John 20:29

Ver. 29. In itself, this address of the disciple would not have a decisive value. It might be an exaggeration of feeling. But what gives it an absolute importance is the manner in which Jesus receives it. The Lord does not check this outbreak of feeling, like the angel of the Apocalypse, who says to John:

“ Worship God! ” He answers, on the contrary: “ Thou hast believed,” and thus accepts the expression by which Thomas has proclaimed His divinity. In an article by Lien (May, 1869), it is objected that this approving answer of Jesus may refer not to the expression: My God, but to the belief of Thomas in the fact of the resurrection. But if Jesus had approved of the exclamation of the disciple only in part, He would have found the means of removing the alloy, while preserving the pure gold.

The perfect πεπίστευκας, thou hast believed, signifies: “Thou art henceforth in possession of faith.” This verb might also be taken in an interrogative sense. For Meyer observes, not without reason, that there is in the words: because thou hast seen, a shade of reproach which accords well with this sense.

In the last words Jesus points out the entirely new character of the era which is beginning, that of a faith which should be contented with testimony, without claiming to be founded on sight, as that of Thomas had done.

This saying closes the history of the development of faith in the apostles, and gives a glimpse of the new phase which is about to begin that of the faith of the Church resting upon the apostolic testimony. Baur thinks that Jesus here opposes to faith in external facts that which has its contents only in itself, in the idea of which the believer is henceforth fully conscious. But John 20:30-31 express a thought directly opposite to this. So Baur has declared them to be interpolated, without the least proof. The contrast which Jesus points out is altogether different: it is that of a carnal faith, which in order to accept a miracle wishes absolutely to see it, and a faith of a moral nature, which accepts the divine fact on the foundation of a testimony which is worthy of confidence. It was granted to Thomas to be saved on the former path; but from this time forward it will be necessary to content oneself with the second. Otherwise faith would be no longer possible in the world except on condition of miracles renewed unceasingly and celestial appearances repeating themselves for every individual. This is not to be the course of the divine work on earth.

The aorist participle ἰδόντες, properly: who shall have seen, indicates an anterior act with relation to faith, and the aorist participle πιστεύσαντες, who have believed, is spoken from the standpoint of the development of the Church regarded as consummated.

This answer of Jesus to Thomas is the normal close of the fourth Gospel. It indicates the limit of development of the apostolic faith, and the starting-point of the new era which is to succeed it on the earth. The apostolic faith, as it has just risen to the full height of its object, will be able henceforth to re-echo throughout the world by means of the testimony of the chosen messengers, so as incessantly to reproduce itself.

On the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Strauss has said, in speaking of the resurrection of Jesus: “Here is the decisive point, where the naturalistic view must retract all its previous assertions or succeed in explaining the belief in the resurrection without bringing in a miraculous fact.” And Strauss is right. The question here is of a miracle sui generis, of the miracle properly so called. The usual expedients for explaining the miracles of Jesus, “the hidden forces of spontaneity,” the mysterious influence exerted upon the nerves “by the contact of an exquisite person” all this has no longer any application here; for no other human being co-operated in the resurrection of Jesus, if it took place. If Jesus really came forth alive from the tomb after His crucifixion, there is nothing left but to say with St. Peter: GOD has raised up Jesus.

It is said: Such a fact would overthrow the laws of nature. But what if it were, on the contrary, the law of nature, when thoroughly understood, which required this fact? Death is the wages of sin. If Jesus lived here below as innocent and pure, if He lived in God and of God, as He Himself says in John 6:57, life must be the crown of this unique conqueror. No doubt He may have given Himself up voluntarily to death to fulfil the law which condemns sinful humanity; but might not this stroke of death, affecting a nature perfectly sound, morally and physically, meet in it exceptional forces capable of reacting victoriously against all the powers of dissolution? As necessarily as a life of sin ends in death, so necessarily does perfect holiness end in life, and consequently, if there has been death, in the resurrection. Natural law, therefore, far from being contrary to this fact, is the thing which requires it.

But if this fact is rational, when once the perfect holiness of Jesus is admitted, is it possible? To deny that it is, would be to affirm an irreducible dualism between being and virtue. It would be to deny monotheism. The divine will is the basis of being, and the essence of this will is to move towards the good. In creating being it has therefore reserved to itself the means of realizing the good in all the forms of existence and of causing the absolute sovereignty of holiness to be triumphant in the being. This is all that we can determine a priori from the theistic standpoint. “Every historian,” says Strauss, “should possess philosophy enough to be able to deny the miracle here as well as elsewhere.” Every true historian, we will answer, should have philosophy enough, above all, to let the word yield to the facts, here as elsewhere.

