sculpture were destroyed by the new manichees.
the modern puritan attacks the appetite for God. fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te. 'thou hast created us for Thyself and our heart cannot rest until it rests in Thee'.
a Fr would pounce with unholy zest on this dangerous admission and would resolve augustine's longing for God to waste time considering the possibility that God might exist. the one common characteristic of the neo puritans is a resolute distaste for the examination of evidence. i have yet to find, in the works of this school, any evidence that they paused to examine the evidence for christianity or have ever allowed their minds to dwell for one moment on the possibility that christianity satisfies men because if gratifies the noblest of all the natural appetites, the appetite for truth.
it is an unquestioned assumption among neo puritans that a belief is necessarily false because it is consoling.
our belief in immortality is attributed to wishful thinking. similarly the british faith in victory which survived the collapse of france was attributed by dr. goebbels to the same wishful thinking'. as if the fact that we drew consolation
158 from our belief in ultimate victory necessarily proved that this belief had no rational justification.
to argue that the hunger for God disproves the existence of God is as irrational as to maintain that the belief in the existence of cows is an example of 'wish-fulfillment' because the thought of beef makes a hungry man's mouth water.
'courage, writes mr. h.r. knickerbocker, is more important quality than intelligence. i remember i once had a spirited argument on this point with henri bernstein, the french playwright. bernstein insisted that intelligence was the most valuable quality a man could have, and with enough of it he would not need more than a minimum of courage. i argued that without courage the keenest intelligence is useless in the world of action'. and not only in the world of action, but also in the world of thought. courage is tested by adherence to a creed, the evidence for which is not coercive and which appeals to rational inferences rather than to emotion. God does not coerce faith. He could provide His ministers on earth with coercive credentials, miracles so frequent and so public that none could deny them. even modernists might be shaken if every christian in the london hospitals was instantaneously cured after a special service of intercession.
the conflict between supernaturalism and materialism is a conflict between reason and emotion. it is often (and false) said of free will that all argument is against it and all experience is for it. certainly all argument is against materialism and ordinary experience lends support to it. 'the world is too much with us, late and soon', the material world whose impact on our senses and our emotions at times seem irresistible. to the ordinary christian,
159 God is a belief, to the saint a lover. the saint walks by sight, but the rest of us stumble along as best we may through the black out of this world...
..but we, who are neither saints nor poets, are not necessarily 'estranged' because we miss the 'many splendoured things'. this direct vision is only for the few. it is only the privileged minority who have the chance to witness a miracle or to entertain an angel unawares. but God, who is the God not only of the saints but also of the sinners, not only of the learned but also of the simple, has made it very easy for men of good will to discover those truths which he proposes for our acceptance, easy, that is, for those who are not so impressed by what burke calls 'th solemn plausibilities of the world' that they cannot discern the splendid certainties of the world to come.
most of us when we 'turn a stone' are more likely to startle a slug than 'to start a wing', but the evidence for the 'man-splendoured thing' is no less persuasive because it is inferred rather than seen, because the appeal is to the mind and reason rather than to the emotions and sense. the christian explanation of events is always the simple and obvious explanation. only very clever men could concoct or appreciate the ingenious explanations of the empty tomb which we find in the works of learned unbelievers, but the greatest of intellects and the simplest of God's children have found it equally easy to accept the truths which God became man to proclaim.
CRUCIFIXUS ETIAM PRO NOBIS SUB PONTIO PILATO. PASSUS ET SEPULTUS EST. ET RESURREXIT TERTIA DIE SECUNDUM SCRIPTURAS.
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
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