imaginative origin of the last twelve verses of Mark's Gospel.

The compilers of Matthew freely accept the legends of their age. Mark's white-robed stranger becomes the angel of the Lord, with a countenance like lightning, descending from heaven to roll back the stone, as if a risen God required miraculous help to burst the fetters of the grave!1 They also tell us that the chief priests and elders placed a guard of Roman soldiers at the tomb of Jesus, because he had foretold his resurrection; 2 and yet, the Apostles were so unconscious of the prediction, that they treated the evidence of Mary and her companions as merely idle gossip. They had witnessed the resurrection of Lazarus, and had received, as apostolic missionaries, the marvellous gift of restoring the dead to life, and yet were incredulous of the Messianic Resurrection.

The Roman guard saw an angel descend from heaven, and Jesus rise from the grave, but instead of rushing forth wildly to spread the marvellous tale, they kept and sold the priceless secret of the Resurrection to high priests, who conspired to defraud the Hebrew race of their Messiah, and mankind of attested. Immortality. But, if men ever existed capable of so monstrous a design, could gold, however freely lavished, purchase the unbroken silence of those who had witnessed the marvels of the Resurrection?

The action of the chief priests was a crime against Humanity, and yet Jesus, in seeking the solitude of a mountain, concurred in the design of concealing that he had risen from the dead. If the Roman sentinels,

1 Matt. xxviii.

T

2 Matt. xxvii. 62-66.

instead of selling the secret, had openly proclaimed the miracle, would Jesus have confirmed their evidence by making a public entry into Jerusalem, or permitted them to be punished as impostors, by his own persistent concealment of his bodily existence?

The credulous compilers of Matthew's Gospel overlook the fact that, if Jesus had openly forecast the Resurrection, his concealment of the accomplished miracle placed him under the ban of Moses, as a prophet whose prediction had not been fulfilled. But if the prophecy had ever been uttered, could Mary and the Apostles have forgotten what priests and elders so easily recalled?

Matthew alone records that, when Jesus died, the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the Holy City, and appeared unto many." Whilst, therefore, these visitants from the unseen world were walking about the streets of Jerusalem attesting Immortality, the Apostles were denying the credibility of the Messianic Resurrection, because they understood not the Scriptures. The chief priests and elders bought the silence of the Roman guards; did they also purchase the evidence of the numerous witnesses who had seen and conversed with the risen saints at Jerusalem? But the presence of legendary fiction is at once disclosed in the anomaly of saints restored to life on Friday and remaining in their graves until the following Sunday, that their appearance in the streets of Jerusalem might synchronise with the Resurrection of Jesus-an incongruity probably arising from the interpolation of the words, after his resurrection,' to

1 Matt. xxvii. 52, 53.

reconcile the legend with the statement of Paul that Jesus was the first-fruits of them that slept.'

The compilers of Matthew depict Jesus carefully concealing his victory over death by meeting his Apostles in the solitude of a mountain, where, although he could now speak with the infinite knowledge and wisdom of Divinity, in freedom from the embarrassing rôle of the Hebrew Messiah, he has nothing more to say than that all power is given to him in heaven and on earth, and that his disciples are to teach and baptize all nations, in the name of a Trinity never previously heard of,1 whose personality is disclosed in the formula-Father, Son, and Holy Ghost-unknown to Christianity until the second century.

Convinced of the interpolation of Matthew and Mark, we necessarily reject the legendary accretions of Luke and John. According to the former, Jesus rose from the dead, appeared twice to his disciples, and was carried up into heaven within four-and-twenty hours," and yet, the same author declares, in the Acts of the Apostles, that Jesus appeared several times during a period of forty days before his ascension. According to this Evangelist, however, Jesus said nothing of baptism, creeds, Trinity, or miracles, but simply repeated the Gospel message of repentance and remission of sins, and explained the Scriptures in confirmation of prophetic fatality. He also instructed the Apostles to wait at Jerusalem for power from on high, in which Orthodoxy sees the outpouring of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. But, on the contrary, John affirms that the Holy

1 Matt. xxviii. 16–20.

3 Acts i.

2 Luke xxiv.

Spirit and full ecclesiastical powers were conferred on the Apostles before the ascension.1

Do we accept all these incongruities as revelation, recording the utterance of an omniscient Being conscious that the Christianity of futurity would condemn unbaptized babes to eternal fire, consign monotheists to the stake, and claim universal dominion over the reason and conscience of Humanity, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth? Or, are we not rather reading the blundering efforts of credulous Piety sustaining a constructive resurrection through the current traditions of the second century?

Paul, or whoever may have written the First Epistle to the Corinthians, further complicates the story of the resurrection by affirming that Jesus was first seen by Peter, then by the twelve apostles, afterwards by five hundred brethren at once, the majority of whom were then living, and finally by Paul himself, who, in thus classing the vision on the road to Damascus with antecedent appearances of Jesus, assigns to all the character of impalpable phantoms.2

Is it on inspired authority that Peter is thus substituted for Mary; or is this merely Pauline rejection of the important position held by woman in the drama of the Resurrection? But what shall we say of the writer who considered that if Jesus be not risen from the dead, his followers are the most miserable of mankind, and yet neglected to preserve for posterity the names and attested evidence of the surviving majority of the five

hundred witnesses?

To what source do we, therefore, trace the legend

of the Resurrection? The fourth Evangelist records that on the first day of the week, while it was yet dark, Mary Magdalene visited the sepulchre alone, saw the stone rolled away, and hastened to inform Peter and John that the body of Jesus had been removed. The two Apostles ran to the tomb, saw that the body was not there, and returned home without further inquiry. But Mary remained weeping at the tomb, and saw an apparition of Jesus.

The bereaved convulsionnaire, distracted by the appalling horror of a felon's death inflicted on her dear Lord and Master, went forth with the dawn to visit the sepulchre, in that condition of nervous tension which evokes mere phantoms in all the semblance of reality. What, therefore, more natural than that she should see an apparition of Jesus, and that her excited report of the marvellous vision originated belief in the Resurrection of the Messiah, around which subsequently clustered the unattested legends, accepted as authentic by the evangelical compilers of the second century?

The details of the Messianic apparition are further amplified in the Gospel of John by a conversation between Jesus and Mary, so irreconcilable with Divinity or Humanity as to disclose the presence of legendary fiction. If Jesus had appeared as an omnipresent God, could he have exclaimed- Touch me not; for I have not yet ascended to my Father,'-as if it were obligatory on Divinity to undergo some form of ceremonial purification in heaven, before touching the hand of Mary? If he spoke as the Son of Man, could he have thus repulsed his most faithful and devoted disciple? And if Mary had suddenly passed from despair to joy