Let us, in the first place, study the four, or rather the five, narratives of the appearances of the Risen One.

I. The Narratives.

John mentions three appearances of Jesus (to Mary Magdalene, the Twelve, Thomas), all three in Judea and in the week which followed the resurrection.

Is this to say that the author did not know of a larger number? The twenty-first chapter, which proceeds from him directly or indirectly, proves the contrary. For this chapter mentions a new one which took place in Galilee. That to Thomas closes the Gospel properly so called, for the reasons which belong to the plan and aim of the work (see on John 20:28-29).

Matthew relates two appearances: that to the women in Judea, which seems to be only a generalized double of the appearance to Mary Magdalene (in John), and that to the Eleven on the mountain where He had appointed for them a meeting-place. It was in the latter that Christ made known to the apostles His elevation to the Messianic royalty, to the sovereignty over all things. This is the reason why it closes the first Gospel, which is designed to demonstrate the Messianic dignity of Jesus, and in the view of the author serves to sum up all the others. This took place in Galilee, like that of the twenty-first chapter of John.

If we set aside the unauthentic end of Mark, we find in this Gospel only the promise of an appearance to the believers in Galilee. We are ignorant of what the true conclusion of this work must have contained. What we now possess, composed from John and Luke, mentions the appearance to Mary Magdalene (John) and those to the two from Emmaus and to the disciples on the evening of the day of the resurrection (Luke).

Luke mentions three appearances: that on the road to Emmaus, that to Peter, that to the disciples on the evening of the first day; all three in Judea and on the very day of the resurrection. It would be difficult to believe that he did not know of others, since he had labored for the evangelization of the Gentile world with St. Paul, who, as we are about to see, mentions several others. Luke himself, in Acts 1:3, speaks of forty days during which Jesus showed Himself alive to the apostles. He simply desired, therefore, to report the first appearances which served to establish in the hearts of the apostles the belief in the fact of the resurrection.

As for Paul, he enumerates in 1 Corinthians 15:3 ff., as facts appertaining to the apostolic tradition which he has himself received, first the appearances to Peter and to the Twelve which immediately followed the resurrection; then a later appearance to more than five hundred brethren, some of whom he himself knew personally; moreover, two appearances, one to James, the other to all the apostles. Finally, to these five he adds that which was granted to himself on the road to Damascus.

We are already acquainted with the first two, one from Luke, the other from Luke and John. The third surprises us, since it is not related in any of the four gospels. But it is probably identical with that of which Matthew speaks, which took place on the mountain of Galilee, whither Jesus had summoned all His followers from before His death (Matthew 26:32, Mark 14:28), though in Matthew He addresses only the Eleven in order to call them to their mission to the whole world. The fourth (James), mentioned by Paul alone, is confirmed by the conversion of the four brothers of Jesus (Acts 1:14). The fifth (all the apostles) is evidently that of the ascension, the word all alluding not to James, as has been thought, but rather to Thomas, who had been absent at the time of the first appearance to the Eleven. If mention is not made of the first two appearances in John and Luke, those to Mary Magdalene and the two from Emmaus, it is because they have a private character, Mary and the two disciples not belonging to the circle of the official witnesses chosen by Jesus to declare publicly what concerned Him.

Notwithstanding the diversity of these accounts, it is not difficult to reconstruct by their means the whole course of things. There are ten appearances known:

1. That to Mary, in the morning, at the sepulchre (John and Matthew);

2. That to the two from Emmaus, in the afternoon of the first day (Luke and Mark);

3. That to Peter, a little later, but on the same day (Luke and Paul);

4. That to the Eleven (without Thomas), in the evening of this first day (John, Luke, Mark);

5. That to Thomas, eight days afterwards (John);

6. That to the seven disciples, on the shore of the sea of Galilee (John

7. That to the five hundred believers, on the mountain of Galilee (Matthew, Paul);

8. That to James (Paul);

9. That of the ascension (Luke, Paul). Finally, to complete the whole: 10. That to Paul, some years afterwards, on the road to Damascus.

Evidently no one had kept an exact protocol of what occurred in the days which followed the resurrection. Each evangelist has drawn from the treasure of the common recollections what was within his reach, and reproduced what best answered the purpose of his writing. They did not dream of the future critics; simplicity is the daughter of good faith. But what is striking in this apparent disorder is the remarkable moral gradation in the succession of these appearances. In the first ones, Jesus consoles; He is in the presence of broken hearts (Mary, the two from Emmaus, Peter). In the following ones (the Twelve, Thomas), He labors, above all, to establish faith in the great fact which has just been accomplished. In the last ones, He more particularly directs the eyes of His followers towards the future by preparing them for the great work of their mission. It is thus, indeed, that He must have spoken and acted, if He really acted and spoke as risen from the dead.

