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this matter, every human motive operated to lead them to discover and avow their error. To have persisted in so gross, a false hood after it was known to them, was not only to encounter for life all the evils which men could inflict from without, but to endure also the pangs of inward con scious guilt; with no hope of future peace, no testimony of a good conscience, no ex pectation of honor or esteem among men, no hope of happiness in this life or in the world to come. "§31. Such conduct in the apostles would, moreover, have been utterly irreconcilable with the fact that they possessed the ordi nary constitution of our common nature. Yet their lives do show them to have been men like all others of our race, swayed by the same motives, animated by the same hopes, affected by the same joys, subdued by the same sorrows, agitated by the same fears, and subject to the same passions, temptations, and infirmities as ourselves. And their writings show them to have been men of vigorous understandings. If then their testimony was not true, there was no possible motive for this fabrication. The Character of the Witnesses “§32. It would also have been irreconcil able with the fact that they were good men. But it is impossible to read their writings and not feel that we are conversing with men eminently holy and of tender con sciences, with men acting under an abiding sense of the presence and omniscience of God, and their accountability to Him, and walking in His ways. Now, though in a single instance a good man may fall, [Continued on on page 141 ]
lepers (one having "confluent leprosy,” as Dr. Howard Kelly of Johns Hopkins has informed me Dr. Luke’s report indicates) under conditions of roadside publicity that made imposture or mistake impossible; that He stopped a storm with a word; that three dead people (one whose body had started to decay) returned to life at His command, and that He, Himself, in exact accordance with His prediction, returned to them from the grave three days after being publicly executed, and that He consorted with them after His resurrection for a period of about a month and ten days.' If He “truly did” these “signs," I believe no man will ques tion or could question His divine nature and authority. Applying the Laws o f Thought and Rules of Evidence It remains, therefore, only to ascertain whether the laws of thought and rules of evidence can enable us to know for a cer tainty that He did do the supernatural things reported in these documents, Gos pels, or depositions that we have seen were written by some persons at or about the time they were done, and, from conclusive internal evidence, by men who were in deed, at least as to three of them, eyewit nesses as they allege. On this point I will ask Greenleaf to speak again: “§30. The great truths the apostles de clared were that Christ had risen from the dead, and that only through repentance from sin, and faith in Him could men hope for salvation. This doctrine they asserted with one voice, everywhere, not only under the greatest discouragements, but in the face of the most appalling terrors that can be presented to the mind of man. Their Master had recently perished as a malefac tor, by the sentence of a public tribunal. His religion sought to overthrow the reli gions of the whole world. The laws of every country were against the teachings of His disciples. The interests and passions of all the rulers and great men in the world were against them. The fashion of the world was against them. Propagating this new faith, even in the most peaceful and inoffensive manner, they could expect noth ing but contempt, opposition, revilings, bit ter persecutions, stripes, imprisonments, tor ments, and cruel deaths. Yet this faith they zealously did propagate, and all these mis eries they endured undismayed, nay re joicing. As one after another was put to a miserable death, the survivors only prose cuted their work with increased vigor and resolution. The annals of military warfare afford scarcely an example of the like he roic constancy, patience, and unblenching courage. They had every possible motive to review carefully the grounds of their faith, and the evidence of the great facts and truths which they asserted; and these motives were pressed upon their attention with the most melancholy and terrific fre quency. It was therefore impossible that they could have persisted in affirming the truths they have narrated, had not Jesus actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact If it were morally possible for them to have been deceived in
definite year of Tiberius' reign! “Had the evangelists been false historians,” wrote the great scholar Thomas Chalmers, "they would not have committed themselves upon so many particulars. They would not have furnished the vigilant inquirers of that pe riod with such an effectual instrument for bringing them into discredit with the peo ple, nor foolishly supplied, on every page of their narratives, so many materials for cross-examination which would infallibly have disgraced them.” Documentary Evidence The Apostle John, in concluding his tes timony or record of the things he said he saw Christ do and heard Him say, gives the purpose of his writing his account: “And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God: and that believing ye might have life through his name” (John 20:30, 31). But the first step in arriving at certainty that Jesus Christ lived and died and rose from the dead and performed the miracles attributed to Him is to make sure of the authenticity of the records, copies of which we have in our hands in the form of the New Testament Gospels. This we can do with the utmost certainty by applying fundamental laws of thought to unquestionable facts. A fact known to all who have given any study at all to this subject is that these books were quoted, listed, catalogued, harmonized by different writers, Christian and pagan, right back to the time of the apostles. Celsus, for instance, a bitter opponent of Christianity who was bom only fifty years after the Apostle John, mentioned the four Gospels as being in his day the sacred books of Christian be lievers. The Gospels, then, were written before the time of Celsus and Justin Martyr and Ireneus and Papias and the others who quoted them, as surely as a book has to be written by some one before it is quoted by any one. I leave this very important but obvious point with a quotation from Greenleaf: "If any ancient document concerning our public rights were lost, copies which had been as universally received and acted up on as the four Gospels have been, would have been received in evidence in any of our courts, without the slightest hesitation. The entire text of the Corpus Juris Civilis is received as authority in all the courts of Continental Europe upon much weaker evidence of its genuineness.” Unless one, therefore, desires to apply to the Gospels the theory Mark Twain satirized with the remark that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by him but by an other man of the same name, and to believe that the Gospels were not written by the apostles to whom they have been univer sally attributed from the earliest times, but by some other remarkable men of the same names, there is no room for question that the records of the words and acts of Jesus of Galilee came from the pens of the men who, with John, wrote what they had “heard” and "seen” and their hands had "handled, of the Word of life.” Among the things they reported were Christ’s cure of cripples, blind men, and
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