The Fair Haven

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Something is imperatively demanded in order to account for the
intensity of conviction manifested by the earliest Christians shortly
after the Crucifixion; for until that time they were far from being
firmly convinced, and the Crucifixion was the very last thing to have
convinced them. Given (to speak of our Lord as he must probably
appear to Strauss) an unusually gifted teacher of a noble and
beautiful character: given also, a small body of adherents who were
inclined to adopt him as their master and to regard him as the coming
liberator, but who were nevertheless far from settled in their
conviction: given such a man and such followers: the teacher is put
to a shameful death about two years after they had first known him,
and the followers forsake him instantly: surely without his
reappearing in some way upon the scene they would have concluded that
their doubts had been right and their hopes without foundation: but
if he reappeared, their faith would, for the first time, become
intense, all-absorbing. Surely also they might be trusted to know
whether they had really seen their master return to them or not, and
not to sacrifice themselves in every way, and spend their whole lives
in bearing testimony to pure hallucination?

There is one other point on which a few words will be necessary,
before we proceed to the arguments in favour of the objective
character of Christ's Resurrection as derivable from the conversion
and testimony of St. Paul. It is this. Strauss and those who agree
with him will perhaps maintain that the Apostles were in truth wholly
devoted to Christ before the Crucifixion, but that the Evangelists
have represented them as being only half-hearted, in order to
heighten the effect of their subsequent intense devotion. But this
looks like falling into the very error which Rationalists condemn
most loudly when it comes from so-called orthodox writers. They
complain, and with too much justice, that our apologists have made
"anything out of anything." Yet if the Apostles were not
unsteadfast, and did not desert their master in his hour of peril,
and if all the accounts of Christ's reappearances are the creations
of disordered fancy, we may as well at once declare the Evangelists
to be worthless as historians, and had better give up all attempt at
the construction of history with their assistance. We cannot take
whatever we wish, and leave whatever we wish, and alter whatever we
wish. If we admit that upon the whole the Gospel writings or at any
rate the first three Gospels, contain a considerable amount of
historic matter, we should also arrive at some general principles by
which we will consistently abide in separating the historic from the
unhistoric. We cannot deal with them arbitrarily, accepting whatever
fits in with our fancies, and rejecting whatever is at variance with
them.

Now can it be maintained that the Evangelists would be so likely to
overrate the half-heartedness of the Apostles, that we should look
with suspicion upon the many and very plain indications of their
having been only half-hearted? Certainly not. If there was any
likelihood of a tendency one way or the other it would be in the
direction of overrating their faith. Would not the unbelief of the
Apostles in the face of all the recorded miracles be a most damaging
thing in the eyes of the unconverted? Would not the Apostles
themselves, after they were once firmly convinced, be inclined to
think that they had from the first believed more firmly than they
really had done? This at least would be in accordance with the
natural promptings of human instinct: we are all of us apt to be
wise after the event, and are far more prone to dwell upon things
which seem to give some colour to a pretence of prescience, than upon
those which force from us a confession of our own stupidity. It
might seem a damaging thing that the Apostles should have doubted as
much as long as they clearly did; would then the Evangelists go out
of their way to introduce more signs of hesitation? Would any one
suggest that the signs of doubt and wavering had been overrated,
unless there were some theory or other to be supported, in order to
account for which this overrating was necessary? Would the opinion
that the want of faith had been exaggerated arise prior to the
formation of a theory, or subsequently? This is the fairest test;
let the reader apply it for himself.

On the other hand, there are many reasons which should incline us to
believe that, before the Resurrection, the Apostles were less
convinced than is generally supposed, but it would be dangerous to
depart either to the right hand or to the left of that which we find
actually recorded, namely, that in the main the Apostles were
prepared to accept Christ before the Crucifixion, but that they were
by no means resolute and devoted followers. I submit that this is a
fair rendering of the spirit of what we find in the Gospels. It is
just because Strauss has chosen to depart from it that he has found
himself involved in the maze of self-contradiction through which we
have been trying to follow him. There is no position so absurd that
it cannot be easily made to look plausible, if the strictly
scientific method of investigation is once departed from.

