the Old Testament are said to have been translated without experiencing death, did so likewise.

S.-You refer to Enoch and Elijah. The statements certainly make them ascend in the bodies they had while in life.

P.-Paul should assuredly have accounted for these phenomena which were so much against the order he laid down. But perhaps he did not hold that Jesus rose from the dead and showed himself in his natural body. In what aspect, for example, was Jesus presented to himself, when he saw him as one born out of due time?"

In

AppearJesus to

ance of

S.-There are three accounts of the circumstance on which this alleged vision of the risen Jesus is based, one given by the writer of the book of Acts in his own terms, and two as taken Paul. down from Paul's lips (ix. 1-7; xxii. 6-10; xxvi. 13-18). these, all that is said to have occurred is that a great light appeared, and that a voice came from heaven addressing Paul, and to which he responded, and that this voice proclaimed itself to be that of "Jesus of Nazareth," no exhibition of any figure being made. This, however, is held to have amounted to "the Lord Jesus" having "appeared" unto him (Acts ix. 17).

P.-It is singular that Jesus when in heaven should still describe himself by his earthly location of Nazareth. Were there others with Paul at this time, and, if so, what may be their testimony?

S.-There were persons with Paul, but it is quite uncertain what they witnessed. According to one account they saw the light, but in the others this is not declared. Then in one it is said they heard the voice, and in another that they did not do so.

P. The whole, then, may have been the result of pure imagination on the part of Paul. Is there anything in what is known of him to negative such an imputation?

S. On the contrary, he was evidently of a highly excitable and imaginative constitution. He could boast of frequent "visions and revelations of the Lord," and fancied once that he had been "caught up to the third heaven," where he "heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter;" and such had been "the abundance of the revelations" made to him, that some physical infirmity, which he calls “a thorn

in the flesh," or a "messenger of Satan," was he conceived imposed upon him to repress and keep down exulting thoughts (2 Cor. xii. 1-7). He believed that supernatural communications were made to him to visit and preach in Macedonia, and to prolong his ministry in Corinth, and that an angel from God had appeared to him to warn him that he should be brought before Cæsar (Acts xvi. 9; xviii. 9, 10; xxvii. 23, 24). He was more addicted than any one to those extatic utterances which were called "speaking with tongues" (1 Cor. xiv. 18). And though Jesus had selected the eleven apostles as his special witnesses, and these, with over a hundred more, had been miraculously inspired at Pentecost to disseminate his doctrine, the boast of Paul was that he had received his instruction from an independent source, "not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father ;" and in the assurance of this he represents himself as proceeding to Jerusalem, the head quarters of the faith, "by revelation," to carry on his mission.

P.-Paul is evidently an unreliable witness for the supernatural. And as regards his having been taught from above without human instrumentality, what is this but to show the unimportance of such a personal mission as is attributed to Jesus?

Had such a being as he is described to be been sent from heaven to instruct and suffer for man on earth, Paul, naturally, would have sought out those who had been his selected associates, and have learnt from them all that could be known of the divine master; and if Paul could be fully empowered to preach the gospel, and to be in fact the founder of its developed doctrines, without such contact with the witnesses to the career of Jesus, then the circumstances of that career, and therewith the career itself, become unnecessary. If divine action through the spirit was all that was requisite for the qualification of such a man as Paul, others could equally well, in the same way, be indoctrinated and assured, and the direct mission of Jesus to show forth the ways of God might be dispensed with. Paul, I take it, means it to be understood, that what he had experienced is the highest and truest form of teaching, and many here would be disposed to agree with him.

But to revert to the physical resurrection of Jesus. If Paul

could classify the vision to himself, amounting at most to the exhibition of a supernatural light and the sound of a voice from heaven, with those apparitions of Jesus recounted in the gospels, these latter may in his idea have been as devoid of a real bodily presence as was his own vision.

Do any of the other writers of the New Testament, independent of the authors of the gospels, speak of the nature of the resurrection of Jesus?

S.-There are epistles attributed to James, Peter, John, and Testimony Jude, all of whom were apostles, and present, as it is said, when ofte apostles. Jesus made his appearance; but not one of them refers to the occurrence. Jesus is spoken of in the Apocalypse as one who had been dead and was alive again in heaven (i. 5, 18; ii. 8), but nothing is said of his actual appearance as risen on earth, of which the ostensible writer is declared to have been a witness. Peter also adverts to him as "put to death in the flesh, but quickened by (or in) the spirit," by which he also went and preached unto other "spirits" who are said to have been "in prison" (1 Pet. iii. 18), describing thus a resurrection of a spiritual, not a physical order.

P.-The being in life again in heaven, all might look for, but this is a different thing from having been put to death in the flesh, and quickened also in the flesh, as the evangelists represent.

to the resurrection.

