The Fair Haven

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What then can that thing have been which made these men so beyond all
measure and one-mindedly certain? Were they thus before the
Crucifixion? Far otherwise. Yet the men who fled in the hour of
their master's peril betrayed no signs of flinching when their own
was no less imminent. How came it that the cowardice and fretfulness
of the Gospels should be transformed into the lion-hearted
steadfastness of the Acts?

The Crucifixion had intervened. Yes, but surely something more than
the Crucifixion. Can we believe that if their experience of Christ
had ended with the Cross, the Apostles would have been in that state
of mind which should compel them to leave all else for the sake of
preaching what he had taught them? It is a hard thing for a man to
change the scheme of his life; yet this is not a case of one man but
of many, who became changed as if struck with an enchanter's wand,
and who, though many, were as one in the vehemence with which they
protested that their master had reappeared to them alive. Their
converse with Christ did not probably last above a year or two, and
was interrupted by frequent absence. If Christ had died once and for
all upon the Cross, Christianity must have died with him; but it did
not die; nay, it did not begin to live with full energy until after
its founder had been crucified. We must ask again, what could that
thing have been which turned these querulous and faint-hearted
followers into the most earnest and successful body of propagandists
which the world has ever seen, if it was not that which they said it
was--namely, that Christ had reappeared to them alive after they had
themselves known him to be dead? This would account for the change
in them, but is there anything else that will?

They had such ample opportunities of knowing the truth that the
supposition of mistake is fraught with the greatest difficulties;
they gave such guarantees of sincerity as that none have given
greater; their unanimity is perfect; there is not the faintest trace
of any difference of opinion amongst them as to the main fact of the
Resurrection. These are things which never have been and never can
be denied, but if they do not form strong prima facie ground for
believing in the truth and actuality of Christ's Resurrection, what
is there which will amount to a prima facie case for anything
whatever?

Nevertheless the matter does not rest here. While there exists the
faintest possibility of mistake we may be sure that we shall deal
most wisely by examining its character and value. Let us inquire
therefore whether there are any circumstances which seem to indicate
that the early Christians might have been mistaken, and been firmly
persuaded that they had seen Christ alive, although in point of fact
they had not really seen him? Men have been very positive and very
sincere about things wherein we should have conceived mistake
impossible, and yet they have been utterly mistaken. A strong
predisposition, a rare coincidence, an unwonted natural phenomenon, a
hundred other causes, may turn sound judgments awry, and we dare not
assume forthwith that the first disciples of Christ were superior to
influences which have misled many who have had better chances of
withstanding them. Visions and hallucinations are not uncommon even
now. How easily belief in a supernatural occurrence obtains among
the peasantry of Italy, Ireland, Belgium, France, and Spain; and how
much more easily would it do so among Jews in the days of Christ,
when belief in supernatural interferences with this world's economy
was, so to speak, omnipresent. Means of communication, that is to
say of verification, were few, and the tone of men's minds as regards
accuracy of all kinds was utterly different from that of our own;
science existed not even in name as the thing we now mean by it; few
could read and fewer write, so that a story could seldom be confined
to its original limits; error, therefore, had much chance and truth
little as compared with our own times. What more is needed to make
us feel how possible it was for the purest and most honest of men to
become parents of all fallacy?