II. The Fact.

What really occurred, which gave occasion to the narratives which we have just studied?

According to the contemporary Jews, whose assertion was reproduced in the second century by Celsus and in the eighteenth by the author of the Wolfenbuttel Fragments, the answer is: nothing at all. This whole history of the resurrection of Jesus is only a fable, the fruit of a premeditated deception on the part of the apostles. They had themselves put the body of Jesus out of the way, and then proclaimed His resurrection.

To this explanation we cannot reply better than by saying, with Strauss: “Without the faith of the apostles in the resurrection of Jesus, the Church would never have been born.” After the death of their Master the apostles were too much disheartened to invent such a fiction, and it was from the conviction of His resurrection that they drew the triumphant faith which was the soul of their ministry. The existence of the Church which has religiously renewed the world is explained with yet greater difficulty by a falsehood than by a miracle.

Others, Strauss at their head, answer: Something occurred, but something purely internal and subjective. The apostles were, not impostors, but dupes of their own imagination. They sincerely believed that they saw the appearances which they have related. On the day of Jesus' death, or the next day, they fled to Galilee; and, on finding themselves again in the places where they had lived with Him, they imagined that they saw and heard Him again; these hallucinations were continued during some weeks, and here is what gave rise to the narratives of the appearances.

But, 1. From this point of view, the first scenes of the appearances of Jesus must be placed in Galilee, not in Jerusalem, as is the case in all the narratives, even in that which may be called the most decidedly Galilean that of Matthew (Matthew 28:1-10).

2. According to all the accounts, and even according to the calumny against the disciples invented by the Jews, the body of Jesus, after the descent from the cross, was left in the hands of the Lord's friends. Now, in the presence of the dead body, all the hallucinations must have vanished. We shall thus be brought back to the first explanation, which makes the disciples impostors an explanation which Strauss himself declares impossible. If it is said: The Jews got possession of the body and carried it off, they worked in this case against themselves and for the success of the falsehood which they ascribed to the apostles. And why not bring into broad daylight this point tending to prove criminality instead of confining themselves to accusing the disciples of having put Him out of the way?

3. The hallucinations which are supposed are incompatible with the state of mind of the disciples at this time. The believers so little expected the resurrection of Jesus that it was for the purpose of embalming His body that the women repaired to the sepulchre. If they still had a hope, by reason of the promises which the Lord had made to them before His death, it was that of His return from heaven, whither they believed that He had gone. “Remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom,” said the thief on the cross. And this, indeed, was undoubtedly what the disciples from Emmaus meant when they said, Luke 24:21: “Already it is the third day since these things came to pass.” The restoration to life of His body broken on the cross was not dreamed of by any one. What those hoped for who hoped for anything was a Parousia, not a resurrection properly so called. And this also is what they think that they behold at the first moment, when Jesus appears to them; they take Him for a pure spirit returning from heaven. How in such a condition of mind could they have been themselves the creators of the appearances of the Risen One?

4. And what if these appearances consisted only in a luminous figure, an ethereal form floating in the distance, seen between heaven and earth, and soon vanishing in the sky? But it is a person who approaches, who asks them to touch him, who converses with them, who blames them for seeing in him only a spirit, who speaks in a definite way and joins acts with his words (“He breathed on them, saying: Receive ye the Holy Spirit”), who gives positive orders (to assemble on a mountain, to baptize the nations, to tarry in Jerusalem), who has friendly conversations with some of them (the two from Emmaus, Thomas, Peter); hallucination does not comport with such features. We must always come back to the supposition of fiction and falsehood. As to a legendary formation, it cannot be thought of here, since Paul, even during the lifetime of the witnesses, alludes to all these accounts.

5. That a nervous person has hallucinations is a fact often noticed; but that a second person shares these illusions is a thing unexampled. Now this phenomenon takes place simultaneously not in two, but in eleven, and soon even in five hundred persons (1 Corinthians 15:6). The hallucinated Camisards of Cevennes are cited, it is true. But the noises which they heard in the air, the rolling of drums, the singing of psalms, do not in any respect resemble the definite communications which the Lord had with those to whom He appeared and the distinct sight of His person and His features. And if all this were only visions beheld simultaneously by so large a number of persons, it would be necessary to imagine the whole company of the believers raised to such a strange and morbid degree of exaltation that it would become absolutely incompatible with the calm self-possession, the admirable clearness of mind, the practical energy of will, which every one is forced to admire in the founders of the Church.