But if I had been in Strauss's place, and had wished to make out a
case against Christianity without much heed of facts, I should not
have done it by a theory of hallucinations. A much prettier, more
novel and more sensational opening for such an attempt is afforded by
an attack upon the Crucifixion itself. A very neat theory might be
made, that there may have been some disturbance at one of the Jewish
passovers, during which some persons were crucified as an example by
the Romans: that during this time Christ happened to be missing;
that he reappeared, and finally departed, whither, no man can say:
that the Apostles, after his last disappearance, remembering that he
had been absent during the tumult, little by little worked themselves
up into the belief that on his reappearance they had seen wounds upon
him, and that the details of the Crucifixion were afterwards revealed
in a vision to some favoured believer, until in the course of a few
years the narrative assumed its present shape: that then the
reappearance of Christ was denied among the Jews, while the
Crucifixion as attaching disgrace to him was not disputed, and that
it thus became so generally accepted as to find its way into Pliny
and Josephus. This tissue of absurdity may serve as an example of
what the unlicensed indulgence of theory might lead to; but truly it
would be found quite as easy of belief as that the early Christian
faith in the Resurrection was due to hallucination only.

Considering, then, that Christianity was not crushed but overran the
most civilised portions of the world; that St. Paul was undoubtedly
early told, in such a manner as for him to be thoroughly convinced of
the fact, that on some few but sufficient occasions Christ was seen
alive after he had been crucified; that the general belief in the
reappearance of our Lord was so strong that those who had the best
means of judging gave up all else to preach it, with a unanimity and
singleness of purpose which is irreconcilable with hallucination;
that all our records most definitely insist upon this belief and that
there is no trace of its ever having been disputed among the Jewish
Christians, it seems hard to see how we can escape from admitting
that Jesus Christ was crucified, dead, and buried, and yet that he
was verily and indeed seen alive again by those who expected nothing
less, but who, being once convinced, turned the whole world after
them.

It is now incumbent upon us to examine the testimony of St. Paul, to
which I would propose to devote a separate chapter.

CHAPTER III--THE CHARACTER AND CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL

Setting aside for the present the story of St. Paul's conversion as
given in the Acts of the Apostles--for I am bound to admit that there
are circumstances in connection with that account which throw doubt
upon its historical accuracy--and looking at the broad facts only, we
are struck at once with the following obvious reflection, namely,
that Paul was an able man, a cultivated man, and a bitter opponent of
Christianity; but that in spite of the strength of his original
prejudices, he came to see what he thought convincing reasons for
going over to the camp of his enemies. He went over, and with the
result we are all familiar.

Now even supposing that the miraculous account of Paul's conversion
is entirely devoid of foundation, or again, as I believe myself, that
the story given in the Acts is not correctly placed, but refers to
the vision alluded to by Paul himself (I. Cor. xv.), and to events
which happened, not coincidently with his conversion, but some years
after it--does not the importance of the conversion itself rather
gain than lose in consequence? A charge of unimportant inaccuracy
may be thus sustained against one who wrote in a most inaccurate age;
but what is this in comparison with the testimony borne to the
strength of the Christian evidences by the supposition that OF THEIR
OWN WEIGHT ALONE, AND WITHOUT MIRACULOUS ASSISTANCE, THEY SUCCEEDED
IN CONVINCING THE MOST BITTER, AND AT THE SAME TIME THE ABLEST, OF
THEIR OPPONENTS? This is very pregnant. No man likes to abandon the
side which he has once taken. The spectacle of a man committing
himself deeply to his original party, changing without rhyme or
reason, and then remaining for the rest of his life the most devoted
and courageous adherent of all that he had opposed, without a single
human inducement to make him do so, is one which has never been
witnessed since man was man. When men who have been committed deeply
and spontaneously to one cause, leave it for another, they do so
either because facts have come to their knowledge which are new to
them and which they cannot resist, or because their temporal
interests urge them, or from caprice: but if they change from
caprice in important matters and after many pledges given, they will
change from caprice again: they will not remain for twenty-five or
thirty years without changing a jot of their capriciously formed
opinions. We are therefore warranted in assuming that St. Paul's
conversion to Christianity was not dictated by caprice: it was not
dictated by self-interest: it must therefore have sprung from the
weight of certain new facts which overbore all the resistance which
he could make to them.

