# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1851 05 13_S146
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

146

stle himself writes: "If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up . . . If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable".

Indeed there are in our days unhappy persons who, because they themselves are without peace and comfort of heart, and because they themselves have despaired of all truth and certainty, look askance at the comfort and peace which Christians have from the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and who therefore either flatly deny this fact, or at least seek to make the certainty of it wavering and doubtful. But well for us Christians; at the objections which the enemies of Christianity raise only now, after nearly 2000 years, against the certainty of the facts upon which Christianity is founded, we can laugh: God has provided that the resurrection of JESUS Christ has more and mightier proofs in its favor than any fact which history reports to us. — Every sensible man acknowledges the principle: "When it is proven that a historian

1. could know with certainty what he reports,

and that he

2. was so honest that he wished to write nothing but the truth; if further

3. not only contemporary friends, but even enemies, who were contemporaries of the historian or appeared soon after him, and who therefore could easily have refuted the historian in their time, have not dared to accuse the historian of falsehood and deceit in that time; and if finally

4. it can be shown that a historian was in such a position that he had to write the truth: then the narrated fact is beyond doubt true. Whoever denies this principle, overthrows the certainty of all history and indeed all human certainty, and no longer deserves to be reckoned among the society of rational men.

Let us now, however, examine according to this principle, recognized by the learned and the unlearned, the history of the resurrection of JESUS Christ, and it will soon become evident that only unreason or a willfulness hostile to God can deny the certainty of this fact, or even obstinately call it in question.

Could the apostles and evangelists, in the first place, know with certainty that Christ had risen? — Concerning this there can be no doubt. For Christ appeared to them alive again on the third day after His death on the cross; not like a specter which, as if wrapped in clouds, appears now and, before the witness can recover from his alarm and examine the reality of the apparition he has had, suddenly vanishes again; but in a period of forty days, at the most various times, now in broad day, now at evening, now in the night-time; and in the most various places, now in the city, now on the way, now by the sea, now on a mountain; now to one, now to two, now to the Eleven together, now with them at the same time to above 500 brethren. And more: Christ did not step before them mute and thereupon dissolve like a vision of mist, but the Risen One, whom they knew well from long familiar intercourse, spoke with them at length, reminded them of that which He had formerly spoken to them, made the prophecy, to be fulfilled a few days afterward, of the outpouring of the Holy Ghost upon them, wrought miracles before them, ate and drank with them, and let them touch His glorified body with its five wounds. Here no deception was possible. And, what is of special importance, the apostles showed themselves herein anything but credulous, but rather most slow of belief; so that Christ could bring them to believe that it was really He only after much trouble. Yea, we see that the apostles evidently hoped for Christ's resurrection less than Christ's enemies feared it. — A second question is now: Can we, nay, must we also assume, that the apostles and evangelists not only could write the truth hereafter, but that they also were willing to write it? — If there is any question which all the world must answer without hesitation with Yes, it is this. Not only do all these men bear the most indisputable marks of simplicity, honesty, conscientiousness and fear of God, but — I ask here confidently even the most obstinate doubters — say, what could have moved the dear disciples of Christ to pretend falsely that the Lord had risen and appeared to them and before their eyes finally ascended into heaven, if it had not really happened? Every deceiver seeks by his deceit, not his disadvantage, but always his advantage! But what was the advantage which the holy apostles and evangelists could expect from their proclamation that Jesus had risen, and which they actually obtained? They could expect nothing else than this: that no man would believe them, and that they would be despised as deceivers, hated, persecuted, tortured and killed. And that, and nothing else, the disciples of Christ also reaped from their Easter preaching; they had to seal it with hunger, thirst, nakedness, scorn, mockery, contempt, disgrace and blows, with their tears, and finally with their blood. Is it not madness, then, to believe that the apostles and evangelists indeed could have told the truth, but shrewdly would not tell it, and wantonly deceived the world, in order to be able to suffer for it — all conceivable tortures and torments and at last the most wretched death? — As to the third mark of historical truth, the testimony of enemies who lived at the time of the narrators, or at least not long afterward, the history of our Easter festival lacks this seal also in no way. In the first place, a great multitude of such enemies were converted by the preaching of Christ's resurrection, and so became the most important and unimpeachable witnesses for it*); and as to the obstinate enemies, it is known among all scholars who know the history of antiquity, that no writer, however hostile, who lived in the time of the apostles or soon after, has so much as attempted to prove that the holy apostles and evangelists had themselves invented and made up what they relate of Christ that is wonderful. These first opponents appearing in writings against Christianity, to whom it would have been so easy to prove that the New Testament narrators were deceivers, if they had been such; they, who could thereby have so easily refuted all Christianity and, as with a single blow, have cast it to the ground, they do not attempt it. The first who wrote a book of his own against Christianity, by name Celsus, admits the miracles of Christ, and seeks to weaken the proof lying in the resurrection of Christ only by pretending, absurdly enough, that only the shadow of Jesus appeared to the apostles **)! A second writer-opponent of Christianity, Philostratus, seeks to help himself by this, that he

*) Who can be so foolish as to believe that those who had at first been the fiercest adversaries of Christ, as soon as the disciples proclaimed Christ's resurrection as having occurred, accepted this wonderful tidings unexamined, and for the truth of it have now in part even given their life! In that time, when the apostles, if they had been deceivers, could so easily have been exposed! The present enemies of Christianity seek indeed, in order to stop the mouth of these mighty witnesses, the enemies converted at that time, to make the ignorant believe that those who in the time of the apostles and soon after accepted Christianity were only uneducated, credulous people, who were neither accustomed nor able to examine strictly the ground of what they accepted; but it is untruth. Even the most superficial student of history knows that from the beginning also a great multitude of Jewish scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees and chief men of the people, and while the disciples of the apostles were yet living also many heathen scholars, philosophers and others, accepted Christianity only after the strictest examination. As to the former, I remind you only of Saul, afterward Paul; and as to the latter, of the former heathen scholars and philosophers converted to Christianity, Quadratus, Aristides and Athenagoras, the Athenians; Justin Martyr, the Samaritan; Tatian and Theophilus, the Syrians; Tertullian, the Carthaginian; Pantaenus and Clement, the Alexandrians; not to mention the distinguished philosophers converted later.

**) This objection, like the other most important objections of Celsus, the learned Origen has preserved for us in a separate treatise which he wrote against Celsus. We see from this how wretched were the grounds which the most learned in that time ventured alone to bring forward against the historical foundation of Christianity, when one could not yet deny what had happened so impudently without making oneself ridiculous before all the world.