Note 142 — Chapter IV · DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

In the point of view held by the Evangelists, this conception is not contradicted even by those particulars which the friends of the purely natural opinion respecting the life of the risen Jesus are accustomed to urge in their support. That Jesus ate and drank was, in the circle of ideas within which the gospels originated, as far from presupposing a real necessity, as the meal of which Jehovah partook with two angels in the tent of Abraham: the power of eating is here no proof of a necessity for eating.142 That he caused himself to be touched, was the only possible mode of refuting the conjecture that an incorporeal spectre had appeared to the disciples; moreover, divine existences, not merely in Grecian, but also (according to the passage above quoted, Gen. xxxii. 24) in Hebrew antiquity, sometimes appeared palpable, in distinction from unsubstantial shades, though they otherwise showed themselves as little bound by the laws of materiality as the palpable Jesus, when he suddenly vanished, and was able to penetrate without hindrance into a room of which the door was closed.143