What then could these facts have been?

Paul's conduct as a Jew was logical and consistent: he did what any
seriously-minded man who had been strictly brought up would have done
in his situation. Instead of half believing what he had been taught,
he believed it wholly. Christianity was cutting at the root of what
was in his day accepted as fundamental: it was therefore perfectly
natural that he should set himself to attack it. There is nothing
against him in this beyond the fact of his having done it, as far as
we can see, with much cruelty. Yet though cruel, he was cruel from
the best of motives--the stamping out of an error which was harmful
to the service of God; and cruelty was not then what it is now: the
age was not sensitive and the lot of all was harder. From the first
he proved himself to be a man of great strength of character, and
like many such, deeply convinced of the soundness of his opinions,
and deeply impressed with the belief that nothing could be good which
did not also commend itself as good to him. He tested the truth of
his earlier convictions not by external standards, but by the
internal standard of their own strength and purity--a fearful error
which but for God's mercy towards him would have made him no less
wicked than well-intentioned.

Even after having been convinced by a weight of evidence which no
prejudice could resist, and after thus attaining to a higher
conception of right and truth and goodness than was possible to him
as a Jew, there remained not a few traces of the old character.
Opposition beyond certain limits was a thing which to the end of his
life he could not brook. It is not too much to say that he regarded
the other Apostles--and was regarded by them--with suspicion and
dislike; even if an angel from Heaven had preached any other doctrine
than what Paul preached, the angel was to be accursed (Gal. i., 8),
and it is not probable that he regarded his fellow Apostles as
teaching the same doctrine as himself, or that he would have allowed
them greater licence than an angel. It is plain from his undoubted
Epistles to the Corinthians and Galatians that the other Apostles, no
less than his converts, exceedingly well knew that he was not a man
to be trifled with. If the arm of the law had been as much on his
side after his conversion as before it, it would have gone hardly
with dissenters; they would have been treated with politic tenderness
the moment that they yielded, but woe betide them if they presumed on
having any very decided opinions of their own.

On the other hand, his sagacity is beyond dispute; it is certain that
his perception of what the Gentile converts could and could not bear
was the main proximate cause of the spread of Christianity. He
prevented it from becoming a mere Jewish sect, and it has been well
said that but for him the Jews would now be Christians, and the
Gentiles unbelievers. Who can doubt his tact and forbearance, where
matters not essential were concerned? His strength in not yielding a
fraction upon vital points was matched only by his suppleness and
conciliatory bearing upon all others. To use his own words, he did
indeed become "all things to all men" if by any means he could gain
some, and the probability is that he pushed this principle to its
extreme (see Acts xxi., 20-26).

Now when we see a man so strong and yet so yielding--the writer
moreover of letters which shew an intellect at once very vigorous and
very subtle (not to say more of them), and when we know that there
was no amount of hardship, pain, and indignity, which he did not bear
and count as gain in the service of Jesus Christ; when we also
remember that he continued thus for all the known years of his life
after his conversion, can we think that that conversion could have
been the result of anything even approaching to caprice? Or again,
is it likely that it could have been due to contact with the
hallucinations of his despised and hated enemies? Paul the Christian
appears to be the same sort of man in most respects as Paul the Jew,
yet can we imagine Paul the Christian as being converted from
Christianity to some other creed, by the infection of hallucinations?
On the contrary, no man would more quickly have come to the bottom of
them, and assigned them to diabolical agency. What then can that
thing have been, which wrenched the strong and able man from all that
had the greatest hold upon him, and fixed him for the rest of his
life as the most self-sacrificing champion of Christianity? In
answer to this question we might say, that it is of no great
importance how the change was made, inasmuch as the fact of its
having been made at all is sufficiently pregnant. Nevertheless it
will be interesting to follow Strauss in his remarks upon the account
given in the Acts, and I am bound to add that I think he has made out
his case. Strange! that he should have failed to see that the
evidences in support of the Resurrection are incalculably
strengthened by his having done so. How short-sighted is mere
ingenuity! And how weak and cowardly are they who shut their eyes to
facts because they happen to come from an opponent!

