II.—THE WITNESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

6. Having explained the meaning of the Lateran decision, we may now presume to analyse the New Testament basis of the doctrine.

(a) We shall not deal with the proofs that may be adduced from the Old Testament. If it is true, as it seems to be true, that the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body, like the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation, is foreshadowed and foretold rather than revealed in the Old Testament, we may be content to refer to these foreshadowings which were differently interpreted by such loyal groups of Jewish thinkers as the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Book of Job has summed up these dim shadows in its poignant hope:

> I know that my Redeemer liveth > > And in the last day I shall rise out of the earth > > And I shall be clothed again with my skin, > > And in my flesh I shall see my God. (Job xix, 25, 26).

(b) If we hold that the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body is revealed in the New Testament—that is, if we hold that Jesus Christ clearly revealed the Resurrection of the Body—we must look for this revelation primarily in the Gospels. But in this matter, as elsewhere, the Gospel texts must not be dealt with merely mechanically, and, as it were, by a show of hands. This is a valid as well as a valuable way of investigating an alleged doctrine but the New Testament, and especially the Four Gospels, is too organic to be fully expressed by a mere mechanical interpretation. If history is but a mode of psychology, no sufficient valuation of its contents can be other than psychological. To interpret the four Gospels needs a certain knowledge of the four gospellers.

(c) Let us begin the interpretation of the four Gospels by the principle that the Revelation granted to mankind by Jesus Christ was primarily Jesus Christ. The Word was Himself the revealed Word. He was the Light that needed no further light to make Him manifest. He was the ultimate Truth, who could be identified and recognised rather than proved. The essential revelation of Jesus Christ was something that He was and did rather than something that He said.

(d) We may go a step further, and say that Jesus Christ’s essential revelation of the Resurrection of the Body was the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was not so much any previous or subsequent word He had spoken about it, as the very resurrection itself. St Thomas completes this thought by the profound principle that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the efficient and exemplar cause of our resurrection* (III Pars., Qu. 56, Art. I, ad 3m).

(e) With these principles in mind let us deal with the witness of St Mark’s Gospel: in other words, with the witness of St. Peter.

7. There is a detailed account of the Resurrection of the identical body of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday (ch. xvi).

* A further motive of the Church’s doctrine may perhaps be found in the traditional belief in the Assumption of our Blessed Lady’s incorrupt, and therefore identical, body into heaven.

The fact of the Resurrection is supplemented by the mode. “And after that He appeared in another shape” i.e. His body could now change its shape. The account St Mark gives of the Resurrection is so succinct as to be chosen in the Liturgy for the Gospel of Easter Sunday.

The additional traces of the Resurrection are significant.

(a) There is the saying of Herod recorded by the three Synoptists, “John the Baptist is risen again from the dead” (Mk. V, 4; Matt. XIV, 2; Lk. IX, 7).

(b) There is our Blessed Lord’s prophecy of the Resurrection. This was made after the Transfiguration, and is recorded by St Mark and St Matthew alone (Mk. ix, 9 Matt. xvii, 9).

(c) There is the answer to the Sadducees, who said, “there was no resurrection.” To them our Blessed Lord replied, “Do ye not therefore err because you know not the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they shall rise again from the dead they shall neither marry nor be married, but are as the angels of God” (Mk. xii, 4). This episode is common to the three Synoptists (Mk. xii, 24-26; Matt, xx, 25-33; Lk. xx, 29-38).

(d) A further element in our Blessed Lord’s revelation of the Resurrection is the miracle of raising from the dead. St Mark, St Matthew and St Luke all record the raising of the child—daughter of Jairus; all record that death had touched her, so lightly that Jesus called it sleep (Mk. v, 39; Matt. ix, 24).

We may synthesise this sufficient doctrine of St Mark’s Gospel. We are given the essential revelation of the fact and mode of the Resurrection of our Blessed Lord’s body—together with a preliminary prophecy of it—and the common Jewish doctrine, together with a defence of this against a carnal interpretation and all this entailed by the miracle of raising a child from the dead.

8. St Matthew has all that St Mark has, together with some characteristic matter of his own.

(a) He alone gives our Blessed Lord’s commission to the Apostles . . . “raise the dead “ (x, 8).

(b) With St Luke, he gives in the message to St John the Baptist . . . “the dead rise again” (xi. 5; Lk. vii, 22).

