Note 158 — Chapter IV · DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

If we compare with this account of the resurrection of Jesus, the precise and internally consistent attestation of his death: we must incline to the other side of the dilemma above stated, and be induced to doubt the reality of the resurrection rather than that of the death. Hence Celsus chose this alternative, deriving the alleged appearance of Jesus after the resurrection, from the self-delusion of the disciples, especially the women, either dreaming or waking; or from what appeared to him still more probable, intentional deception:158 and more modern writers, as, for example, the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist, have adopted the accusation of the Jews in Matthew, namely, that the disciples stole the body of Jesus, and afterwards fabricated, with slender agreement, stories of his resurrection and subsequent appearances.159 This suspicion is repelled by the remark of Origen, that a spontaneous falsehood on the part of the disciples could not possibly have animated them to so unflinching an announcement of the resurrection of Jesus amid the greatest perils;160 and it is a just argument of modern apologists that the astonishing revolution from the deep depression and utter hopelessness of the disciples at the death of Jesus, to the strong faith and enthusiasm with which they proclaimed him as the Messiah on the succeeding Pentecost, would be inexplicable unless in the interim something extraordinarily encouraging had taken place—something, in fact, which had convinced them of his resurrection.161 But that this cause of conviction was precisely a real appearance of the risen Jesus—that, indeed it was necessarily an external event at all—is by no means proved. If we chose to remain on supranatural ground, we might with Spinoza suppose that a vision was produced by miraculous means in the minds of the disciples, the object of which was to make evident to them, in a manner accordant with their powers of comprehension and the ideas of their age, that Jesus by his virtuous life had risen from spiritual death, and that to those who followed his example he would grant a similar resurrection.162 With one foot at least on the same ground stands the supposition of Weisse, that the departed spirit of Jesus really acted on the disciples whom he had left behind; in connexion with which he refers to the apparitions of spirits, the impossibility of which remains unproved.163 In order to escape from the magic circle of the supernatural, others have searched for natural external causes which might induce the belief that Jesus had risen and had been seen after his resurrection. The first impetus to this opinion, it has been conjectured, was given by the circumstance that on the second morning after the burial his grave was found empty, the linen clothes which lay in it being taken first for angels and then for an appearance of the risen Jesus himself:164 but if the body of Jesus was not reanimated, how are we to suppose that it came out of the grave? Here it would be necessary to recur to the supposition of a theft: unless the intimation of John, that Jesus on account of haste was laid in a strange grave, were thought available for the conjecture that perhaps the owner of the grave caused the corpse to be removed: which however the disciples must subsequently have learned, and which in any case has too frail a foundation in the solitary statement of the fourth gospel.