Note 170 — Chapter IV · DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

Here however there presents itself a distinction, which seems at once to render the event in the history of Paul unavailable for the explanation of those earlier appearances. To the Apostle Paul, namely, the idea that Jesus had risen and appeared to many persons was delivered as the belief of the sect which he persecuted; he had only to receive it into his conviction and to vivify it in his imagination until it became a part of his own experience: the earlier disciples, on the contrary, had before them as a fact merely the death of their Messiah,—the notion of a resurrection on his part they could nowhere gather, but must, according to our conception of the matter, have first produced it; a problem which appears to be beyond all comparison more difficult than that subsequently presented to the Apostle Paul. In order to form a correct judgment on this subject, we must transport ourselves yet more completely into the situation and frame of mind into which the disciples of Jesus were thrown by his death. During several years’ intercourse with them he had constantly impressed them more and more decidedly with the belief that he was the Messiah; but his death, which they were unable to reconcile with their messianic ideas, had for the moment annihilated this belief. Now when, after the first shock was past, the earlier impression began to revive: there spontaneously arose in them the psychological necessity of solving the contradiction between the ultimate fate of Jesus and their earlier opinion of him—of adopting into their idea of the Messiah the characteristics of suffering and death. As, however, with the Jews of that age to comprehend meant nothing else than to derive from the sacred scriptures: they turned to these, to ascertain whether they might not perhaps find in them intimations of a suffering and dying Messiah. Foreign as the idea of such a Messiah is to the Old Testament, the disciples, who wished to find it there, must nevertheless have regarded as intimations of this kind, all those poetical and prophetic passages which, like Isa. liii., Ps. xxii., represented the man of God as afflicted and bowed down even to death. Thus Luke states as the chief occupation of the risen Jesus in his interview with the disciples, that beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself, i.e. that Christ ought to have suffered such things (xxiv. 26 f., 44 ff.). When they had in this manner received into their messianic idea ignominy, suffering and death, the ignominiously executed Jesus was not lost, but still remained to them: by his death he had only entered into his messianic glory (Luke xxiv. 26) in which he was invisibly with them always, even unto the end of the world (Matt. xxviii. 20). But how could he fail, out of this glory, in which he lived, to give tidings of himself to his followers? and how could they, when their mind was opened to the hitherto hidden doctrine of a dying Messiah contained in the scriptures, and when in moments of unwonted inspiration their hearts burned within them (Luke xxiv. 32),—how could they avoid conceiving this to be an influence shed on them by their glorified Christ, an opening of their understanding by him (v. 45), nay, an actual conversing with him?170 Lastly, how conceivable is it that in individuals, especially women, these impressions were heightened, in a purely subjective manner, into actual vision; that on others, even on whole assemblies, something or other of an objective nature, visible or audible, sometimes perhaps the sight of an unknown person, created the impression of a revelation or appearance of Jesus: a height of pious enthusiasm which is wont to appear elsewhere in religious societies peculiarly oppressed and persecuted. But if the crucified Messiah had truly entered into the highest form of blessed existence, he ought not to have left his body in the grave: and if in precisely such Old Testament passages as admitted of a typical relation to the sufferings of the Messiah, there was at the same time expressed the hope: thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption (Ps. xvi. 10; Acts ii. 27); while in Isa. liii. 10, he who had been represented as led to the slaughter and buried, was yet promised a prolongation of his days: what was more natural to the disciples than to reinstate their earlier Jewish ideas, which the death of Jesus had disturbed, namely, that the Christ remaineth for ever (John xii. 34), through the medium of an actual revivification of their dead master, and, as it was a messianic attribute one day to call the dead bodily from the grave, to imagine also as returning to life in the manner of a resurrection?