For the nature of the resurrection body see Goulburn, Bampton Lectures ; Skrine, Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1904, 870.
8. The sayings of the Risen Master are most significant. Their marine)' is perfectly distinct from
that of the ministry. What Keim (Jesus of Nazara, vi. 354) describes as the ' simple, solemn, almost life- less, cold, unfamiliar character of the manifesta- tions,' calls attention to the striking aloofness and unearthliness of the Easter tone. Familiarity is altered into distance and aAvful dignity. Yet with this difference, which is inevital>le, if the circumstances are historic, the Personality is just the same. And as with their manner, so with their substance. They occupy, very marvellously, an intermediate i^o.sition between the teaching of the ministry which they presuppose, and the teach- ing of the Apostles which they account for and explain.
9. Christ's Resurrection and modern thought. — Non-Christian explanations of Christ's Resurrec- tion.— There are only two ultimate explanations possible : either the event was the action of God, which is the Christian explanation ; or else it must be accounted for within purely earthly and human limits. Rejection of the Christian or supernatural account leaves the necessity of providing a natural- istic explanation ; otherwise there would always be a danger that the supernatural, although cast out on principle, would nevertheless return again. Non- Christian theories of Christ's Resurrection form a series. No one has summarized them better than Keim (vi. 327 fll".).
(1) There was the theory, now quite obsolete, which denied Christ's death. He fainted away on the cross, and recovered in the grave. The valu- able point in this theory is its recognition that the Apostles did really see their Lord alive again as a solid objective fact confronting them. Its mon- strously irrational character lies in its impossible assumption that a half-dead form, with difficulty brought back to life, leading an exhausted exist- ence, and finally dying over again, could ever have inspired in His adherents triumphant faith in Him as a risen conqueror and Son of God. The well- known sentences of Strauss have effectually dis- posed of this miserable fabrication, with all the wretched immoralities which it included. It is, says Reville, ' un tissu d'invraisemblances materi- elles et morales ' (ii. 455).
(2) Another theory was that the body was secretly removed from the grave — either by opponents or by friends. Imagination hovers between Pilate, or the Sanhedrists, or Joseph of Arimatha^a, or the gardener, or Mary Magdalene. Of the attempt to account for the empty grave as an imposture, Keim justly remarks : ' All these assumptions are repel- lent and disgraceful ; they shoAV that the holy con- viction of the apostles and the first Christians . . . has not in the slightest degree influenced the hardened minds of such critics' (p. 325). This theory also has passed away. Critics, says Keim, have left off seeking an explanation from external facts.
(3) But there is still a world of mental facts. The naturalistic explanations of to-day are sought through psychology. There is the 'Vision hypo- thesis— a self-generated appearance, the product of reflexion on the uniqueness of the Personality. Jesus' followers, studying the Scriptures, came to the conclusion that it belonged to the vocation of the Messiah to pass through suffering to glory. Fi'om the principle, ' He must live,' they passed involun- tarily to the assertion, ' He does live,' and to the further assertion, 'We have seen Him'! Thus they took a leap from a conclusion of the intellect to a fact of history. Keim's criticism is that reflexion requires time. Its advocates postulate a year — ten years. But the Apo-stolic evidence con- curs in asserting that the interval between the death and the belief in the Resurrection was exceed- ingly brief. Strauss himself gave up the theory, and adopted another. ' Not so much by way of
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RESURRECTION OF CHRIST 511
reflexion, it is now said, as by the quicker road of tiie iieart, of the force of imagination, and of strong nervous excitement, the disciples attained to belief in the living Messiah' (p. 334). The invincible Jesus liovered before their minds (p. 343). When jVIohammed ilied, his adherents swore to decapitate any one who dared to say that tiie Prophet had expired (p. 344). In reality Jesus was not dead to the disciples, since they had witnessed neither His Passion nor death nor burial. Back in Galilee the old associations revived, far from the disasters and the graves of Jerusalem — unbounded excitement, in- tensided by abstinence from food and by the feverish mootls of the evening, caused the limits of the outer and inner world to disai)i)ear. They thought they .saw and heard externally, while they only saw and heard within. Martineau adopted something of tills subjective theory of emotion and i-eflexion combined. It is the most popular non-Christian explanation of the day. But Keim deliberately rejects it.
Keim admits that the Apostolic age was full of more or less self-generated human visions. But if these visions had been the same in kind as the appearances of the Risen Christ, St. Paul would certainly not have closed his list with the fifth or sixth manifestation. Why does the Apostle consider the manifesta- tion to himself as last of a series (iu-xaTev, 1 Co 15**), obviously last of its kind, carefully diflferentiating it from the visions which may have come either to himself or to others ? ' Having made such a sharp and clean division, it is to be taken as proved that there lay between the first 5 or 6 appearances and the later often-repeated visions such a great and broad gulf of time, and indeed of character, as rendered it impossible to reckon the latter appearances with the former' (p. 353).