§ 1. — The Resurrection is a historically certain fact.
267. — 1° Opponents. — The miracle of the Resurrection has met with many adversaries in all ages. Only those of the present hour should hold our attention. In general, one could posit in principle that the opinion of the enemies of Christianity was always governed by their passions and their prejudices. That of our modern rationalists derives from their philosophy which rejects a priori all miracles, even supposing that it was attested by the strongest and most trustworthy testimonies. “Today,” says Mr. Stapfer, “for modern man, a veritable resurrection, the return to organic life of a really dead body, is the impossibility of impossibilities. The seat of these critics is thus made in advance, and the only question which arises for them is to discover the best ground on which they can attack Catholic apologetics. This ground, they believed to find it in the literary and historical criticism. It is therefore no longer said today: we do not believe in the Resurrection, because the fact is impossible, because it is outside the laws of nature; we are content to say: Every historical fact must be proved by the testimony of those who have been able to know it. But "the Resurrection, if we want to take it for a historical reality, of the same order as death, is attested only by discordant testimonies... death, a natural and real fact, had witnesses and could be recounted ; the Resurrection, a matter of faith, has never been verified... We only speak of visions and the accounts given of them are contradictory. "The Resurrection is a Christian belief, not a fact of Gospel history. And if we were to see in it a historical fact, we would have to recognize that this fact is not guaranteed by sufficiently reliable, concordant, clear and precise testimonies. " As we can judge from these two brief quotations, it is indeed in the name of historical criticism that we intend to deny the fact of the Resurrection: it is by relying on the testimonies which report, by contrasting them, that it is hoped to ruin one of the principal points of Christian belief. This is how the testimony of Saint Paul is placed in parallel with the testimony of the Evangelists, and since the first is less detailed and is of an earlier date, it is claimed that it represents the primitive tradition, which would have believed at first only in the immortality of Christ and would have arrived at faith in the bodily Resurrection of Our Lord only little by little and by successive stages of which the Gospel accounts bear the traces. We will see if all these claims are justified.


268. — 2° Proofs of the Resurrection. — The two principal testimonies which relate to us the fact of the Resurrection are, according to chronological order: — a) the testimony of Saint Paul, recorded in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, whose date of composition can be fixed, from the opinion of all the critics, between 52 and 57[66]; and — b) the testimony of the Gospels, composed between 67 and the end of the 1st century.


A. TESTIMONY OF SAINT PAUL. — Saint Paul, as we said above, often preached the Resurrection of Christ. But the most important passage in which he bears witness to this is found in his Epistle to the Corinthians (xv, 11-14). Here are the main points of this passage; “I remind you, brethren, of the Gospel which I preached to you...I taught you first of all, as I learned it myself, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures; that he was buried and rose again on the third day, according to the Scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. After that he appeared at one time to more than five hundred brethren, most of whom are still alive, and a few have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the Apostles. After all of them, he appeared to me also, as to an abortion... Now, if Christ is preached to have risen from the dead, how do some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection from the dead, neither is Christ risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain, vain also is your faith. »