6. But the most insoluble difficulty for the partisans of this hypothesis is that which Keim has better set forth than any one else

I mean the sudden ending of the appearances. At the end of a few weeks, after eight or nine visions so precise that Paul counts them, as it were, on his fingers on a certain marked day, that of the ascension, all is over. The visions cease as suddenly as they came; the five hundred who were exalted have returned, as if by enchantment, to cold blood. The Lord, ever living to their faith, has disappeared from their imagination. Although far inferior in intensity, the Montanist exaltation endured for a full half century. Here, at the end of six weeks, the cessation is complete, absolutely ended. In the presence of this fact, it becomes evident that an external cause presided over these extraordinary manifestations, and that, when the cause ceased to act, the phenomenon came to its end. We are thus brought to seek for the historical fact which forms the basis of the narratives that we are studying.

I. Some modern writers (Paulus, Schleiermacher, and others) think that the death of Jesus was only apparent, and that after a long swoon He came to Himself again under the influence of the aromatics and the cool air of the sepulchre. Some Essenic friends also perhaps aided Him with their care. He appeared again, accordingly, among His followers like one risen from the dead; such is the foundation of the accounts of the appearances which we read in our gospels. Strauss has refuted this hypothesis better than any one else. How, after so cruel a punishment as that of the cross, could Jesus, having been restored by purely natural means, move with perfect ease, go on foot to a distance of some leagues from Jerusalem, and also return to that city the same afternoon; how could He be present without any one seeing His entrance; and disappear without any one noticing His departure? How, above all, could a person who was half dead, who was with difficulty dragged out of his tomb, whose feeble vital breath could not, in any case, have been preserved except by means of care and considerate measures, have produced on the apostles the triumphant impression of a conqueror of death, of the prince of life, and by the sight of Himself have transformed their sadness into enthusiasm, their disheartenment into adoration? And then, finally, in the interval between these visits, what became of this moribund person? Where did He conceal Himself? And how did He bring to an end this strange kind of life in which He was obliged to conceal Himself even from His friends? The critics would persuade us that He died in a Phoenician inn, sparing His disciples the knowledge of this sad ending;...it must also be added: leaving them to believe in His triumph over death, and boldly to preach His resurrection! This is imposture transferred from the disciples to the Master Himself. Does it become thereby more admissible?

II. The opinion which, without denying the miracle, approaches most nearly to the preceding, is that of Reuss and de Pressense . There was in the case of Jesus a real return to life, but in exactly the same body which had previously served Him as an organ. In fact, this body still bears the prints of the nails and of the spear-thrust. De Pressense adds, in proof of this explanation, that Jesus, after the walk to Emmaus, did not reach Jerusalem till a certain time after His two travelling companions, since He did not go to the company of the disciples in the upper chamber until after the arrival of the latter. He will allow us to attach no great importance to this argument. Why could there not have been an interval between the time of His return and that of His appearance in the chamber where the disciples were assembled? Is it not clear that the Lord's body, although identical in some respects with His previous body, underwent by means of the miraculous fact of the resurrection a profound transformation of nature, and that from that time it lived and acted in entirely new conditions? It appears and disappears in a sudden manner, it obeys the will so far as to become visible in an apartment the doors of which had not opened, it is not recognized by those in whose midst Jesus had passed His life. All this does not allow us to believe that the resurrection consisted for Jesus, as it did for the dead whom He had Himself raised to life, only in a return to the life in His former body. They had returned into their former sphere of infirmity and death; Jesus entered within the higher sphere of incorruptibility.

III. Weiss puts forth an entirely opposite opinion. According to him, the resurrection was the complete glorification of the Lord's body, which from this time became the spiritual body of which St. Paul speaks, 1 Corinthians 15:44-49. But how are we to explain in that case the sensible appearances of Jesus? For there is no relation between such a body and our earthly senses. It only remains to hold, with Weiss, an act of condescension by which the Risen One appropriated to Himself, at certain moments, a sensible form, which He afterwards laid aside. But this material form was not an envelopment of some sort; it bore the traces of the wounds which had been inflicted upon it on the cross. Was there only an appearance here, a sort of disguise? This is impossible. Or, if these visible prints were real, how could they belong to the spiritual body? Moreover, if we take into account the words of the Lord to Mary: “I am not yet ascended, but I ascend to my Father and your Father,” it is impossible to mistake the difference between the resurrection and the complete glorification of the Lord. We see from this declaration that the resurrection is indeed the entrance into a higher state, but that this state is not yet perfect. There remains a place for a last divine act, the ascension, which will introduce Him into His state of final glory.

