The circumstance of disappearing, shall be considered under the next head, with other objections of the like kind. At present I shall only examine the other parts of this story, and inquire whether they afford any ground to conclude that the body of Christ was not a real one. Had this piece of history been related of any other person I think such suspicion could have risen. For what is there unnatural or uncommon in this account? Two men meet an acquaintance whom they thought dead: They converse with him for some time, without suspecting who he was; the very persuasion they were under that he was dead, contributed greatly to their not knowing him; besides, he appeared in a habit and form different from what he used when he conversed with them; appeared to them on a journey and walked with them side by side; in which situation no one of the company has a full view of another: afterwards, when they were at supper together, and lights brought in, they plainly discerned who he was. Upon this occasion, the Gentleman asks what sort of witnesses these are? eye-witnesses? No; before supper they were eye-witnesses, says the Gentleman, that the person whom they saw was not Christ: and then he demands a reason for our rejecting the evidence of their sense when they did not know Christ, and insisting on it when they did.
It is no uncommon thing for men to catch themselves and others by such notable acute questions, and to be led by the sprightliness of their imagination out of the road of truth and common sense. I beg leave to tell the Gentleman a short story, and then to ask him his own question. A certain Gentleman who had been some years abroad happened in his return to England through Paris to meet his own sister there.
She was not expecting to see him there, nor he to see her, they conversed together with other company, at a publick house, for great part of a day, without knowing each other. At last the Lady began to shew great signs of disorder; her color came and went, and the eyes of the company were drawn toward her; and then she cried out, Oh my brother! and was hardly held from fainting. Suppose now this Lady were to depose upon oath in a court of justice that she saw her brother at Paris; I would ask the Gentleman, Whether he would object to the evidence, and say, that she was as good an eye-witness that her brother was not there, as that he was; and demand of the court, why they rejected the evidence of her senses when she did not know her brother, and were ready to believe it when she did. When the question is answered in this case, I desire only to have the benefit of it in the case now before you. But if you shall be of opinion, that there was some extraordinary power used on this occasion, and incline to think that the expression, their eyes were holden, imports as much; then the case will fall under the next article. In which
We are to consider Christ's vanishing out of sight; his coming in and going out when the doors were shut; and such like passages; which, as they fall under one consideration, so I shall speak to them together.
But it is necessary first to see what the Apostles affirm distinctly in their accounts of these facts; for I think more has been said for them, than ever they said, or intended to say for themselves.
In one place [Luke 24:31] it is said, he vanished out of their sight.
Which translation is corrected in the margin of our Bibles thus: He ceased to be seen of them. And the original imports no more.
It is said in another place, that the disciples being together, and the doors shut, Jesus came and stood in the midst of them. How he came, is not said; much less is it said that he came through the door, or the keyhole; and for anything that is said to the contrary, he might come in at the door, though the disciples saw not the door open, nor him, till he was in the midst of them. But the Gentleman thinks these passages prove that the disciples saw no real body, but an apparition. I am afraid that the Gentleman, after all his contempt of apparitions, and the superstition on which they are founded, has fallen into the snare himself, and is arguing upon no better principles than the common notions which the vulgar have of apparitions. Why else does he imagine these passages to be inconsistent with the reality of Christ's body? Is there no way for a real body to disappear? Try the experiment now; do but put out the candles, we shall all disappear. If a man falls asleep in the day-time, all things disappear to him; his senses are all locked up; and yet all things about him continue to be real, and his senses continue perfect. As shutting out all rays of light would make all things disappear; so intercepting the rays of light from any particular body, would make that disappear. Perhaps something like this was the case; or perhaps something else, which we know not. But, be the case what it will, the Gentleman's conclusion is founded on no principle of true philosophy: for it does not follow that a body is not real because I lose sight of it suddenly. I shall be told, perhaps, that this way of accounting for the passages is as wonderful, and as much out of the common course of things, as the other. Perhaps it is so; and what then? Surely the Gentleman does not expect, that, in order to prove the reality of the greatest miracle that ever was, I should shew that there was nothing miraculous in it, but that everything happened according to the ordinary course of things. My only concern is, to shew, that these passages do not infer, that the body of Christ after the resurrection was no real body. I wonder the Gentleman did not carry his argument a little further, and prove, that Christ, before his death, had no real body; for we read, that when the multitude would have thrown him down a precipice, he went through the midst of them unseen. Now, nothing happened after his resurrection more unaccountable than this that happened before it; and if the argument be good at all, it will be good to prove, that there never was such a man as Jesus in the world. Perhaps the gentleman may think that this is a little too much to prove: and if he does, I hope he will quit the argument in one case as well as in the other; for difference there is none.
Hitherto we have been called upon to prove the reality of Christ's body, and that it was the same after the resurrection that was before: but the next objection complains, that the body was too much the same with that which was buried; for the Gentleman thinks that it had the same mortal wounds open and uncured of which he died. His observation is grounded upon the words which Christ uses to Thomas:
[John 20:27] Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my side. Is it here affirmed that Thomas did actually put his hand into his side, or so much as see his wounds fresh and bleeding? Nothing like it: but it is supposed from the words of Christ; for if he had no wounds, he would not have invited Thomas to probe them. Now, the meaning of Christ will best appear by an account of the occasion he had to use this speech. He had appeared to his disciples, in the absence of Thomas, and shewn them his hands and feet, which still had the marks of his crucifixion: the disciples report this to Thomas: he thought the thing impossible, and expressed his unbelief, as men are apt to do when they are positive, in a very extravagant manner: You talk, says he, of the prints of the nails in his hands and feet; for my part, says he, I'll never believe this thing, except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side. Now, in the first place, here is nothing said of open wounds;
Thomas talks only of putting his finger into the print, that is, the scar of the nails, and thrusting his hand into his side. And, in common speech, to thrust an hand into any one's side does not signify to thrust it through the side into the bowels. Upon this interpretation of the words, which is a plain and natural one, the Gentleman's objection is quite gone. But suppose Thomas to mean what the Gentleman means; in that case the words of Christ are manifestly a severe reproach to him for his infidelity: Here, says Christ, are my hands and my side; take the satisfaction you require; thrust your fingers into my hands, your hand into my side; repeating to him his own words, and calling him to his own conditions; which, to a man beginning to see his extravagance, is of all rebukes the severest. Such forms of speech are used on many occasions, and are never understood to import that the thing proposed is proper, or always practicable. When the Grecian women reproached their sons with cowardice, and called to them as they were flying from the enemy, to come and hide themselves, like children as they were, in their mothers' wombs; he would be ridiculous who had asked the question, Whether the women really thought they could take their sons into their wombs again?