Strauss believes this to have been the case. He supposes that the
earliest Christians were under hallucination when they thought that
they had seen Christ alive after his Crucifixion; in other words,
that they never saw him at all, but only thought that they had done
so. He does not imagine that they conceived this idea at once, but
that it grew up gradually in the course of a few years, and that
those who came under its influence antedated it unconsciously
afterwards. He appears to believe that within a few months of the
Crucifixion, and in consequence of some unexplained combination of
internal and external causes, some one of the Apostles came to be
impressed with the notion that he had seen Christ alive; the
impression, however made, was exceedingly strong, and was
communicated as soon as might be to some other or others of the
Apostles: the idea was welcome--as giving life to a hope which had
been fondly cherished; each inflamed the imagination of the other,
until the original basis of the conception slipped unconsciously from
recollection, while the intensity of the conviction itself became
stronger and stronger the more often the story was repeated. Strauss
supposes that on seeing the firm conviction of two or three who had
hitherto been leaders among them, the other Apostles took heart, and
that thus the body grew together again perhaps within a twelve-month
of the Crucifixion. According to him, the idea of the Resurrection
having been once started, and having once taken root, the soil was so
congenial that it grew apace; the rest of the Apostles, perhaps
assembled together in a high state of mental enthusiasm and
excitement, conceived that they saw Christ enter the room in which
they were sitting and afford some manifest proof of life and
identity; or some one else may have enlarged a less extraordinary
story to these dimensions, so that in a short time it passed current
everywhere (there have been instances of delusions quite as
extraordinary gaining a foothold among men whose sincerity is not to
be disputed), and finally they conceived that these appearances of
their master had commenced a few months--and what is a few months?--
earlier than they actually had, so that the first appearance was soon
looked upon as having been vouchsafed within three days of the
Crucifixion.

The above is not in Strauss's words, but it is a careful resume of
what I gather to be his conception of the origin of the belief in the
Resurrection of Christ. The belief, and the intensity of the belief,
need explanation; the supernatural explanation, as we should
ourselves readily admit, cannot be accepted unless all others are
found wanting; he therefore, if I understand him rightly, puts
forward the above as being a reasonable and natural solution of the
difficulty--the only solution which does not fail upon examination,
and therefore the one which should be accepted. It is founded upon
the affection which the Apostles had borne towards their master, and
their unwillingness to give up their hope that they had been chosen,
as the favoured lieutenants of the promised Messiah.

No man would be willing to give up such hope easily; all men would
readily welcome its renewal; it was easy in the then intellectual
condition of Palestine for hallucination to originate, and still
easier for it to spread; the story touched the hearts of men too
nearly to render its propagation difficult. Men and women like
believing in the marvellous, for it brings the chance of good fortune
nearer to their own doors; but how much more so when they are
themselves closely connected with the central figure of the marvel,
and when it appears to give a clue to the solution of that mystery
which all would pry into if they could--our future after death?
There can be no great cause for wonder that an hallucination which
arose under such conditions as these should have gained ground and
conquered all opposition, even though its origin may be traced to the
brain of but a single person.

He would be a bold man who should say that this was impossible;
nevertheless it cannot be accepted. For, in the first place, we
collect most certainly from the Gospel records that the Apostles were
NOT a compact and devoted body of adherents at the time of the
Crucifixion; yet it is hard to see how Strauss's hallucination theory
can be accepted, unless this was the case. If Strauss believed the
earliest followers of Christ to have been already immovably fixed in
their belief that he was the Son of God--the promised Messiah, of
whom they were themselves the especially chosen ministers--if he
considered that they believed in their master as the worker of
innumerable miracles which they had themselves witnessed; as one whom
they had seen raise others from death to life, and whom, therefore,
death could not be expected to control--if he held the followers of
Christ to have been in this frame of mind at the time of the
Crucifixion, it might be intelligible that he should suppose the
strength of their faith to have engendered an imaginary reappearance
in order to save them from the conclusion that their hopes had been
without foundation; that, in point of fact, they should have accepted
a new delusion in order to prop up an old one; but we know very well
that Strauss does not accept this position. He denies that the
Apostles had seen any miracles; independently therefore of the many
and unmistakable traces of their having been but partial and wavering
adherents, which have made it a matter of common belief among those
who have studied the New Testament that the faith of the Apostles was
unsteadfast before the Crucifixion, he must have other and stronger
reasons for thinking that this was so, inasmuch as he does not look
upon them as men who had seen our Lord raise any one from the dead,
nor restore the eyes of the blind.

