The Third Day
11) N% ARREN POSTBRIDGE 0 F all the miracles recorded in the Gospels, the supreme miracle, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth on the third day after his crucifixion, is the hardest of all to rationalise away. Various German critics have essayed the task. So, in our own country and our own time, has the Bishop of Birming- ham. Renan, in his Vie de Jesus, assigned the whole story un- hesitatingly to the realm of legend. Christ was crucified, and that ended everything, except the memory of a sublime life.
That doctrine the Christian Church, with an almost passionate conviction, rejects. " He was crucified, dead and buried ; the third day He rose again from the dead." Whatever clause of the Creed is questioned, that cannot be. Without that affirmation the whole foundation on which the Church—Roman Catholic or Protestant—has been built up through the centuries crumbles into nothing. But a belief must rest on fact, and when it is a question of a fact in history, the evidence for the fact must be examined. The evidence for this fact is available. We know where to find it. It consists of the testimony of five writers— the authors of the four Gospels and St. Paul. St. Paul's is the earliest and briefest, but he mentions more of the risen Christ's appearances than any single evangelist. " He appeared to Ccphas," he tells the congregation at Corinth in his first letter to them ; " then to the twelve [it must have been the eleven] ; then he appeared to about five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain until now, but some are fallen asleep ; then he appeared to James ; then to all the apostles ; and last of all, as unto one born out of due time, he appeared to me also."
The interest here lies in the fact that none of the Gospel narra- tives mention the appearance to James (probably the Lord's brother, not the son of Zebedee ; there is a well-known and curious description of the incident in the apocryphal Gospel according to the Hebrews) or the five hundred brethren. On the other hand, Paul, rather strangely, seems to know nothing of the appearances to the women at the grave. That is one of many discrepancies, which anyone who will may seize on, between the different narratives. The most curious is one between St. Luke and—not the other evangelists but—St. Luke. The story told in the last chapter of the third Gospel gives the clear impression that the Ascension took place on the evening of the Resurrection day, the Sunday, for immediately after the last charge to the disciples comes, without any break, the statement that He led them out to Bethany and parted from them and was carried up into heaven. There is no reference to any appearance in Galilee. But the same writer in the first chapter of Acts, perhaps in the light of later and better information, tells how Jesus " showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs. being seen of them forty days." That is in keeping with the narratives in Matthew and John. (The authentic Mark recounts nothing but the discovery of the empty tomb by the women.) There is much more that is difficult or impossible to explain. The difference between one angel (not that a man in a white robe, or even two in dazzling apparel, were necessarily super- natural) and two at the tomb matters little. The fact that the charge to the disciples to go at once to Galilee was followed immediately by appearances not in Galilee but at and near Jerusalem, and that Matthew, knowing nothing of these, speaks only of the disciples going to Galilee, raises difficulties which are not perhaps insuperable. The nature of the Judacan appear- ances—He was at first not recognised by Mary Magdalene, then recognised ; at first not recognised .by the two who walked to Emmaus, then recognised ; at first not recognised by the disciples at the Sea of Tiberias, then recognised ; He appeared suddenly in a closed room, yet offered His hands and His side to be touched, and ate a piece of a broiled fish—is beyond our under- standing ; but to understand it is not essential. Belief in the Resurrection does not depend on the solution of such problems. The evidence for the central fact is twofold. First, there is the empty tomb ; second, and even more important, the intense and unquestioning conviction among the disciples that Christ was risen and still lived. There have been attempted explana- tions of the empty tomb—for no one to whom weight attaches has questioned the fact of it. The disciples, it is suggested, might have removed the body themselves to give colour to the story of a resurrection ; of all assumptions that is perhaps the most untenable. Joseph of Arimathea might have done it, for no intelligible reason. The Jews might have done it—again it is not clear why. With regard to the conviction of the disciples, it is conceivable, though only barely conceivable, that, as a reaction, as it were, from their desertion, when " they all forsook Him and fled," they should have been so overwhelmed with a sense that in spite of everything—the crucifixion and the burial— He lived spiritually still that that was enough to impel them to the foundation of the Church and strengthen them to face the martyrdoms so many of them endured. That broadly is the thesis to which Canon Streeter gives adhesion in his essay in Foundations, and the conclusions of so earnest and so learned an authority on the Gospels cannot be lightly set aside.
But in fact it was no merely spiritual survival that the evan- gelists described or the disciples preached. The presence of Christ was spiritual, beyond question, from the moment of His departure from earth at the Ascension. But meanwhile there had been the supreme and decisive manifestation, the conquest of the grave. That, and nothing else, was the theme of the disciples' preaching, from the day when Peter, as recounted in the second chapter of Acts, declared on the day of Pentecost that " this Jesus did God raise up, whereof we all are witnesses."
Witnesses they claimed, unhesitatingly and uncompromisingly, to be. In Paul's words, Christ had appeared to Cephas—Petcr himself—then to the twelve. There was no thought or question of any spiritual appearance. They were as certain they had seen Him in tig flesh as they were that they saw one another.
That was the Tfiole burden of Peter's, preaching. Paul preached the same, though there is no suggestion that he ever saw Christ in His days on earth. Conviction came to him in a way that he never fully understood, and we certainly cannot, on the road to Damascus.
The evidence for the empty tomb is decisive. It is recorded by all four evangelists. It consists of the testimony of Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James and Joses, and other women, and of Peter and of John ; in the fourth Gospel is added the striking mention of " the napkin that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself," as though the body had dematerialised within its cover- ings. The story may be disbelieved completely. It may be accepted as fact, but with various explanations, such as have been indicated, offered for the disappearance of the body. Or, taken with the record of the appearances to the disciples in the weeks after the Crucifixion, it may be accepted as decisive proof that Christ rose from the dead on the third day (or before, for the actual resurrection may have taken place at any time between the Friday evening, when the body was laid in the tomb, and the Sunday morning, when the tomb was found to be empty). It is thus that the Christian Church throughout the centuries has accepted it, and there is nothing to shake faith in the miracle today.
The discrepancies between the different stories are no obstacle to belief. In a sense they strengthen it. If well-meaning editors in the early Church had felt it necessary to smooth them out, to collate and harmonise the versions of the four evangelists, then the authority of the records might well be called in question. But it has not happened so. Each, writing at various distances of time from the events he describes, has set down the facts as he has been able to glean them. On essentials there is no con- tradiction between them. Regarding details, as might be ex- pected, there are divergences. All, no doubt, like Luke, set forth in order a declaration of those things most surely believed, even as they delivered them which from the beginning were eye- witnesses. But the eye-witnesses were telling the evangelists of events long past. Different witnesses would have spoken of different incidents that had come within their experience, and, memory being fallible, inaccuracies might well have crept into the stories. But none of the inaccuracies, if such there were, was such as to. call the supreme event in question. On that all the testimony is decisive. Concurrence there is far more notable than divergence in lesser matters.
The argument that religion in the broadest sense is real and credible, but this central fact of the Christian religion incredible, misses the mark. If there is a God at all, even though He works normally along fixed lines, which it is the custom to speak of as law, He must by the nature of things be free and unbound, able to manifest Himself in whatever way seems good. On that hypothesis there is nothing incredible at all in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whether some other way might have been chosen God only knows. Even the way He chose does not rid human life of its perplexities. There is still, and always, the mystery of the illimitable universe, and its bear- ing on what happened in Palestine and what is happening here today. But the contention that because we• cannot understand everything we can believe nothing is desperate doctrine. Let human belief reach out to the limit of its powers. Judgement on some points will still remain suspended this side the grave. What discoveries there may be beyond it we mint wait to learn. No impatience about that need trouble us.
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