Note 165 — Chapter IV · DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

Far more fruitful is the appeal to the passage of Paul (1 Cor. xv. 5 ff.), as the most appropriate starting point in this inquiry, and the key to the comprehension of all the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection.165 When Paul there places the Christophany which occurred to himself in the same series with the appearances of Jesus in the days after his resurrection: this authorizes us, so far as nothing else stands in the way of such an inference, to conclude that, for aught the Apostle knew, those earlier appearances were of the same nature with the one experienced by himself. Now with respect to the latter as narrated to us in the Acts (ix. 1 ff., xxii. 3 ff., xxvi. 12 ff.), it is no longer possible, after the analysis of Eichhorn166 and Ammon,167 to retain it as an external, objective appearance of the real Christ; even Neander168 does not positively dare to maintain more than an internal influence of Christ on the mind of Paul, only appending in a very beseeching manner the supposition of an external appearance; and even that internal influence he himself renders superfluous by detailing the causes which might in a natural manner produce such a revolution in the disposition of the man thus: the favourable impression of Christianity, of the doctrine, life and conduct of its adherents, which he had here and there received, especially on the occasion of the martyrdom of Stephen, threw his mind into a state of excitement and conflict, which he might indeed for a time forcibly repress, perhaps even by redoubled zeal against the new sect, but which must at last find vent in a decisive spiritual crisis, concerning which it need not surprise us that in an oriental it took the form of a Christophany. If according to this we have in the Apostle Paul an example, that strong impressions from the infant Christian community might carry an ardent mind that had long striven against it, to a pitch of exaltation which issued in a Christophany, and a total change of sentiment: surely the impression of the sublime personality of Jesus would suffice to inspire into his immediate disciples, struggling with the doubts concerning his messiahship which his death had excited in them, the experience of similar visions. They who think it necessary and desirable in relation to the Christophany of Paul to call in the aid of external natural phenomena, as thunder and lightning, may also seek to facilitate the explanation of the appearances of the risen Jesus which his immediate disciples believed themselves to have previously had, by the supposition of similar incidents.169 Only it must be observed that, as Eichhorn’s explanation of the event in the life of Paul proved a failure from his maintaining as historical every single detail in the New Testament narrative, as the blindness of Paul and his cure, the vision of Ananias, and so on, which he could only transform into natural occurrences by a very strained interpretation: so it would inevitably render impossible the psychological explanation of the appearances of Jesus, to acknowledge as historical all the evangelical narratives concerning them, especially those of the tests which Thomas applied by touching the wounds of Jesus, and which Jesus himself afforded by taking material nourishment; and indeed these narratives, from the contradiction which they are shown to present, have not the slightest claim to such a character. The two first gospels, and our chief informant in this matter, the Apostle Paul, tell us nothing of such tests, and it is quite natural that the Christophanies which, in the actual experience of the women and Apostles, may have floated before them as visions of much the same character as that which Paul had on the way to Damascus, when once received into tradition, should by reason of the apologetic effort to cut off all doubts as to their reality, be continually more and more consolidated so that the mute appearances became speaking ones, the ghostlike form was exchanged for one that ate, and the merely visible body was made palpable also.