9. St Luke, the physician, could not fail to be interested in the ultimates of human life. It is characteristic of him that he has given us the fullest identifications of Jesus Christ’s birth and resurrection to life.

(a) It is therefore to be expected that the medical man has given us something like the fullness of a medical diagnosis in describing the identification and signs of Christ’s risen body. The last chapter (xxiv) of his Gospel is a minute study not only of the fact and mode of Jesus Christ’s risen life, but of the various signs of this life which Jesus Christ gave his Apostles.

We must especially notice the scene where Jesus says, “See, my hands and feet, that it is I myself. Handle and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as you see me to have” (Lk. xxiv, 39).

Again, “They offered Him a piece of a broiled fish and a honeycomb. And when He had eaten . . .” (ibid. 42).

(b) A slender addition to the Resurrection doctrine, peculiar to St Luke, is the parable of Dives and Lazarus. “And he said to him, ‘If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe if one rise again from the dead” (Lk. xvi, 31).

(c) St Luke is unique in recording two confirmatory miracles. He gives the raising of the daughter of Jairus from a death so recent as to resemble sleep, but he further gives the raising of the son of the widow of Nain from death so undeniable that already the body was on its way to the tomb (Lk. vii, 12, 15).

10. St John’s characteristic resolve to complete rather than to repeat the work of the Synoptists has led him to give us valuable supplements to the Resurrection doctrine.

(a) The Resurrection of our Blessed Lord in fact and mode is described by St John with extraordinary detail—one might almost see in it the cherished memories of an old man standing on the brink of the tomb. St John alone has recorded the piercing of the side of our Blessed Lord (John XIX, 34) on the cross, and not without a purpose. Where St Luke records that the risen Saviour invited the disciples to see His hands and His feet, St John records that “He showed them His hands and His side.” The disciples, therefore, were “glad when they saw the Lord” (John xx, 20). But sight was to be confirmed by touch, in order that identification might be complete. “Then he saith to Thomas, ‘Put in thy finger hither and see my hands, and bring hither thy hand and put it into my side’” (Ibid. 27).

(b) St Mark and St Matthew substantially agree in giving the testimony of the false witnesses before Caiphas, the High Priest. These witnesses accused our Blessed Lord of having said that He would “destroy this Temple made with hands, and within three days, I will build another not made with hands” (Mk. xiv, 58). But St Mark added, “Their wit-nesses did not agree” (59).

In this disagreement of the witnesses, it might have been doubted whether the so-called prophecy was not a mere invention of the false witness. St John, with his constant desire to support the value of St Mark’s Gospel, assures us that the prophecy was not a perjury of false witness, but a prophecy of the resurrection of Jesus Christ’s Body. “He spoke of the temple of His body. When therefore He was risen again from the dead, His disciples remembered that he had said this” (John ii, 21, 22).

(c) St John, who has not recorded our Blessed Lord’s apologetic references to the Resurrection against the false views of the Sadducees, has been careful to record His direct references. The fifth chapter, with its cure of the man at the pool of Bethsaida and its heated discussion, might be looked upon as a sermon to Jerusalem on the Resurrection of the Body. The whole chapter should be read: “For as the Father raiseth up the dead and giveth life, so the Son also giveth life to whom He will . . .” (25) “Amen, amen, I say unto you that the hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live . . . (58) . . . the hour cometh wherein all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God. (29) And they that have done good things shall come forth unto the resurrection of life; but they that have done evil unto the resurrection of judgement.” These two chapters are a unique contribution to the doctrine of the Resurrection.

(d) Moreover, St John has made us all his debtors by recording that our Blessed Lord connected the raising and glorification of our dead bodies with His own condescension and humiliation in the Blessed Sacrament. The sixth chapter of St John’s Gospel might almost be called a second sermon on the Resurrection of the Body preached not to Jerusalem and Judea, but to Capharnaum and Galilee. Again this chapter, as the preceding chapter, should be studied in full, especially 39, “Now this is the will of the Father who sent me; that of all that He hath given me, I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again in the last day.” (44) “I will raise him up in the last day.” (52) “If any man eat of this bread he shall live for ever.” (55) “He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day.”

