Note 62 — Chapter IV · DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

In this narrative, peculiar to the first gospel, critics have found all kinds of difficulties, which have been exposed with the most acumen by the author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, and after him by Paulus.62 The difficulties lie first of all in this: that neither the requisite conditions of the event, nor its necessary consequences, are presented in the rest of the New Testament history. As regards the former, it is not to be conceived how the Sanhedrists could obtain the information, that Jesus was to return to life three days after his death: since there is no trace of such an idea having existed even among his disciples. They say: We remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, etc. If we are to understand from this that they remembered to have heard him speak to that effect; Jesus, according to the evangelical accounts, never spoke plainly of his resurrection in the presence of his enemies; and the figurative discourses which remained unintelligible to his confidential disciples, could still less be understood by the Jewish hierarchs, who were less accustomed to his mode of thought and expression. If, however, the Sanhedrists merely intend to say, that they had heard from others of his having given such a promise: this intelligence could only have proceeded from the disciples; but as these had not, either before or after the death of Jesus, the slightest anticipation of his resurrection, they could not have excited such an anticipation in others;—not to mention that we have been obliged to reject as unhistorical the whole of the predictions of the resurrection lent to Jesus in the gospels. Equally incomprehensible with this knowledge on the part of the enemies of Jesus, is the silence of his friends, the Apostles and the other Evangelists besides Matthew, concerning a circumstance so favourable to their cause. It is certainly applying too modern a standard to the conduct of the disciples to say with the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist, that they must have entreated from Pilate a letter under his seal in attestation of the fact that a watch had been set over the grave: but it must be held surprising that in none of the apostolic speeches is there anywhere an appeal to so striking a fact, and that even in the gospels, with the exception of the first, it has left no discoverable trace. An attempt has been made to explain this silence from the consideration, that the bribing of the guards by the Sanhedrim had rendered an appeal to them fruitless:63 but truth is not so readily surrendered to such obvious falsehoods, and at all events, when the adherents of Jesus had to defend themselves before the Sanhedrim, the mention of such a fact must have been a powerful weapon. The cause is already half given up when its advocates retreat to the position, that the disciples probably did not become acquainted with the true cause of the event immediately, but only later, when the soldiers began to betray the secret.64 For even if the guards in the first instance merely set afloat the tale of the theft, and thus admitted that they had been placed by the grave, the adherents of Jesus could already construe for themselves the real state of the case, and might boldly appeal to the guards, who must have been witnesses of something quite different from the theft of a corpse. But lest we be told of the invalidity of an argument drawn from the merely negative fact of silence, there is something positive narrated concerning a part of the adherents of Jesus, namely, the women, which is not reconcilable with the fact of a watch being placed at the grave. Not only do the women who resort to the grave on the morning after the Sabbath, intend to complete the embalming which they could not hope to be permitted to do, if they knew that a watch was placed before the grave, and that this was besides sealed:65 but according to Mark their whole perplexity on their way to the grave turns upon the question, who will roll away the stone for them from the grave; a clear proof that they knew nothing of the guards, since these either would not have allowed them to remove the stone, however light, or if they would have allowed this, would also have helped them to roll away a heavier one; so that in any case the difficulty as to the weight of the stone would have been superfluous. But that the placing of the watch should have remained unknown to the women is, from the attention which everything relative to the end of Jesus excited in Jerusalem (Luke xxiv. 18), highly improbable.