According to him, they may have seen Christ exercise unusual power
over the insane, and temporary alleviations of sickness, due perhaps
to mental excitement, may have taken place in their presence and
passed for miracles; he would doubt how far they had even seen this
much, for he would insist on many passages in the Gospels which would
point in the direction of our Lord's never having professed to work a
single miracle; but even though he granted that they had seen certain
extraordinary cases of healing, there is no amount of testimony which
would for a moment satisfy him of their having seen more. WE see the
Apostles as men who before the Crucifixion had seen Lazarus raised
from death to life after the corruption of the grave had begun its
work, and who had seen sight given to one that had been born
sightless; as men who had seen miracle after miracle, with every
loophole for escape from a belief in the miraculous carefully
excluded; who had seen their master walking upon the sea, and bidding
the winds be still; our difficulty therefore is to understand the
incredulity of the Apostles as displayed abundantly in the Gospels;
but Strauss can have none such; for he must see them as men over whom
the influence of their master had been purely personal, and due to
nothing more than to a strength and beauty of character which his
followers very imperfectly understood. HE does not believe that
Lazarus was raised at all, or that the man who had been born blind
ever existed; he considers the fourth gospel, which alone records
these events, to be the work of a later age, and not to be depended
on for facts, save here and there; certainly not where the facts
recorded are miraculous. He must therefore be even more ready than
we are to admit that the faith of the Apostles was weak before the
Crucifixion; but whether he is or not, we have it on the highest
authority that their faith was not strong enough to maintain them at
the very first approach of danger, nor to have given them any hope
whatever that our Lord should rise again; whereas for Strauss's
theory to hold good, it must already have been in a white heat of
enthusiasm.

But even granting that this was so--in the face of all the evidence
we can reach--men so honest and sincere as the Apostles proved
themselves to be, would have taken other ground than the assertion
that their master had reappeared to them alive, unless some very
extraordinary occurrences had led them to believe that they had
indeed seen him. If their faith was glowing and intense at the time
of the Crucifixion--so intense that they believed in Christ as much,
or nearly as much, after the Crucifixion as before it (and unless
this were so the hallucinations could never have arisen at all, or at
any rate could never have been so unanimously accepted)--it would
have been so intense as to stand in no need of a reappearance. In
this case, if they had found that their master did not return to
them, the Apostles would probably have accepted the position that he
had, contrary to their expectation, been put to a violent death; they
would, perhaps, have come sooner or later to the conclusion that he
was immediately on death received into Heaven, and was sitting on the
right hand of God; while some extraordinary dream might have been
construed into a revelation of the fact with the manner of its
occurrence, and been soon generally believed; but the idea of our
Lord's return to earth in a gross material body whereon the wounds
were still unhealed, was perhaps the last thing that would have
suggested itself to them by way of hallucination. If their faith had
been great enough, and their spirits high enough to have allowed
hallucination to originate at all, their imagination would have
presented them at once with a glorious throne, and the splendours of
the highest Heaven as appearing through the opened firmament; it
would not surely have rested satisfied with a man whose hands and
side were wounded, and who could eat of a piece of broiled fish and
of an honeycomb. A fabric so utterly baseless as the reappearances
of our Lord (on the supposition of their being unhistoric) would have
been built of gaudier materials. To repeat, it seems impossible that
the Apostles should have attempted to connect their hallucinations
circumstantially and historically with the events which had
immediately preceded them. Hallucination would have been conscious
of a hiatus and not have tried to bridge it over. It would not have
developed the idea of our Lord's return to this grovelling and
unworthy earth prior to his assumption into glory, unless those who
were under its influence had either seen other resurrections from the
dead--in which case there is no difficulty attaching to the
Resurrection of our Lord himself--or been forced into believing it by
the evidence of their own senses; this, on the supposition that the
devotion of the first disciples was intense before the Crucifixion;
but if, on the other hand, they were at that time anything but
steadfast, as both a priori and a posteriori evidence would seem to
indicate, if they were few and wavering, and if what little faith
they had was shaken to its foundations and apparently at an end for
ever with the death of Christ, it becomes indeed difficult to see how
the idea of his return to earth alive could have ever struck even a
single one of them, much less that hallucinations which could have
had no origin but in the disordered brain of some one member of the
Apostolic body, should in a short time have been accepted by all as
by one man without a shadow of dissension, and been strong enough to
convert them, as was said above, into the most earnest and successful
body of propagandists that the world has ever seen.