Our Blessed Lord has here pointed out the mystic connection between His own Body, which He assumed in time, and our bodies, which will last to eternity. (1) The Resurrection of the body unto life everlasting will depend on the reception of the Sacramental Body of Jesus in the Church. In other words, the Holy Eucharist is supremely the “Sacrament of the Living.” (2) The difficulties which the human mind sees in the resurrection of the identical body from the ashes of death are paralleled and indeed outdone by the difficulties of the body of Jesus Christ in its sacramental existence. It would seem that if reason can accept the dogma of the body of Jesus Christ existing with all its accidents under the accidents of bread, there is no great mental hardship in accepting the resurrection of our identical body.

(e) Like the Synoptists, St John records a confirmatory miracle, the rising of Lazarus (John xi). It was well chosen for its purpose of confirmation. The miracle of giving back life to a dead body was not wrought on one so recently dead that death seemed but sleep; nor yet on one who, dead a few hours, was on his way to the grave; but on one whose body after three days’ burial under a tropical sun was already undeniably corrupt. It is this stench of Lazarus’s tomb that “smells sweet and blossoms in the dust” which reminds us that though corruption of the flesh has taken away from our body something that once belonged to it, God will undo this corruption and give us back the body that was once ours. Thus St John has reminded us that one of the greatest of his Master’s miracles was a victory over that corruption which seems to make the resurrection of the identical body impossible.

II. This manifold witness of the Gospels to the resurrection of the body prepares us to see how largely the preaching of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ entered into the apologetics of the early Apostles.

(a) St Peter in his first defence of the Church before the people boldly said (Acts iii, 15); “But the Author of Life you

killed; whom God raised from the dead, of which we are witnesses.”

(b) St Peter’s first defence of the Church before the High Priest repeated this doctrine (Acts iv, 10). “Be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God hath raised from the dead, even by Him this man standeth here before you whole.”

(c) The first official apologetic to the Gentile world in the person of Cornelius is but a repetition of the resurrection formula (Acts x, 39-43). “We are witnesses of all things that He did in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem, whom they killed hanging Him upon a tree. Him God raised up the third day, and gave Him to be made manifest, not to all the people, but to witnesses, pre-ordained by God, even to us, who did eat and drink with Him, after He arose again from the dead.”

(d) St Paul’s apostolic sermon at Antioch in Pisidia follows the lines of St Peter’s discourse at least in the matter of the Resurrection (Acts xiii, 30). “God raised Him up from the dead the third day. (31) Who was seen for many days. …(34). And to show that He raised Him up from the dead not to return now any more to corruption…”

(e) But as St Paul stood at Athens before the Aeropagus, the spirit of Greek philosophy was dead, when it could be said of the kinsmen of Plato and Aristotle (Acts xvii, 31) “God hath appointed a day wherein He will judge the world in equity by the man whom He hath appointed giving faith to all, by raising Him up from the dead. (32) And when they had heard of the resurrection of the dead some indeed mocked; but others said: We will hear thee again concerning this matter.”

Small wonder that henceforth no little of St Paul’s zeal and genius was to be taken up by proving Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the tomb as the fact of the resurrection of the dead.

(f) The Pharisee-Sadducee dispute on the resurrection of the dead finally sent him a prisoner to Rome. (Acts xxiii, 6— xxiv, 15—xxvi, i, 32).

Thus the discussion opened by the Greek news-seekers of Athens had its re-echo in the long philosophical appeal to the Greek mind of Corinth (1 Cor. xv).

Other explicit references, not to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but to the general Resurrection of the Dead, are to be found in Rom. viii, 23; Cor. iv, 16, showing that at the time when the Apostle wrote this second group of epistles the thought of the Resurrection was habitual with him. Already in Thess. iv, 16, he had tried to comfort the Greek mind of the Macedonians with the example of Christ’s risen body. Later on, the same conviction of Christ’s Resurrection being the cause and exemplar of our Resurrection found its expression in the last group of Epistles written from his prison in Rome, where he was awaiting trial and perhaps death. It is this circumstance which gives a peculiar power to the texts, Eph. i, 20; ii, 4, 6; Phil. iii, ii, 21; Col. i, 18; ii, 12. Already the writer of the Epistle could write . . . “Of the doctrine of baptisms and impositions of hands, and of the resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgement” (Heb. vi, 2). In this final fragment of the New Testament the doctrine had received a formulation which was to pass bodily into the Catholic Creed.