Strauss, however, writes as follows:- "That we are not bound to the
individual features of the account in the Acts is shewn by comparing
it with the substance of the statement twice repeated in the language
of Paul himself: for there we find that the author's own account is
not accurate, and that he attributed no importance to a few
variations more or less. Not only is it said on one occasion that
the attendants stood dumb-foundered: on another that they fell with
Paul to the ground; on one occasion that they heard the voice but saw
no one; on another that they saw the light but did not hear the voice
of him who spoke with Paul: but also the speech of Jesus himself, in
the third repetition, gets the well known addition about "kicking
against the pricks," to say nothing of the fact that the appointment
to the Apostleship of the Gentiles, which according to the two
earlier accounts was made partly by Ananias, partly on the occasion
of a subsequent vision in the Temple at Jerusalem, is in this last
account incorporated in the speech of Jesus. There is no occasion to
derive the three accounts of this occurrence in the Acts from
different sources, and even in this case one must suppose that the
author of the Acts must have remarked and reconciled the
discrepancies; that he did not do so, or rather that without
following his own earlier narrative he repeated it in an arbitrary
form, proves to us how careless the New Testament writers are about
details of this kind, important as they are to one who strives after
strict historical accuracy.

"But even if the author of the Acts had gone more accurately to work,
still he was not an eye witness, scarcely even a writer who took the
history from the narrative of an eye witness. Even if we consider
the person who in different places comprehends himself and the
Apostle Paul under the word 'we' or 'us' to have been the composer of
the whole work, that person was not on the occasion of the occurrence
before Damascus as yet in the company of the Apostle. Into this he
did not enter until much later, in the Troad, on the Apostle's second
missionary journey (Acts xvi., 10). But that hypothesis with regard
to the author of the Acts of the Apostles is, moreover, as we have
seen above, erroneous. He only worked up into different passages of
his composition the memoranda of a temporary companion of the Apostle
about the journeys performed in his company, and we are therefore not
justified in considering the narrator to have been an eye witness in
those passages and sections in which the 'we' is wanting. Now among
these is found the very section in which appear the two accounts of
his conversion which Paul gives, first, to the Jewish people in
Jerusalem, secondly, to Agrippa and Festus in Caesarea. The last
occasion on which the 'we' was found was xxi., 18, that of the visit
of Paul to James, and it does not appear again until xxvii., 1, when
the subject is the Apostle's embarkation for Italy. Nothing
therefore compels us to assume that we have in the reports of these
speeches the account of any one who had been a party to the hearing
of them, and, in them, Paul's own narrative of the occurrences that
took place on his conversion."

The belief in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures having been
long given up by all who have considered the awful consequences which
it entails, the Bible records have been opened to modern criticism:-
the result has been that their general accuracy is amply proved,
while at the same time the writers must be admitted to have fallen in
with the feelings and customs of their own times, and must
accordingly be allowed to have been occasionally guilty of what would
in our own age be called inaccuracies. There is no dependence to be
placed on the verbal, or indeed the substantial, accuracy of any
ancient speeches, except those which we know to have been reported
verbatim, they were (as with the Herodotean and Thucydidean speeches)
in most cases the invention of the historian himself, as being what
seemed most appropriate to be said by one in the position of the
speaker. Reporting was a rare art among the ancients, and was
confined to a few great centres of intellectual activity; accuracy,
moreover, was not held to be of the same importance as at the present
day. Yet without accurate reporting a speech perishes as soon as it
is uttered, except in so far as it lives in the actions of those who
hear it. Even a hundred years ago the invention of speeches was
considered a matter of course, as in the well-known case of Dr.
Johnson, than whom none could be more conscientious, and--according
to his lights--accurate. I may perhaps be pardoned for quoting the
passage in full from Boswell, who gives it on the authority of Mr.
John Nichols; the italics are mine. "He said that the Parliamentary
debates were the only part of his writings which then gave him any
compunction: BUT THAT AT THE TIME HE WROTE THEM HE HAD NO CONCEPTION
THAT HE WAS IMPOSING UPON THE WORLD, THOUGH THEY WERE FREQUENTLY
WRITTEN FROM VERY SLENDER MATERIALS, AND OFTEN FROM NONE AT ALL--THE
MERE COINAGE OF HIS OWN IMAGINATION. HE never wrote any part of his
works with equal velocity. (Boswell's Life of Johnson, chap.
lxxxii.)

