The Truth Is in the Details
"Now, as a literary historian, I am
perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are
not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite
clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not
artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view
they are clumsy, they don't work up to things properly. Most of
the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of
anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a
legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the
Platonic dialogues, there are no conversations that I know of in
ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing,
even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when
the realistic novel came into existence. In the story of the
women taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and
scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No
one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing
little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more
convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation
of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author
put it in simply because he had seen it.
"Then we come to the strangest story of all, the story of
the Resurrection. It is very necessary to get the story clear. I
heard a man say, 'The importance of the Resurrection is that it
gives evidence of survival, evidence that the human personality
survives death.' On that view what happened to Christ would be
what had always happened to all men, the difference being that
in Christ's case we are privileged to see it happening. This is
certainly not what the earliest Christian writers thought.
Something perfectly new in the history of the Universe had
happened. Christ had defeated death. The door which had always
been locked had for the very first time been forced open. This
is something quite distinct from mere ghost-survival. I don't
mean that they disbelieved in ghost-survival. On the contrary,
they believed in it so firmly that, on more than one occasion,
Christ had had to assure them that He was not a ghost.
The point is that while believing in survival they yet regarded
the Resurrection as something totally different and new. The
Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after
death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in
the Universe. Something new has appeared in the Universe: as new
as the first coming of organic life. This Man, after death, does
not get divided into 'ghost' and 'corpse.' A new mode of being
has arisen. That is the story. What are we going to make of it?