From an impartial analysis of this text, it emerges that Saint Paul affirms the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus: — a) the death of Jesus "I have taught you that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the Scriptures. » The death of Jesus — the redemptive death, Jesus voluntarily sacrificing himself on the cross for the ransom of guilty humanity — this is indeed the ordinary theme of Saint Paul's preaching. Now the fact and the doctrine connected with it, he declares to have received from the apostolic tradition;b) the burial of Jesus: “I taught you...that he (Christ) was buried. The Greek word "etaphê" which Saint Paul uses, and which has been translated as: "has been buried", generally designates, among the sacred writers of the New Testament, an honorable burial: it is the word that Saint Luke uses when he speaks of the burial of the rich in the parable of Lazarus (Luke, xvi, 22), and it is again the word that we find in the Acts of the Apostles (ii, 29), in connection with the burial of David. There can therefore be no question of a burial, as M. Loisy hypothesizes in a fragment of a letter reproduced by L'Univers of June 3, 1907[68], where he is not afraid to say that "the burial by Joseph of Arimathea and the discovery of the empty tomb, two days after the passion, offering no guarantee of authenticity, one is entitled to conjecture that, on the evening of the passion, the body of Jesus was detached from the cross by the soldiers and thrown into some common grave, where one could not have the idea to go to look for it and recognize after a certain time. It is not clear on which texts such a hypothesis can be based; in any case it is not on the word etaphê used by Saint Paul and which designates at the very least an ordinary burial. To conjecture after this that Jesus was thrown into a common grave is no longer historical criticism, it is fanciful criticism; — c) the very fact of the Resurrection. This third point is, to tell the truth, the one which matters most to the Apostle, the only one which goes to the thesis which he maintains. However, it should be noted immediately, it is not so much a question for Saint Paul of proving the resurrection of Jesus, which is not in question, as of recalling it as an accepted truth and using it as a point of view. support for the demonstration of another dogma under discussion. What indeed is the purpose of the first letter to the Corinthians! It is to prove to the faithful of this Church, previously evangelized by Saint Paul, that those among them who deny the resurrection of the dead are in error and illogicality, since they indeed admit the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because, in the thought of the Apostle, the two things are connected, one is implied in the other. One cannot deny the resurrection of the dead without denying the Resurrection of Christ; and to deny the Resurrection of Christ is to give the lie to the testimony of the Apostles, that is to say that they taught a false thing, and that therefore Christianity is worthless. “If the dead are not raised, neither is Christ risen. And if Christ is not risen, vain is your faith.” (1 Cor., xv, 16, 17). Given the purpose of the Apostle, it is quite natural that he would not otherwise insist on the proofs of the Resurrection of Christ. He just has to make a choice and retain those that are most likely to make an impression on his readers. Now of the two arguments used by the Evangelists: the empty tomb and the apparitions, it is indisputable that the first has less significance than the second, since the empty tomb can be explained by other hypotheses than the resurrection. Saint Paul therefore leaves this first argument aside, or at least only speaks of it indirectly. We say, however, that he speaks of it in an indirect way, for when he declares that "Christ died", "that he was buried" "and that he rose again", it is indeed the one who died and was buried, who rises again, and how could it be if the body was left in the tomb? However, if the empty tomb is in the thought of Saint Paul, it must be recognized that the Apostle does not seek to draw an argument from it and that he is content to insist on the fact of the apparitions.

To prove, or better, to remind the Corinthians that Jesus is risen, Saint Paul therefore invokes six apparitions which he divides into three groups: — 1. In the first group, two apparitions, one to Peter, the other to Twelve ; — 2. in the second, three apparitions, the first to five hundred brothers, the second to James, the third to all the Apostles; — 3. in the third, a single apparition, the one with which he himself was gratified. All the apparitions, moreover, are put on the same footing, but there is every reason to presume that, in the eyes of Saint Paul, the apparition to the five hundred brothers had a particular importance, for, at the time when he wrote, some twenty-five years after the event, most of these witnesses were still alive, and it is a sort of appeal to their common witness that the Apostle does not fear to address to them.


269. — Objection. — The apparitions, object the rationalists, are put by Saint Paul on the same footing; all were of the same kind, since the apostle describes them in the same way, and that he employs everywhere the same word, the verb ôphtê which can be translated by the French expressions, "he was seen" or "he appeared. Such was the appearance of Jesus to Saul on the road to Damascus; such, then, were the other apparitions. The question therefore comes down to determining what the Apostle meant by saying that he had seen the risen Christ. Now Saint Paul could not have understood by this that he had seen Christ come back alive in the body which had been laid in the tomb; he saw only one light, "a body of glory" (Phil., iii, 21). And the very light he saw was not a real, objective light. “HE had the sensation of seeing, without there being anything within reach of his gaze. He was hallucinating.”[69] And how did this hallucination occur? This is because, according to M. Meyer, Saint Paul, a man of genius but suffering from a nervous illness, and accustomed to similar visions, found himself bodily and intellectually predisposed to the event on the road to Damascus. The ideas of Jesus Messiah, of Jesus the principle of life, of the living and immortal Jesus had been formed little by little without his knowledge in his subconsciousness. On the road to Damascus, these ideas suddenly erupted from his subconscious to his consciousness, and he then saw Christ in a body of glory, a spiritualized or pneumatic body, which threw upon him a blinding light, but this body was not not the dead body of Jesus come back to life. All the apparitions mentioned by Saint Paul, the rationalists then conclude, being of the same nature as his, were only subjective visions.


