Gooding, David: Resurrection: Myth or History?

The two alternatives that we have set ourselves to discuss this evening concern the resurrection of our Lord Jesus, whether it is in fact myth, or whether it is a fact of history. Now, at the risk of stating the obvious, I would like to remind us that they who hold the view that the resurrection is a myth Myth. use Use that that term myth in a very responsible and meaningful way. We must take them seriously. When they use the term myth, they do not imply an innocent, irresponsible fairy story. By myth, they mean rather a story which conveys profound and universal truth, relating to the origin of life, its purpose, and its destiny. They mean such a story as conveying universal truth shall give man some hope, some encouragement to hope for a destiny that is worthwhile and that will make sense of this life, and a destiny which will have a practical effect on a man's morals and ethics here in this life. It was in this fashion that the famous Greek philosopher, for instance, the philosopher Plato, used myth. When he had got as far as one can go by unaided reason, he then included in his dialogues myths aimed at buttressing the conclusions of reason with suitable spiritual and moral power. And therefore, they who call the resurrection a myth mean that the resurrection is a story that conveys the universal truth, that expresses what is practically a universal instinct in the human heart, that after death, human personality survives. Which, if it be true, has its obvious implications for the way we live here on Earth. But if we were to push this definition of myth a little bit further, we should find the reason why this evening again we are forced to a decision whether the resurrection of our Lord Jesus is to be regarded merely as a myth, or whether we are not obliged to take it far further than that and regard it as a historical fact. For a myth, while it conveys universal truth, can happily regard its details as quite untrue and unhistoric. Let me take an example of the fact, o- o- of this situation. The defeat of Napoleon by Wellington at Waterloo is a historic fact. We should not call it a myth, for while it is a historic fact, it has no lesson to teach. It conveys no universal truth. If it had any lesson to teach at all, it was only to the military strategists, and Wellington's methods are long since outdi- dated and irrelevant. On the other hand, Aesop's Fables may be regarded as a very humble form of myth. Nobody has ever dreamed that the details of Aesop's Fables were historic facts. Animals don't speak, as Aesop's Fables say they speak. And yet, while the details of Aesop's fables are not historic facts, yet Aesop's fables do convey universal truths that all people will readily recognize. And therefore, those who incline to the view that the resurrection is a myth feel it a far bigger and more important thing that it should be a myth than a historic fact. They say, you see, the resurrection is conveying a universal truth, and it doesn't matter if the details are not historic facts. They would go further. If we wanted to establish the reliability of the claim that Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, we could turn to the instrument of historical criticism. And the more we apply the canons of historical criticism, the more we should become convinced that it was a fact, a fact of history, that Wellington defeated Napoleon. But you can't establish the truth of a myth by historical criticism. If you were trying to back home the truth of one of Aesop's fables, it's no good you're sitting down and applying historical criticism to prove that there was a lion, or there was a fox, who actually, on a certain day of the week, was it Tuesday or Wednesday, of a particular year, made the remarks that Aesop said they made. That would be absurd. Historical criticism has got nothing to do with establishing the truth of a myth. You are beginning to see, I suppose, that between the traditional Christian view that the resurrection is a fact, and the view held in more modern times among Christian theologians that the resurrection is a myth, there begins to yawn a very deep chasm. The myth theory would tell us that the truth of the resurrection is completely unaffected by the question whether the details recorded in the Gospels for us did actually happen. They would say that you cannot, you cannot enforce the truth of the resurrection by employing the normal tools of historical criticism. They will go so far as to say it doesn't matter if the records in the Gospels disagree with one another. It doesn't matter, the resurrection is still true. They will go so far as to say that the resurrection is still true, even though the body of Jesus Christ is still moldering in Joseph's grave. Some of us cannot sit so lightly to the historic facts. I want now to demonstrate why I think that the view that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a myth is utterly inadequate. A view, in fact, that is, on strictly rational grounds, untenable. Let me first of all observe that myth, anyway, at this juncture, is altogether an inadequate instrument