Note 144 — Chapter IV · DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

It is quite another question, whether on our more advanced position, and with our more correct knowledge of nature, those two different classes of particulars can be held compatible with each other. Here we must certainly say: a body which consumes visible food, must itself be visible; the consumption of food presupposes an organism, but an organism is organized matter, and this has not the property of alternately vanishing and becoming visible again at will.144 More especially, if the body of Jesus was capable of being felt, and presented perceptible flesh and bones, it thus exhibited the impenetrability of matter, proper to it as solid: if on the other hand he was able to pass into closed houses and rooms, unhindered by the interposition of walls and doors, he thus proved that the impenetrability of solid matter did not belong to him. Since then according to the evangelical accounts he must at the same time have had and not have had the same property: the evangelical representation of the corporeality of Jesus after the resurrection is manifested to be contradictory. And this contradiction is not of such a kind that it is divided among the different narrators; but the account of one and the same Evangelist includes those contradictory features within itself. The brief account of Matthew, it is true, implies in the embracing of the feet of Jesus by the women (v. 9) only the attribute of palpability, without at the same time presenting an opposite one; with Mark the case is reversed, his statement that Jesus appeared in another form (v. 12) implying something supernatural, while on the other hand he does not decidedly presuppose the opposite; in Luke, on the other hand, the permission to touch his body and the act of eating speak as decidedly in favour of organic materiality, as the sudden appearance and disappearance speak against it; but the members of this contradiction come the most directly into collision in John, where Jesus, immediately after he has entered into the closed room unimpeded by walls and doors,145 causes the doubting Thomas to touch him.