Truly this is not too much to say of them; and yet we are asked to
believe that this faith, so intensely energetic, grew out of one
which can hardly be called a faith at all, in consequence of day-
dreams whose existence presupposes a faith hardly if any less intense
than that which it is supposed to have engendered. Are we not
warranted in asserting that a movement which is confined to a few
wavering followers, and which receives any very decisive check, which
scatters and demoralises the few who have already joined it, will be
absolutely sure to die a speedy natural death unless something
utterly strange and new occurs to give it a fresh impetus? Such a
resuscitating influence would have been given to the Christian
religion by the reappearance of Christ alive. This would meet the
requirements of the case, for we can all feel that if we had already
half believed in some gifted friend as a messenger from God, and if
we had seen that friend put to death before our eyes, and yet found
that the grave had no power over him, but that he could burst its
bonds and show himself to us again unmistakably alive, we should from
that moment yield ourselves absolutely his; but our faith would die
with him unless it had been utter before his death.

The devotion of the Apostles is explained by their belief in the
Resurrection, but their belief in the Resurrection is not explained
by a supposed hallucination; for their minds were not in that state
in which alone such a delusion could establish itself firmly, and
unless it were established firmly by the most apparently irrefragable
evidence of many persons, it would have had no living energy. How an
hallucination could occur in the requisite strength to the requisite
number of people is neither explained nor explicable, except upon the
supposition that the Apostles were in a very different frame of mind
at the time of Christ's Crucifixion from that which all the evidence
we can get would seem to indicate. If Strauss had first made this
point clear we could follow him. But he has not done so.

Strauss says, the conception that Christ's body had been reawakened
and changed, "a double miracle, exceeding far what had occurred in
the case of Enoch and Elijah, could only be credible to one who saw
in him a prophet far superior to them"--i.e., to one who
notwithstanding his death was persuaded that he was the Messiah:
"this conviction" (that a double miracle had been performed) "was the
first to which the Apostles had to attain in the days of their
humiliation after the Crucifixion." Yes--but how were they to attain
to it, being now utterly broken down and disillusioned? Strauss
admits that before they could have come to hold what he supposes them
to have held, they must have seen in Christ even after his
Crucifixion a prophet far greater than either Moses or Elias; whereas
in point of fact it is very doubtful whether they ever believed this
much of their master even before the Crucifixion, and hardly
questionable that after it they disbelieved in him almost entirely,
until he shewed himself to them alive. Is it possible that from the
dead embers of so weak a faith, so vast a conflagration should have
been kindled?

I submit, therefore, that independently of any direct evidence as to
the when and where of Christ's reappearances, the fact that the
Apostles before the Crucifixion were irresolute, and after it
unspeakably resolute, affords strong ground for believing that they
must have seen something, or come to know something, which to their
minds was utterly overwhelming in its convincing power: when we find
the earliest and most trustworthy records unanimously asserting that
that something was the reappearance of Christ alive, we feel that
such a reappearance was an adequate cause for the result actually
produced; and when we think over the condition of mind which both
probability and evidence assign to the Apostles, we also feel that no
other circumstance would have been adequate, nor even this unless the
proof had been such as none could reasonably escape from.

Again, Strauss's supposition that the Apostles antedated their
hallucinations suggests no less difficulty. Suppose that, after all,
Strauss is right, and that there was no actual reappearance; whatever
it was that led the Apostles to believe in such reappearance must
have been, judging by its effect, intense and memorable: it must
have been as a shock obliterating everything save the memory of
itself and the things connected with it: the time and manner of such
a shock could never have been forgotten, nor misplaced without
deliberate intention to deceive, and no one will impute any such
intention to the Apostles.

