Character and claim of New utterances, and still later, this same Church of His made a selection amongst these documents, putting her seal upon a certain number of them, declaring Testament them to be inspired and to contain no teaching contrary to the Christian Faith. Mark you, she did not declare that these same writings contain all that has been revealed, or that they are chronological records. As a matter of fact she has said very little about them, beyond proclaiming them as divinely inspired works. How and in what way, she has not said. When the time comes for her to do so, she will define her meaning as she has already so often done in other matters. The New Testament then, is not the witness of the ResurThe Church rection-it is the Christian Church which is the and not the witness. The Scriptures are supplementary and Bible the witness to the Resur rection corroborative only. The Church is not built upon the Scriptures, but the Scriptures upon the Church. As Professor Huxley has said, "The infallibility of the Gospels rests on that of those who selected them, as the former existed before the latter :" and again, "whoso defines the Canon, defines the Creed".1 Hence, even if we grant at this stage, that alleged errors may have crept into the New Testament Scriptural accounts, apparent errors of time, apparent errors difficulties do of place, apparently contradictory statements in ally affect the matters of fact, interpolations and incomplete question not materi 1 Huxley's Prologue to Science and Christian Tradition. Book fragments, these do not directly affect the question before us. We are called upon to inquire into the evidence which the Christian Church places before us, to prove the historical fact of the Resurrection. And this is not primarily the written records, Scriptural or otherwise. It is the very existence of that Church herself. No greater, no more convincing proof can be offered of the truth of Christ's rising from the dead, than the extraordinary circumstances under which Christianity came into being. This we shall investigate. Then Plan of the will follow as corroborative testimony, the writings, Christian and non-Christian, which throw light upon the event, and finally we shall consider the value of the evidence given by the New Testament. In considering this last item we shall of course not look upon the various books as inspired works, but as merely human documents. And that no undue use may be made of them, we intend to accept for the purpose of argument, only those portions which the best of the so-called higher critics sanction, with such authorship and chronology as appear to them most probable. CHAPTER II EXPECTATION FROM earliest times, so far back as we have any Pagan quest record of the human race, we find men perplexed of God about their destiny, troubled by the existence of evil, yearning for better and higher things. Ever longing, yet ever dissatisfied, men sought in vague ideas of a great First Cause, in shadowy and anthropomorphical deities, or in the grovelling worship of dead ancestors and fictitious heroes, the satisfaction for which their hearts yearned; yet they found it not. Animate and inanimate creation became an object of adoration, but amidst this superstition was everywhere to be found, dimly yet surely, the realisation of the One Supreme God. The knowledge of the Omnipotent never died out : it was debased and dimmed, but there it was. And in every place was the expectation of better days and of a deliverance from misery. It was not merely amongst the privileged people of Israel that a deliverer was awaited-we find the same state of mind existing in Pagan nations. The 4 Revelation Persians were waiting for the coming of Sacchyas Pagan exwho was to destroy evil and make all good. Plato pectation of travelled through Greece and Egypt in search of the best religion. Cicero says, "Nature has granted us but faint sparks of knowledge, and since these are soon extinguished by our immoral habits and vices, the light of nature in its clearness and brightness is nowhere to be found". And well might he say so, for the Roman world, nay, the world in general, was steeped in licentiousness and cruelty. Aristotle bears witness to the longing of noble souls for truth and purer days. Socrates says to Plato "Thou seest that thou canst not worship God with any certainty, since thou must fear lest And of a He may reject thee for having uttered a blasphemy. Therefore it seems best to me to wait patiently till one comes who will teach us what our bearing should be towards God and Man."2 That a deliverer was expected is shown by the following quotations. Tacitus writes that "according to the predictions of the ancient sacred writings, the East would become powerful, and that men from Judæa would found a universal Empire"." Evidently the Hebrew expectation of the Messiah had travelled far, for Suetonius says: "Throughout the East there was an ancient unchanging tradition, deliverer that men out of Judæa would found a new and 1 3 universal Empire". Suetonius has written "Percrebuerat Oriente toto vetus et constans opinio, Esse in fatis, ut eo tempore Judæa profecti rerum potuentur ".2 Plutarch confirms it in his work on Isis and Osiris. Cicero tells us that ancient prophesies foretold a king whom all must serve if they would be saved, and he asks who is this monarch and when he shall come. There is also the wellknown quotation from Virgil in his fourth Eclogue wherein he describes the new era foretold by the Sybil, in which a mysterious babe should be bornthe Son of the Godhead, by whom all creatures should be renewed, sin and the serpent destroyed, and peace be given to mankind. And we need not Jewish ex- here dwell upon the Jewish expectation of the Messiah which had reached its climax about the time of the birth of Jesus Christ. pectation of the Messiah consider apart later in this work. That we shall Every Hebrew The woman hoped that she might be the one chosen to 1 Vita Vesp., c. iv. |