When we come to think of it, it is rather surprising that the Christians had no raisings from the dead to point to through all these years. The fact is striking testimony to the marked sobriety of their spirit. The heathen had them in plenty.33 In an age so innocent of real medical knowledge, and filled to the brim and overflowing with superstition, apparent death and resuscitation were fre- quent, and they played a role of importance in the Greek prophet and philosopher legends of the time.34 A famous instance occurs in Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, which, from a certain resemblance between it and the nar- rative of the raising of the widow of Nain's son, used to be thought an imitation of that passage.35 Things are better understood now, and it is universally recognized that we have in this beautiful story neither an imitation of the New Testament nor a polemic against it, but a simple product of the aretalogy of the day. Otto Weinreich has brought together the cases of raising from the dead which occur in this literature, in the first excursus to his treatise on Ancient Miracles of Healing.7,6 He thus enables us to observe at a glance the large place they take in it. It is noticeable that they were not esteemed a very great thing. In the instance just alluded to, the introduction of a resuscitation into Philostratus's Life of Apollonius is accompanied by an in- timation that it may possibly be susceptible of a natural ex- planation. Philostratus does not desire to make the glory of his hero depend on a thing which even a common magi- cian could do, but rather rests it on those greater miracles which intimate the divine nature of the man.37
You probably would like to have the account which Philostratus gives of this miracle before you. "Here too," he writes,38 "is a miracle which Apollonius worked: A girl had died just in the hour of her marriage, and the bride-
HEATHEN RESUSCITATIONS 17
groom was following her bier lamenting, as was natural, his marriage left unfulfilled; and the whole of Rome was mourning with him, for the maiden belonged to a consular family. Apollonius, then, witnessing their grief, said: 'Put down the bier, for I will stay the tears that you are shed- ding for this maiden.' And withal he asked what was her name. The crowd accordingly thought he was about to deliver such an oration as is commonly delivered as much to grace the funeral as to stir up lamentation ; but he did nothing of the kind, but merely touching her and whisper- ing in secret some spell over her, at once woke up the maiden from her seeming death; and the girl spoke out loud and returned to her father's house; sjust as Alkestis did when she was brought back to life by Herakles. And the relations of the maiden wanted to present him with one hundred and fifty thousand sesterces, but he said that he would freely present the money to the young lady by way of a dowry. Now, whether he detected some spark of life in her, which those who were nursing her had not dis- covered— for it is said that, although it was raining at the time, a vapor went up from her face — or whether life was really extinct, and he restored it by the warmth of his touch, is a mysterious problem which neither I myself nor those who were present could decide."
We are naturally led at this point to introduce a further remark which has its importance for the understanding of the facts of the testimony. All that has been heretofore said concerns the church writers, properly so-called, the literary remains of the church considered as the body of right-believing Christians. Alongside of this literature, however, there existed a flourishing growth of apocryphal writings — Acts of Apostles and the like — springing up in the fertile soil of Ebionitish and Gnostic heresy, the most respectable example of which is furnished by the Clemen- tina. In these anonymous, or more usually pseudonymous, writings, there is no dearth of miraculous story, from what-
18 COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES
ever age they come. Later, these wild and miracle-laden documents were taken over into the Catholic church, usu- ally after a certain amount of reworking by which they were cleansed to a greater or less — usually less — extent of their heresies, but not in the least bit of their apocryphal miracle-stories. Indeed, by the relative elimination of their heresies in the Catholic reworking, their teratologics — as the pedants call their miracle-mongering — was made even more the prominent feature of these documents, and more exclusively the sole purpose of their narrative.39 It is from these apocryphal miracle-stories and not from the miracles of the New Testament, that the luxuriant growth of the miraculous stories of later ecclesiastical writings draw their descent. And this is as much as to say that their ultimate parentage must be traced to those heathen won- der-tales to which we have just had occasion to allude.