to convey the lesson it would wish to convey. Aesop's fables can talk to us about the way we behave, about the results that come to certain ways of behaving because we have seen those results with our very eyes, and Aesop's fables merely sum up what we have found in our own experience. But when it comes to the resurrection, whether humans do live on beyond the grave, whether there is a glorious destiny for mankind in another world, whether there is a judgment to come, whether sin will bring for the impenitent suffering in the world to come. These things are beyond our experience to prove or disprove. If the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not a fact, then you will not prove the resurrection by myth. For if perchance you were trying to make the instinct, as you call it, the instinct for survival, come to bear upon the way a man lives? He may very readily turn around to you and say, oh yes, you are quite right that there is an almost universal instinct in the human heart that whispers to men that they will survive death. But how will you prove to me that that instinct is anything more than wishful thinking? Suppose here a motor car, if it could feel and think and talk. The motor car feels the thobbing of its pistons within and the urge that sends its wheels spinning. The motor car says to himself, you know, I have such an urge to live and to move and to go that I'm sure that this urge will go on forever. Silly motor car. You have only to smash the plug and crack the cylinder, and the urge will stop. There is no thereafter for a motor car. And a man has every right to turn round and question this universal instinct. How do I know, he may ask, that when I lie in my coffin, the instinct won't have disappeared. And if you urge on the basis of myth that there is a life to come in which there will be a moral judgment, and a man will have to answer for his sins in this life, your modern man will turn around and say, but how do you know that the conscience that pursues you and makes you think that there is to be a judgment in a life to come, is anything more than Freud's super ego. Are you not merely extrapolating a farther fixation? And what shall we say if the resurrection is merely a myth? It has no authority whatsoever and no certain evidence upon which we may build. But to come to more important matters, they who hold that the resurrection is merely a myth must face, to start with, the undeniable fact that the people who set the story going first, namely the Christian apostles, did not regard it as a myth. After all, it was not we in the twentieth century or the twenty-first who were left to invent this myth. We must, if we will be true to history, go back to the men who invented the story, if they did invent it, and find out what they intended thereby. We have the word of the Apostle Peter, used, I admit, in a slightly different connection, but it applies here equally well. We have not followed cunningly devised myths, and myth is the very word he uses. You see, the ancient oriental world was very used to the idea of a myth. The Greek world was very used to the idea of a myth. They understood perfectly well what you were doing when you told a story that wasn't true in its detail, but was meant to carry a universal truth. Everybody knew what was meant by a myth, and Peter says explicitly, we have not followed cunningly devised myths. When Peter spoke of the resurrection, he intended it as a literal fact of history. So did Paul. Paul, in fact, writing at one stage to some Christians at Corinth, was obliged to go over in some great detail what he actually meant when he talked of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the course of his remarks, he makes this observation. If the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not a fact, we apostles are liars, and deliberate liars. For we have witnessed in the name of God that God literally raised up Jesus from the dead. If God did not literally raise up Jesus from the dead, then we Christian apostles are liars, and deliberate liars at that. It is idle for us in this century to turn around and say that if the Apostle Paul were here nowadays, he would rephrase the whole thing and would no longer insist that the resurrection is a literal affair, a literal fact of history, that he would restate it in modern idiom as a myth. That surely is being most arbitrary. For for this very teaching that Jesus Christ had bodily risen from the dead, the Apostle Paul and his fellow Christians were frequently persecuted. The Pharisees, who were in part responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, they did believe in the resurrection, in a sense that the resurrection was a survival of a man's spirit. But it was a totally different matter when the early apostles preached that the literal body of Jesus Christ, whom they had pierced with spears and nail and put in a tomb, had risen again. And if they had merely meant it in the sense of a myth, I must ask why they did not take the trouble to explain this more carefully, thereby avoid the confusion of thought and indeed the persecution that followed of on