Refutation. — We agree with the rationalists, as we have said before, that the apparitions described by Saint Paul are placed on the same footing. But is it true that the Apostle, in recalling the apparition which he witnessed on the road to Damascus, means to speak of a "subjective vision"? The context indicates quite the contrary. The intimate thought of the Apostle can indeed be deduced from the goal he pursued in his letter. Wanting to combat the opinion of certain faithful of Corinth who denied the bodily resurrection of the dead, Saint Paul intends to demonstrate its existence and nature by relying on the Resurrection of Jesus. His reasoning would therefore have been wrong, if, to prove that the dead will resume their bodies, their true bodies, although glorious and endowed with new properties, he had begun by saying that the Resurrection of Christ, who was the principle and the model, had not been bodily. When he states that the risen Christ appeared to him, he therefore means that he saw him in the same body that was dead and buried, identical to what he had been during his earthly life, except the quality more glory. Such is, without a doubt, the basis of the thought of the Apostle. — That is right, reply the rationalists, "the Evangelists and Saint Paul do not intend to relate subjective impressions?" ; they speak of an objective, exterior, sensible presence, not of an ideal presence, much less still of an imaginary presence. The conditions of existence of this body were different, but it was the same which had been placed in the tomb, and which it was believed did not remain there”[70]. Yes, but that was, according to M. Loisy again, pure hallucination or simple illusion on the part of the Apostles.

1. Regarding the case of Saint Paul, can we say that he was hallucinated? It is true that several times in his life he had visions, but he was always careful to distinguish between this one and the others. The vision of the road to Damascus was, in his eyes, the foundation of his vocation. It was because he had seen the glorious Christ, had met him and heard his call, that he claimed the title of apostle. He would never have dared to take advantage of this title if he had not had the conviction of having seen Christ as truly as the other Apostles, and of having heard his voice calling him to the apostolate.

Doubtless, continue our adversaries, Saint Paul was sincere, but that does not prevent him from being the victim of hallucination. While persecuting the Christians, there was at the bottom of his being an unconscious work; he had doubts about the truth of the doctrine of Jesus, about the legitimacy of his persecutions, in short, he felt remorse. These impressions remained latent at first within his being, suddenly sprang from his subconscious to his consciousness, causing hallucinations of sight and hearing, and producing new convictions in his mind and causing his conversion. 'But none of this is historical. This so-called preparatory work for conversion, which supposedly took place in the subliminal consciousness of Saint Paul, does not appear anywhere. It was always in good faith that Paul persecuted Christians, and because he thought he was doing well in defending the "traditions" of his "fathers", as he himself declared (Gal., i, 14; Acts, xxvi, 9). What he did, he did "out of ignorance" (I Tim., i, 13). The hypothesis remorse has no basis in the texts. It was in an instant that Saul found himself converted and that he believed in the One whose disciples he persecuted.

2. But suppose, if we will, that Saint Paul was hallucinated. Will it be said that the other witnesses, of whom Saint Paul and the Evangelists speak, were all hallucinated? Everything rejects this supposition: the conditions of number, time and circumstances do not allow such a hypothesis. — 1. The number. It is not reasonable to suppose that so many witnesses of such a different character were victims of an illusion of their senses. It is not once that Our Lord shows himself risen, but many times; it is not to one person, it is not even to his drunken Apostles that he appears, but to five hundred brothers at the same time. — 2. Time. The apparitions take place after the death of Jesus, that is to say at a time when the disciples were distraught and thought of hiding. In such a state of mind, they could not imagine that the Crucified appeared to them in glory. The apparitions therefore had to impose themselves from the outside and in such conditions of objectivity that they brought about an irresistible faith in the Resurrection. — 3 Circumstances. Saint Paul, it is true, does not mention any circumstance, but if we refer to the accounts of the Evangelists, we see that the Apostles are at first incredulous and believe they see a spirit. Jesus then makes them touch his wounds (Luke, xxiv, 37, 40; John, xx, 27); he eats before them (Luke, xxiv, 43); he points out to them “that a spirit has neither flesh nor bones” (Luke, xxiv, 39); he allows holy women to kiss his feet (Mat., xxviii, 9).

