Note 124 — Chapter IV · DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

Now the general ideas which may be formed of the life of Jesus after his resurrection are two: either it was a natural and perfectly human life, and accordingly his body continued to be subject to the physical and organic laws; or his life was already of a higher, superhuman character, and his body supernatural and transfigured: and the accounts, taken unitedly, present certain traits to which, on the first view, each of these two ideas may respectively appeal. The human form with its natural members, the possibility of being known by means of them, the continuance of the marks of the wounds, the human speech, the acts of walking and breaking bread,—all these appear to speak in favour of a perfectly natural life on the part of Jesus even after the resurrection. If it were possible still to demur to this, and to conjecture, that even a higher, heavenly corporeality might give itself such an aspect and perform such functions: all doubts must be quelled by the further statement, that Jesus after the resurrection consumed earthly food, and allowed himself to be touched. Such things are indeed ascribed even to higher beings in old myths, as for example, eating to the heavenly forms from whom Abraham received a visit (Gen. xviii. 8), and palpability to the God that wrestled with Jacob (Gen. xxxii. 24 ff.): but it must nevertheless be insisted that in reality both these conditions can only belong to material, organized bodies. Hence not only the rationalists, but even orthodox expositors, consider these particulars as an irrefragable proof that the body and life of Jesus after the resurrection must be regarded as remaining still natural and human.124 This opinion is further supported by the remark, that in the state of the risen Jesus there is observable precisely the same progress as might be expected in the gradual, natural cure of a person severely wounded. In the first hours after the resurrection he is obliged to remain in the vicinity of the grave; in the afternoon his strength suffices for a walk to the neighbouring village of Emmaus; and only later is he able to undertake the more distant journey into Galilee. Then also in the permission to touch his body there exists the remarkable gradation, that on the morning of the resurrection Jesus forbids Mary Magdalene to touch him, because his wounded body was as yet too suffering and sensitive; but eight days later, he himself invites Thomas to touch his wounds. Even the circumstance that Jesus after his resurrection was so seldom with his disciples and for so short a time, is, according to this explanation, a proof that he had brought from the grave his natural, human body, for such an one would necessarily feel so weak from the wounds and torture of the cross, as always after short periods of exertion to require longer intervals of quiet retirement.