It is remarkable, considering the important consequences Witnesses depending on accepting the fact of the resurrection, that the witnesses chosen before whom to display it were just those persons, of whom it was said that they had stolen away the body, and whose evidence was least likely to be received. Why were the manifestations confined to a few particular friends, and not made openly before those in hostility to Jesus, so as to confound them, and to secure a body of testimony that would have been above suspicion ?

S.-I cannot tell you. Jesus had certainly, according to the evangelists, boasted to the Jews that if they destroyed the temple, meaning his body, he would raise it up in three days, and he had called them an evil and adulterous generation, to whom no sign should be given but that of the prophet Jonas, explaining that, as Jonas was three days in the whale's belly, so he was to be but three days in his grave; and it would be fair to expect that he would redeem these pledges

The early heresies.

by manifesting himself on the third day to the objectors and opponents to whom he so committed himself as to the issue to be achieved.

P.-Assuredly, his not doing so amounts to something very like an evasion. Taking this into account, together with the silence of the apostolical epistles as to his physical resurrection, and the discordant representations of the event itself appearing later in the gospels, I conclude that the doctrine of the physical resurrection, when offered for acceptance, could not have been received without considerable demur.

S. From the very outset of Christianity serious differences arose among the Christian community, and the earliest of their writings, which have come down to us, are in refutation of what were deemed heresies. The heresies of course preceded the efforts to rebut them, and therefore the first we know of the actual working of Christianity is the prevalence of conflicting views among those who were its adherents. With the outer world the contest would be natural, but when we see the followers of the system thus in dissension, it is symptomatic of the landmarks of the faith not being demonstratively laid down. The existence of serious contrariety of opinion is to be traced even in the apostolic writings. There were those in the community who were stigmatized as "false apostles, deceitful workers" (2 Cor. xi. 13), (2 Cor. xi. 13), "false prophets" (1 John iv. 1). "Beware," said Paul, "of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision" (Phil. iii. 2); "I would," he declared, "they were even cut off which trouble you" (Gal. v. 12). "The learned have reckoned upwards of ninety different heresies which arose within the first three centuries,' and, very remarkably, the earliest of which we have any knowledge were in respect of the nature of the being of Jesus, and, prominently, of the actuality of his resurrection. The heresies of the first century, says Mr Greg, "related almost exclusively to the person and nature of Jesus; on which points we have many indications that great difference of opinion existed, even during the apostolic period. The obnoxious doctrines especially pointed out in the (fourth) gospel appear to be those held by Cerinthus and the Nicolaitans," which, according to Hug, he proceeds to explain, viewed Jesus as a natural man, 1 Taylor's Diegesis, 346.

"1

"1

but endowed with an emanation from God whereby superhuman power was conferred upon him. This emanation, at the period of his sufferings, "resumed his separate existence, abandoned Jesus to pain and death, and soared upwards to his native heaven. Cerinthus distinguished Jesus and Christ, Jesus and the Son of God, as beings of different nature and dignity. The Nicolaitans held similar doctrines." "Ignatius," observes Mr Hennell, "had been asserting with some vehemence that Jesus Christ suffered upon the cross really, or in the flesh, apparently in opposition to the Cerinthian heresy, that the divine soul or Christ left the body of Jesus to suffer in appearance only. To make his point still stronger, he says that he knows that even after his resurrection he was still in the flesh. The Cerinthian heresy, that the Christ or divine soul of the Saviour had a separate existence from the human being Jesus, and left him at the crucifixion, would give peculiar interest to all legends asserting his corporeal nature after his resurrection, and might occasion some of them." “Theodoret informs us of Cerinthus, who was contemporary with the apostle John and his followers, that he held and taught that Christ (i.e., Jesus) suffered and was crucified, but that he did not rise from the tomb; but that he will rise when there shall be a general resurrection. Philaster says of him that he taught that Christ was not yet risen from the dead, only he announces that he will rise." Dr Lardner (IV. 368) is also cited for this view of the doctrine of Cerinthus.*

"2

Cerinthus, as has been seen, was of the apostolic age, and the Nicolaitans, who held similar views, were so likewise, being referred to by name in Rev. ii. 6. At this early period, then, the fact of the resurrection was disputed. "The preva

lent opinion amongst the early Christian converts-was," says Mosheim (I. 136), "that Christ existed in appearance only, and not in reality, and that his body was a mere phantom. Dr Priestly, in his Church History (I. 97), confirms this statement." "In the gospel of the apostle Barnabas, it is explicitly asserted, that Jesus Christ was not crucified, but that he

1 The Creed of Christendom, 127, 128. Hennell's Works, 187, 188, note. 3 Taylor's Diegesis, 354.

Immortality of the Soul, R. Cooper, 39. 5 Idem, 40.