Will it still be said that the hallucinations, as we understand them, were true hallucinations, objective hallucinations, produced directly by God to obtain the faith of the Apostles in Jesus living and triumphant? This hypothesis is no more historical than the others; it is moreover blasphemous, since it regards God as the direct cause of error.


CONCLUSION. — The attacks of the adversaries therefore lack a serious basis, and we have the right to conclude that, according to the testimony of Saint Paul, the Resurrection is a historically certain fact, demonstrated by six apparitions. Of these apparitions Saint Paul can testify to one, since he is aware of having been the happy witness. As for the others, he affirms that they came to his knowledge through the account given to him of them during his first meeting in Jerusalem with the Apostles, in particular with Saint Peter and Saint James, three years after his conversion (Gal., I, 18), that is to say about four years after the event itself, if we follow the chronology adopted by Mr. Harnack who postpones the conversion of Saint Paul to the very year of the death of Jesus. Thus, at a time so close to the facts, the Apostles already believed in the bodily Resurrection of their Master. It is therefore not possible to admit, with the mythical school, that the Resurrection is a legend which was formed in the middle of the second century, nor, with certain contemporary critics (Loisy), that the Apostles and the disciples neither believed nor preached that the body of their Master had come out alive from the tomb on the third day after his death, and that the Christians would have arrived at this faith only by disfiguring the primitive beliefs and the impressions of the first disciples.


270. — B. TESTIMONY OF THE GOSPELS. — According to the testimony of the four Gospels, faith in the Resurrection of Jesus was born of a double cause: — a) the discovery of the empty tomb, and — b) the apparitions of the Risen One.

a) Argument drawn from the discovery of the empty tomb. — According to the accounts of the four Evangelists, the women and the disciples who went to the sepulcher to embalm Jesus found the tomb empty. The stone which closed the entrance to the sepulcher was thrown aside (Mark, xvi, 4). Inside the sepulchre, the linens lay on the ground, the shrouds and the shroud separately (John, xx, 7); the body of Jesus was no longer there (Luke, xxiv, 3). An Angel announced the Resurrection to them. The frightened guards had fled and had gone to announce the news to the princes of the priests who gave them a large sum of money to publish that the disciples had removed the laying body which they slept (Mat, xxviii, 11, 13).

Thus the first argument invoked by the Evangelists in favor of the Resurrection is drawn from the fact that the day after the Sabbath, on Sunday morning, the body of Jesus had disappeared from the tomb where it had been buried two days before by Joseph of Arimathea.



271. — Objection. — The argument drawn from the discovery of the empty tomb has always been the object of the most lively attacks on the part of the adversaries of Christianity. — 1. Either they admitted the materiality of the fact, and they contrived to provide natural explanations: — 1) The Jews, in the 1st century, resorted to the hypothesis of abduction. They accused the disciples of stealing their Master's body at night while the guards slept. — 2) Among modern critics. some have completely abandoned the hypothesis of the abduction by the disciples of Jesus. Thus the German naturalistic school (Bret-schneider, Paulus, Hase) supposed that Jesus had not died on the cross and that he had only fallen into lethargy. The coolness of the tomb, the virtue of the balms and the strong smell of the aromatics having brought him back to life, he got rid of his shrouds and the shroud which covered his head, and he was able to leave the sepulcher thanks to an earthquake who rolled away the stone that sealed the entrance. He then appeared to his disciples who believed him to be resurrected. The others, on the contrary, have taken up the abduction hypothesis by modifying it. As the discouragement into which the Apostles had fallen removed any suspicion of imposture from them, they assumed that the kidnapping had been carried out either by the Jews[72] who wanted to prevent the influx of visitors, or by the owner of the garden who wanted to rid his vault of the corpse which had taken possession of it[73], or by Joseph of Arimathea himself who, not being a disciple of Jesus, and having lent his vault only out of charity, would be eager, after the Sabbath, to have the body transported to another place.[74]


2. Either they denied the materiality of the fact and claimed that the account of the discovery of the empty tomb is a legend invented by the second or the third Christian generation, and they want to see the proof of it in the silence of Saint Paul. If Saint Paul, they say, whose testimony predates that of the Gospels, does not mention the argument of the empty tomb, it is because he did not know it and the legend had not yet been formed at the time. where he wrote.


