II

THE CHRISTIAN FOUNDATION

For the Christian millions faith in a future life is founded on the New Testament record of the most stupendous of all miracles. It is that the veritable body of Jesus rose from the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and having thus risen appeared to disciples, talked with them, gave them directions and then ascended to heaven in the selfsame body he had worn throughout the thirty years of his earthly life.

It is this miracle and the inference of personal immortality which believing Christians draw from it that the Easter festival annually commemorates. The alleged physical resurrection of Jesus-this is the Christian foundation for the faith in a future life. But the difficulty here is that what Christians offer as proof of immortality is itself in need of being proved. Not only does the evidence fail to establish the occurrence of such a miracle but a physical resurrection from the grave is not at all what was

believed and taught by Paul and the apostles. Recall with me briefly what the New Testament tells us on the subject.

Our earliest witness is the Apostle Paul. He expressly states that he never saw Jesus in the flesh (I Cor. 15:8). The one and only way in which Jesus was seen by him was in a "vision" on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus (Acts 9: 3-19 et passim). Moreover he confesses he was given to seeing visions, to having strange psychic experiences (II Cor. 12:1-4). From this we infer that the successive appearances of Jesus, related by the Apostle in his first letter to the Corinthians, were regarded by him as of the same vision type as his own on the journey to Damascus. In none of his letters does Paul testify to a resurrection of Jesus from the grave. What he does testify to is a resurrection from the dead-a distinction to which we shall shortly return. Paul, moreover, makes no mention of the reports of women at the tomb, nor of any appearances there or on the road to Emmaus, nor of Jesus, at a post-mortem appearance, eating fish in the company of disciples. Paul knew nothing of an empty tomb nor of visits that were made to it. Yet he was Peter's guest for a fortnight at Jerusalem (Gal.

1:18). How, then, could Peter have failed to make mention of these details if he knew them? Or how could Paul have failed to make use of them when confuting the skeptical Corinthians had he ever heard of these particulars? Nay more, any report of an empty tomb would have completely set at naught the argument adduced in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. Hence we are forced to the conclusion that all these details found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and written much later than Paul's letter, originated after the visit to Peter, who himself knew nothing of them.

Turning next to what is known as the "Triple Tradition," the story of Jesus' life in which all three of the Synoptic Gospels agree, we observe that the narrative of a physical resurrection is no part of that source of information. True, the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke contain such a story, but it is missing in Mark's gospel. For the ending of that gospel as we have it in our New Testament is not the original ending. In the margin of the Revised Version we are expressly told that these concluding verses of the Gospel (9-20) "are omitted in the two oldest Greek Manuscripts"

and that "other authorities have a different ending to the Gospel." When inspecting the earliest extant New Testament manuscript in the imperial library at St. Petersburg, I was particularly impressed by the gap covering the space which the twelve verses of the present ending of the Gospel occupy and also by the abruptness of the ending of the Gospel, in the middle of a sentence and with the word "because." The probability is that the original ending of the gospel was unorthodox, recounting a "Docetic" or phantasmal appearance of Jesus after his death and for this reason was suppressed. Finding too in Matthew's story the phrase "but some doubted," we infer that the reason for skepticism was the nature of the appearance. When we compare with one another the accounts of a physical resurrection as given in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, we observe that they differ in eight particulars and all relating to what happened at the tomb.

Comparing the reports of all three Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) we note that the points of difference now increase from eight to twelve.

Add the account given in the Fourth Gospel to the resurrection narratives already exam

ined, and we find the points of difference increase from twelve to twenty-one.1

So far then as the testimony of the records is concerned and remembering that we know not who wrote the Gospels-the evidence amounts only to this: somebody said that somebody saw Jesus, somewhere, somehow, after he had been entombed. In no irreverent or flippant spirit is the evidence thus summed up. It seems to express succinctly and with precision what the records compel us to conclude.

But what we have to note now is that not only do the records furnish no valid evidence for belief in a physical resurrection of Jesus, but also it is not what Paul and the apostles believed and taught. They believed and taught a resurrection from the dead, not a resurrection from the grave. Let me explain. In Old Testament times the Hebrews believed that at death all souls, good and bad alike, departed to Sheol, the underworld, that "land of thick darkness" as Job described it, "where the light is as darkness." There the dead passed their days in a gloomy, shadowy, ghostlike colorless existence. But during the interbiblical period,

1 For a detailed statement, see the Author's "Life of Jesus in the Light of the Higher Criticism," pp. 221 ff.