which I leave with you and do not develop. There is another point on which I wish to say rather more. In our traditions of Jesus, there are sayings of His which could not possibly have been invented by His followers; and for this reason that they were sayings which there was no temptation to invent, and which, once they had been spoken, there was considerable temptation for the Gospel narrator to suppress. When, for example, Jesus is represented as confessing that He is ignorant of the day of His own second coming, or when again, He asks the Scribe, 'Why callest thou Me good?' or when He utters the cry of desertion on the Cross, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?' who does not see that in utterances of that kind, we have a certain proof of the authenticity of the saying and of the historicity of the speaker? Because those who came to write afterwards, and who wished to set Jesus before their readers in His glory, were surely tempted to suppress, if, as we are assured by our opponents, they were open to influences of that kind at all, such sayings as represented Jesus expressing His own ignorance or regarding Himself as deserted by God upon the Cross. Sayings of that kind could never have been invented, and the later you make the Gospels the more difficult invention becomes, since more and more then was the tendency as men moved further

1

story

away from the historical Jesus to express doctrines of Him which overlooked and tried to whittle away the force of sayings of that description." In bringing to a close this short dissertation on the existence of Jesus, we cannot pass over the oft-repeated Pandira story, that the Founder of Christianity is one with Jesus the son of Panther or Pandira a Roman soldier, and Miriam or Mary, a Hebrew girl. This story taken from the Talmud has reference to a man named Jesus who lived a hundred years before the birth of the Christian Jesus. Haeckel in his Riddle of the Universe repeated the calumny at second-hand and had to retract it. Yet it appears and re-appears as something new, and it is well once for all to state that it has nothing whatever to do with Jesus of Nazareth to whom it can in no possible way refer. Mr. McCabe Conclusion in his defence of Haeckel has acknowledged the true historical Jesus is an source of this shameful story. We may then de-character clare with certainty that Jesus Christ was no myth but a real historical personage. As John Stuart Mill has well said: "Who among his disciples, Testimony of John Stuart or among the proselytes, was capable of inventing Mill the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? " 2

1 Prof. Peake, M.A. (late Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Tutor at Primitive Methodist and Lancashire Independent College), Did Jesus rise again?

2 Essay on Theism, p. 253.

Death of

be proved; necessity of it

Swoon theory

CHAPTER V

THE DEATH OF JESUS CHRIST

CLEARLY if Jesus Christ did not die He could not

Jesus must rise again. Hence we have to show that He did really die, for there are critics who allege that the Resurrection can be readily explained on the hypothesis that Christ merely swooned and was removed in that state to the tomb, where He revived and subsequently appeared to His followers, thus giving rise to the belief in His Resurrection. We intend first of all to adduce Pagan testimony to the fact of the death of Christ, then Jewish and finally Christian evidence. And it may be as well to say here a few words concerning the paucity of documents relating to Christianity in general which have come down to us from the first two centuries of the Christian era. We must remember that printing was then unknown, and that the parchments and scrolls on which men wrote were peculiarly liable to destruction. These records were of great value and not printed in numerous copies and many editions, as they are to-day. And from time to time these valuable memorials of the past

Causes of paucity of early documents

24

fell into the hands of hordes of ignorant soldiers in time of war, by whom they were destroyed. We know that the great Alexandrian Library, where it is said that there were some seven hundred thousand manuscripts, was partly burnt during the siege by Cæsar, and finally destroyed with all its historical treasures in the year A.D. 391. As to Jerusalem itself, the Temple and all the ancient quarters of the city with all their manuscripts were destroyed by fire in the siege by Titus A.D. 70. We can then hardly be surprised that so little has come down to us from those early days. And yet, more than enough has reached us to prove that Jesus Christ not only lived, but that He died upon the cross in the reign of Tiberius, and under the Judæan procurator, Pontius Pilate. We have Tacitus a already adduced Tacitus as a witness to the ex- death of istence of Christ. He is more. He gives testimony Christ to the fact of the crucifixion, for he says that Christ "had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate, in the reign of Tiberius". Tacitus was writing of the persecution under Nero, which took place thirty years after the death of Christ, and he wrote this passage seventy years after the latter event, thus referring to it as a well-known fact of history. Lucian says (120 to 200 A.D.): "Moreover their first Lawgiver has taught them

1 Annals, xv. 44.

witness to

Pilati

(the Christians) that they are all brethren, when once they have turned and renounced the gods of the Greeks, and worship this master of theirs WHO WAS CRUCIFIED, and engage to live according to his laws". There are numerous references to the sufferings of the early Christians in the writings of Tacitus, Suetonius, Juvenal, the younger Pliny, Martial, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, as also in the rescript of Adrian to Minutius Fundanus, the proto-consul of Asia, but the foregoing refer directly to the death of Christ. Although no Acta Pontii longer extant, the Acta Pontii Pilati, much disputed though they be, may be mentioned as evidence, since the existence of this document is rendered morally certain by the testimony of Eusebius, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr.2 It was the custom for Roman governors to keep an account of the important events which occurred in their provinces, and to send them from time to time to Rome, where these records were carefully preserved. “Παλαιοῦ κεκρατηκότος ἔθους τοῖς τῶν έθνων αρχουσι τὰ παρά σφισι καινοτομούμενα τῷ τὴν βασίλειον ἀρχὴν ἐπιχρατοῦντι σημαίνειν, ὡς ἄν μηδὲν αὐτὸν διαδιδράσκοι των γινομένων The ancient custom prevailing among the rulers of

1 De morte Peregrini, t. i., p. 565, ed. Græv.

2 Vide Pearson on the Creed, Art. "He rose again from the dead".