Refutation. — We will not delay answering at length those who, taking the Apostles for impostors, maintain that they were the authors of the abduction. What interest could they have in inventing the fable of the Resurrection and in having people worshiped as a God, a seducer of whom they would have been the first victims? Wasn't such a plan impossible? How would they remove the body? By violence, by corruption or by trickery? None of the three hypotheses is serious. Violence is not admissible, on the part of people who had shown so little courage during the Passion. Corruption is only possible with money, and the Apostles were rather poor. There remains the third way: to remove the body by trickery. It was then a question of surprising the guards by a circuitous route, or at night, when they would have been asleep, pushing the stone without the slightest sound, then removing the body without waking anyone, and hiding it in a retreat so secure that it could not be discovered: does not such an undertaking exceed the limits of likelihood?


2. The hypothesis of the apparent death of Jesus has today fallen into the most complete discredit. You have to choose indeed. Either one accepts the accounts of the Evangelists as they are, and then nothing authorizes to believe that the death of Jesus was only apparent. If the sufferings of the cross and the blow of the spear had not caused him to die, he would surely have been asphyxiated by the hundred pounds of aromatics and by the stay in the tomb. Either we look at the Gospel accounts as legends, and then we fall into the objection which denies the materiality of the fact and to which we will respond later.


3. To say that the abduction was committed by the Jews, is an even more absurd hypothesis and is contradicted by the facts. It must be remembered, in fact, that the Apostles preached the Resurrection, not only before the people, but before the heads of the nation. Peter and John were imprisoned for this, and they appeared before the Jewish court (Acts, iv, 1, 12). Can we then understand the silence of the Sanhedrites? “The exhibit was in their hands; they could shake with a single gesture, with a word, the new faith whose rapid progress worried them. they were in no condition to provide it. Unbeknownst to them and without them, the sepulcher had been stripped of his corpse. »[75] And who took him away? “He's not a friend. He is not an enemy. He's not a foreigner. For more than nineteen centuries (Mat., xxviii, 12-15) we have exhausted all hypotheses to escape the miracle; to none we could give some probability. Only one possible answer remains. Christ came out of his own accord from his tomb. He is risen bodily” [76]!


4. Are we better justified in claiming that the discovery of the empty tomb is a legend invented by the second or the third Christian generation[77] ? How, then, to explain the faith of the Apostles, the total transformation that took place in them some time after the great drama of the cross which had left them so discouraged and dejected? If nothing came to recover from their disappointment, if faith in the Resurrection was formed only little by little, how is it that, from cowards and timid that they were during the Passion, they became, afterwards, intrepid, daring and that they preached the Resurrection even to the sacrifice of their life? Should we believe "these witnesses who have their throats cut" or take them for fanatics and madmen?


272. — b) Argument drawn from the apparitions. — While the argument drawn from the empty tomb is only indirect proof, since the fact can be explained by other hypotheses than the Resurrection, the apparitions constitute direct proof.

If we compare the two testimonies of Saint Paul and the Evangelists, we can count eleven apparitions, that of the road to Damascus to Saint Paul not included. Two apparitions mentioned by Saint Paul do not appear in the Evangelists, namely the apparition to the five hundred disciples and the apparition to James. The total of the apparitions related by the Evangelists therefore amounts to nine, of which seven took place in or around Jerusalem, and two in Galilee. In the first group, — the Jerusalem apparitions, — we count the apparitions: — 1. to Mary Magdalene (Mark, xvi, 9; John, xx, 14, 15); — 2. to the women returning from the sepulcher (Mat., xxviii, 9); — 3. to Simon Peter (Luke, xxiv, 34); — 4. to the two disciples who went to Emmaus (Mark, xvi, 12; Luke, xxiv, 13 et seq.); and — 5. to the Apostles gathered in the Cenacle, Thomas absent (Mark, xvi, 14; Luke, xxiv, 36 et seq.; John, xx, 19-25). These first five apparitions took place on Easter Sunday. — 6. Eight days later, again in Jerusalem, Jesus appeared to the eleven Apostles, Thomas present and invited by the Lord to touch the wounds of his hands and his side (John, xx, 26-29). — 7. In Galilee, he appeared to seven disciples on Lake Tiberias (John, xxi, 1, 14); then — 8. to the eleven Apostles on a mountain of (rallied (Mat., xxviii, 16, 17). — 9. Finally, a last apparition which preceded the Ascension and which took place on the Mount of Olives before all the Apostles assembled (Luke, xxiv, 50).