This is an extreme case, yet there can be no question about its
truth. It is only one among the very many examples which could be
adduced in order to shew that the appreciation of the value of
accuracy is a thing of modern date only--a thing which we owe mainly
to the chemical and mechanical sciences, wherein the inestimable
difference between precision and inaccuracy became most speedily
apparent. If the reader will pardon an apparent digression, I would
remark that that sort of care is wanted on behalf of Christianity
with which a cashier in a bank counts out the money that he tenders--
counting it and recounting it as though he could never be sure enough
before he allowed it to leave his hands. This caution would have
saved the wasting of many lives, and the breaking of many hearts.

We, on the other hand, however reckless we may be ourselves, are in
the habit of assuming that any historian whom we may have occasion to
consult, and on whose testimony we would fain rely, must have himself
weighed and re-weighed his words as the cashier his money; an error
which arises from want of that sympathy which should make us bear
constantly in mind what lights men had, under what influences they
wrote, and what we should ourselves have done had we been so placed
as they. But if any will maintain that though the general run of
ancient speeches were, as those supposed to have been reported by
Johnson, pure invention, yet that it is not likely that one reporting
the words of Almighty God should have failed to feel the awful
responsibility of his position, we can only answer that the writer of
the Acts did most indisputably so fail, as is shewn by the various
reports of those words which he has himself given: if he could in
the innocency of his heart do this, and at one time report the
Almighty as saying this, and at another that, as though, more or
less, this or that were a matter of no moment, what certainty can we
have concerning such a man that inaccuracy shall not elsewhere be
found in him? None. He is a warped mirror which will distort every
object that it reflects.

It follows, then, that from the Acts of the Apostles we have no data
for arriving at any conclusion as to the manner of Paul's change of
faith, nor the circumstances connected with it. To us the accounts
there given should be simply non-existent; but this is not easy, for
we have heard them too often and from too early an age to be able to
escape their influence; yet we must assuredly ignore them if we are
anxious to arrive at truth. We cannot let the story told in the Acts
enter into any judgement which we may form concerning Paul's
character. The desire to represent him as having been converted by
miracle was very natural. He himself tells us that he saw visions,
and received his apostleship by revelation--not necessarily at the
time of, or immediately after, his conversion, but still at some
period or other in his life; it would be the most natural thing in
the world for the writer of the Acts to connect some version of one
of these visions with the conversion itself: the dramatic effect
would be heightened by making the change, while the change itself
would be utterly unimportant in the eyes of such a writer; be this
however as it may, we are only now concerned with the fact that we
know nothing about Paul's conversion from the Acts of the Apostles,
which should make us believe that that conversion was wrought in him
by any other means, than by such an irresistible pressure of evidence
as no sane person could withstand.

From the Apostle's own writings we can glean nothing about his
conversion which would point in the direction of its having been
sudden or miraculous. It is true that in the Epistle to the
Galatians he says, "After it had pleased God to reveal his Son in
me," but this expression does not preclude the supposition that his
conversion may have been led up to by a gradual process, the
culmination of which (if that) he alone regarded as miraculous. Thus
we are forced to admit that we know nothing from any source
concerning the manner and circumstances of St. Paul's change from
Judaism to Christianity, and we can only conclude therefore that he
changed because he found the weight of the evidence to be greater
than he could resist. And this, as we have seen, is an exceedingly
telling fact. The probability is, that coming much into contact with
Christians through his persecution of them, and submitting them to
the severest questioning, he found that they were in all respects
sober plainspoken men, that their conviction was intense, their story
coherent, and the doctrines which they had received simple and
ennobling; that these results of many inquisitions were so unvarying
that he found conviction stealing gradually upon him against his
will; common honesty compelled him to inquire further; the answers
pointed invariably in one direction only; until at length he found
himself utterly unable to resist the weight of evidence which he had
collected, and resolved, perhaps at the last suddenly, to yield
himself a convert to Christianity.

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