It may be said that if they were capable of believing in the reality
of their visions they would be also capable of antedating them; this
is true; but the double supposition of self-delusion, first in seeing
the visions at all, and then in unconsciously antedating them,
reduces the Apostles to such an exceedingly low level of intelligence
and trustworthiness, that no good and permanent work could come from
such persons; the men who could be weak enough, and crazed enough, if
the reader will pardon the expression, to do as Strauss suggests,
could never have carried their work through in the way they did.
Such men would have wrecked their undertaking a hundred times over in
the perils which awaited it upon every side; they would have become
victims of their own fancies and desires, with little or no other
grounds than these for any opinions they might hold or teach: from
such a condition of mind they must have gone on to one still worse;
and their tenets would have perished with them, if not sooner.

Again, as regards this antedating; unless the visions happened at
once, it is inconceivable that they should have happened at all.
Strauss believes that the disciples fled in their first terror to
their homes: that when there, "outside the range to which the power
of the enemies and murderers of their master extended, the spell of
terror and consternation which had been laid upon their minds gave
way," and that under the circumstances a reaction up to the point at
which they might have visions of Christ is capable of explanation.
The answer to this is that it is indeed likely that the spell of
terror would give way when they found themselves safe at home, but
that it is not at all likely that any reaction would take place in
favour of one to whom their allegiance had never been thorough, and
whom they supposed to have met with a violent and accursed end. It
might be easy to imagine such a reaction if we did not also attempt
to imagine the circumstances that must have preceded it; the moment
we try to do this, we find it to be an impossibility. If once the
Apostles had been dispersed, and had returned home to their former
avocations without having seen or heard anything of their master's
return to earth, all their expectations would have been ended; they
would have remained peaceable fishermen for the rest of their lives,
and been cured once and for ever of their enthusiasm.

Can we believe that the disciples, returning to Galilee in fear, and
bereaved of that master mind which had kept them from falling out
with one another, would have remained a united and enthusiastic body?
Strauss admits that their enthusiasm was for the time ended. Is it
then likely that they would have remained in any sense united, or is
it not much more likely that they would have shunned each other and
disliked allusions to the past? What but Christ's actual
reappearance could rekindle this dead enthusiasm, and fan it to such
a burning heat? Suppose that one or two disciples recovered faith
and courage, the majority would never do so. If Christ himself with
the magic of his presence could not weld them into a devoted and
harmonious company, would the rumour arising at a later time that
some one had seen him after death, be acceptable enough to make the
others believe that they too had actually seen and handled him?
Perhaps--if the rumour was believed. But WOULD it have been
believed? Or at any rate have been believed so utterly?

We cannot think it. For the belief and assertion are absolutely
without trace of dissent within the Christian body, and that body was
in the first instance composed entirely of the very persons who had
known and followed Christ before the Crucifixion. If some of the
original twelve had remained aloof and disputed the reappearances of
Christ, is it possible that no trace of such dissension should appear
in the Epistles of St. Paul? Paul differed widely enough from those
who were Apostles before him, and his language concerning them is
occasionally that of ill-concealed contempt and hatred rather than of
affection; but is there a word or hint which would seem to indicate
that a single one of those who had the best means of knowing doubted
the Resurrection? There is nothing of the kind; on the contrary,
whatever we find is such as to make us feel perfectly sure that none
of them DID doubt it. Is it then possible that this unanimity should
have sprung from the original hallucinations of a small minority?
True--it is plain from the Epistle to the Corinthians that there were
some of Paul's contemporaries who denied the Resurrection. But who
were they? We should expect that many among the more educated
Gentile converts would throw doubt upon so stupendous a miracle, but
is there anything which would point in the direction of these doubts
having been held within the original body of those who said that they
had seen Christ alive? By the eleven, or by the five hundred who saw
him at once? There is not one single syllable. Those who heard the
story second-hand would doubtless some of them attempt to explain
away its miraculous character, but if it had been founded on
hallucination it is not from these alone that the doubts would have
come.

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