273. — Objection. — Against the argument drawn from the apparitions, the discrepancies found in the Gospel narratives are objected to. — 1. It is remarked that the Evangelists do not agree on the number of the women who went to the tomb, nor on the number of the Angels whom they saw. — 2. But above all the so-called opposition between the sacred authors is invoked with regard to the theater of the apparitions. According to liberal and rationalist critics, there would be in the Gospel accounts two superimposed and moreover irreconcilable traditions: one represented by Saint Matthew and Saint Mark, placing the apparitions in Galilee, in accordance with the message that the angel gives to the holy women for the Apostles on the morning of the resurrection; the other represented by Saint Luke and Saint John and setting the scene of the apparitions exclusively in Judea.


Refutation. — 1. Far from invalidating their accounts, the differences prove on the contrary the independence of the historians. The differences, moreover, relate to secondary points, such as the number of women and the number of angels; they leave intact the very fact of the Resurrection. It clearly appears that the variations of details in no way prevent the identity of the background. — 2. The opposition which is pointed out between the Evangelists with regard to the theater of the apparitions, is not as obvious as is affirmed, and it is far from being demonstrated that there were two distinct traditions. one Jerusalemite, the other Galilean, and even less, that each evangelist knew only one of the two traditions. How can one claim, in fact, that Saint Matthew who, with Saint Mark, represents the Galilean tradition, ignores the Judean tradition, when he reports an apparition of Jesus to the holy women, at the moment when they came out of the sepulchre? (Mat., xxviii, 8, 9). The end of St. Mark also reports Jerusalem apparitions, but let's not insist on this fact, since our adversaries consider this end as apocryphal. Similarly, the Gospel of Saint John, if taken in its entirety and with its appendix, recounts Judean apparitions and Galilean apparitions. Saint Luke reports only the Judean apparitions. So, ultimately, if we except Saint Luke, the Evangelists know the two theaters of the apparitions of Christ, and the exclusivism that one would like to find in their narrations, exists in reality only in the spirit of the rationalist critics. . At least three Evangelists out of four have collected the double tradition: Jerusalem and Galilean.

Note, moreover, that most differences are very well explained by the different goal that the Evangelists pursued. Thus Saint Matthew, writing for the Jewish community where the rumor ran that the disciples had carried off the body of Christ, shows the implausibility of such an accusation by the story of the guard placed in the tomb and the affixing of seals on the stone. of the sepulchre. Saint Mark writing for the Roman environment, very attached to legal forms, first reports that the death of Jesus was officially confirmed by an inquiry by Pilate with the Centurion in charge of the execution of the sentence, then he insists on the disbelief of the disciples who refuse to believe the story of Mary Magdalene. — Saint Luke, writing for the Greek milieu, where the testimony of women was not received in justice and where the resurrection of the dead was regarded as an absurdity, only mentions the apparitions to men (to the two disciples of Emmaus, to Peter, to the Eleven and their companions) and provides material details to demonstrate that the risen body of Christ was not a ghost, but a real body, since he let himself be touched and could be seen eating and drink. Not following the same course, the Evangelists therefore appropriated what fit into their plan and best suited their readers: it would therefore be a mistake to conclude that they ignored the facts they pass over in silence.


Conclusion. — Thus, from the examination of the documents, it appears that, from the first days, the Apostles, both by the discovery of the empty tomb and by the apparitions, believed that their Master had been resurrected, that they imagined him surviving, not only in his immortal soul, but in his body. They believed that his body did not remain in the tomb, but lived again and forever, transformed and glorified.[78]