IV. There is only a shade of difference between the theory of Weiss and Sabatier (set forth in the Christianisme au XIX sie:cle, April, 1880). According to the latter there was no return to life for the body put to death on the cross; the real fact was the reappearance of the Lord with an entirely new body, the spiritual body of which St. Paul speaks. The material elements of the body in which Jesus had lived here on earth are returned to the earth.

At the foundation, what Sabatier thus teaches is nothing else than what the disciples expected, a Parousia, Jesus glorified returning from the other life, but not a resurrection. And yet it is a fact that the reality did not correspond to the expectation of the disciples, but that it went completely beyond it. They went to embalm; they tried to find where the body had been laid; and it was this body which was alive!

Then how can we explain otherwise than by a resurrection the tomb found empty? We have seen that the two suppositions of a removal by the disciples or by the Jews are equally impossible. The return of the material elements to the earth must have been effected by the hands of some agent. Could Jesus have been the digger of His own grave? Besides, how could Jesus, with a purely spiritual body, have said to the disciples: “Touch me,” show them His wounds, ask them for food, and this to the end of convincing them of the material reality of the body which He had?

Sabatier answers that these details are found only in Luke and John, who present to us the appearances under a form materialized by legend, while the normal tradition is still found in Matthew and Mark, and besides in Paul (1 Corinthians 15). In Matthew? But he relates that the women laid hold of the feet of Jesus; the feet of a spiritual body? In Mark? But we do not have the conclusion of Mark's narrative. In Paul? But he enumerates five appearances, some of which are identical with those of Luke, and he thus confirms the accounts of the latter. Is it probable, moreover, that Luke, St Paul's companion in preaching, had on this fundamental point of the resurrection of the Lord a different view from the apostle? And what does Paul himself desire to prove in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians? That we shall receive a new body without any organic relation to our present body? On the contrary, he emphasizes in every way the close bond of union between these two successive organs of our personality. It is this mortal which will put on immortality, this corruptible which will put on incorruption. Only the corruptible elements of flesh and blood will be excluded from this transformation, which, according to Philippians 3:21, will make of the body of our humiliation a body of glory like the present body of the Lord. For a resurrection Sabatier substitutes a creation. By breaking every bond between the present body and the future body, he does away with the victory of the Lord over death, and consequently over sin and condemnation, and thus, while thinking only to treat of a secondary point, does violence to the essence of the Christian redemption.

V. The strangest means of escaping from the notion of a corporeal resurrection and yet attributing some objectivity to the appearances of the Lord was imagined by Weisse, and then adopted and developed by Keim. The appearances of Jesus risen from the dead were spiritual manifestations of Jesus glorified to the minds of His disciples. Their reality belonged only to the inner world; they were nevertheless positive historical facts. But the disappearance of the body of Jesus remains still unexplained, as in most of the preceding hypotheses. And what a strange way of acting is that of a being, pure spirit, who, appearing to the mind of His followers, should take so much pains to prove to them that He is indeed flesh and bones, and not pure spirit! And how should the apostles, who were so little expecting a bodily resurrection, have come to substitute for purely spiritual revelations gross material facts?

After having exhausted all these so different explanations, we return to the thought which naturally comes forth from the words of the Lord: “ I am not yet ascended, but I ascend. ” The interval between the resurrection and the ascension of the Lord was a period of transition. He had indeed recovered His former body, but, through the change which was made in His personal position, this body was subjected to new conditions of existence. It was not yet the spiritual body, but the spirit disposed of it more freely; it was already the docile organ of the will. Thus are the opposite phenomena explained which characterize the manifestations of the Lord in this period of His existence; in particular, the sudden appearances and disappearances. Objection is made because of this fact: that the Lord ate. There would be reason in this objection if He ate for hunger, but this act was not the result of a need. He wished to show that He could eat that is to say, that His body was real, that He was not a pure spirit or a phantom. The ascension consummated what the resurrection had begun.

There are three miracles in the development of nature: 1. The appearance of matter; 2. The appearance of life in matter; 3. The appearance of the conscious and free will in the domain of life. There are three decisive miracles in the history of the Lord: 1. His coming in the flesh, or His entrance into material existence; 2. The realization of life, of holy communion with God in this corporeal existence; 3. The elevation of this life to the liberty of the divine life by the resurrection and ascension.