Easter Morning
MODERN theology is tending more and more to return to the emphasis placed by primitive Christianity on the Resur- rection, as the outstanding witness to the claims and the uniqueness of Christ. It is realized that the doctrine of the Incarnation requires a metaphysical background if it is to be harmonized with the contemporary view of the world, and the actual circumstances of the Birth itself must be received by faith and cannot be historically demonstrated. But the events which followed the Crucifixion come before us as concrete historic facts ; which had a prompt effect upon contemporary life, and are far better attested than many of those incidents of the past which we accept without question as true. On the certitude of the resurrection and all..it guaran- teed the Church was founded. Because of it St. Paul was converted. It is the historic point of departure of the Christian world. What, then, really happened between dark and dawn on the first Easter Day ? A hallucination ? A deliberate deception? An event outside the normal experience of men?
Mr. Morison, who has given us a vivid, arresting, almost exciting study of this ancient problem, approached it expecting to get a naturalistic explanation. The book be has written is a book he did not mean to write. As he proceeded with it, the strangeness of the story, of all the events leading up to the Passion, more and more possessed his mind ; all minimizing solutions of the mystery more and more showed their hollow- ness; the "straightforward and objective character of the Marean story" became more and more difficult to explain away. Moreover, the historic situation before and at the time of St. Paul's conversion requires in the Apostles, who were in a position to know the facts, an absolute belief in the reality of the empty tomb ; and this belief must have been known and widely discussed in Jerusalem. Yet it was never apparently disproved. If this were not so, "we should have the really ironical situation that throughout the period when the disciples were gaining converts daily, at a prodigious rate, the conclusive disproof of their main contention lay within two thousand yards of the scene of the controversy, and in the very tomb where everybody knew it had been placed on the afternoon of the Crucifixion . . . the condition of the grave itself would become the final arbiter in this matter. Either it contained the .remains of Jesus, or it did not." St. Paul, a person of keen intelligence, present in Jerusalem during the beginnings of the Church and an agent of the Great Persecution, must have known and investigated these facts.
His Epistles are sufficient evidence of the conclusion he reached.
What then happened ? Who was it that moved the great stone that sealed the tomb ? On this point the Marcan record is silent. "Au impenetrable curtain descends abruptly at the conclusion of the burial on Friday afternoon and does not rise again until dawn on Sunday, when the stone has already been removed." But there is a strange phrase in the surviving fragment of the ancient Gospel of the Hebrews which describes the risen Jesus, before His appearance to James, as giving" the linen cloth to the servant of the priest." Was this servant one of the temple attendants, who formed the guard before the tomb ? Was he perhaps that Malchus the healing of whose ear was the last miracle of mercy, and who now became the first witness of the risen life ? Are we to think that "as dawn approached in that quiet garden, something happened, which caused one of the watchers hurriedly to awake his companions and to proceed to a closer inspection of the tomb " ? Did the guards roll back the stone, to assure themselves that their lmpani on was mistaken and the body was safely within ; and as dawn broke, did they return in haste and fear to Jerusalem, declaring that something was wrong with the Nazarene's tomb ? If this reconstruction—or something like it—holds water, then much else in the narrative slips into place : the state of the tomb when the women came to it in the early morning, the young man in a white garment, who even at that hour had preceded them and from whom they fled in terror whilst he called after theitt,' "He is risen! He is not here ! " This young man—in the earliest records, a purely human figure—Mr. Morison is inclined tO identify with the nameless disciple who had followed Christ to Gethse- mane, and heard Him utter the mysterious words', -" After I am raised up, I will go before You into Galilee:" When the first rumours of strange happenings were spread through the city by the returning guard, "who shall describe with what haste he would seize whatever clothing was near at hand, and rushing forth, run; as only an intensely moved and excited man could rim, to the Garden of the Resurrection ? "
These suggestions are in their nature unprovable but no one who reads this book ivith attention will feel that they are to be lightly dismissed. Even if it- be only considered as a brilliant exercise of the historic imagination, Mr. Morison's work is of absorbing interest ; but beyond this, it has a claim to be considered as a serious attempt towards solving one of the deepest mysteries alike of history and of faith.
EVEL'YN UNDERII I LL.
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