their insistence that Jesus Christ was risen again. But there is a crowning difficulty. We may content ourselves with the idea that the resurrection is a myth if we think in terms of survival of personality or the continuance of a man's spirit. When we come to the resurrection as stated in the New Testament, that is not what is meant by the resurrection anyway. By the resurrection, the early Christians meant, and they stated it explicitly, not that the spirit or personality of Jesus Christ had survived his crucifixion, but that the literal body had come out of the tomb in which it was laid. For everywhere, for these early Christians, resurrection means the resurrection of the body. It is therefore plain idle nonsense to say that it doesn't matter whether the body of Jesus of Nazareth really came out of the tomb or not. It is putting one's head into the sands of wishful thinking to say that a man can still believe in the Christian doctrine of resurrection, even if the body of Jesus Christ is still in the tomb. That is arrant nonsense. If Jesus Christ is in fact still moldering in the grave of Joseph of Arimathea, then let us be men, courageous men, and fling our Christianity, all of it, out of the window. Let us not descend to explanations that do not fit the facts, and which can merely bring contempt upon Christianity from a modern, scientifically minded world. We are faced then with a tremendous either or. Or. Either Jesus Christ rose from the grave, and if he rose from the grave, then he is the Son of God, as he said he was. And there is a life beyond the grave for all men. And there is a glorious destiny for those whom God saves. And there is a coming day of judgment at which the impenitent shall meet the due reward of their deed. Or Jesus Christ is not risen from the grave. We must discard Christianity as being less than a myth and nothing but a fairy story. What is the evidence? I wish to devote the second half of this lecture to a discussion of some of the evidence, and as last week, so this, I cannot possibly hope to cover all the evidence there is. My hope is that, as I discuss some of it, and I shall be offering the evidence as I understand it that is given by the early Christian writers themselves, that I may encourage some of you to go back to those records yourself and study the evidence again. For my part, I must confess to my constant surprise, though I am a committed Christian. I am constantly surprised to find how the simply and naturally told stories of the resurrection have within them the answers to so many of the critical theories that have been presented in subsequent centuries. But first of all, some introductory words here on the matter of evidence. We must be careful, if we would be fair in this thing, to keep a tight rein on our prejudices and bias. We shall meet right at the very beginning the challenge as to whether we are going to believe that miracle is possible, or whether we are going to dismiss everything we come across that has the slightest flavor of being a miracle. In other words, we must ask ourselves how prejudiced we are on this matter. If we are certain, for reasons that I couldn't begin to imagine, but if any of us is certain that miracles cannot possibly happen, then we may close the discussion at once. For in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have the biggest miracle of all time. I must confess I grow a little impatient sometimes with people who bring up as difficulties in the way of accepting Christianity the miracles of Genesis chapter one. They doubtless are sincere. My impatience springs from this, that the difficulties of Genesis chapter one are nothing to be compared with the difficulties of the resurrection. If therefore we wish to decide whether Christianity is true, it is a far quicker way to start not with Genesis, but with the resurrection, for it is the biggest miracle. If it has happened, and Jesus Christ is God's son, and what he has to say about the early chapters of Genesis is evidence more powerful than any we could possibly have. If Jesus Christ isn't risen, I say again, he is not the son of God, and Christianity is false, and we need not trouble ourselves about the miracles of Genesis chapter one. What then about miracles? I I submit. submit to you that the only scientific approach here is to come with reasonable caution and yet with open mind. After all, the normal way of approaching scientific matters, not that I am a scientist, the normal approach to extraordinary phenomena is first of all to examine the evidence. I am told, for instance, that in the geophysical year, evidence was discovered that there is out in space a magnetic field that has no mass. As far as I understand physics, that is an extraordinary phenomena, phenomenal phenomenon, for not ordinarily you can't have a magnetic field without having some mass for the magnetic field to be round. And yet the evidence has piled up that this phenomenon is there. No scientist worthy of the name would say, but I don't believe, I don't believe you can have a magnetic field without mass, and therefore I'm not prepared to examine the evidence. The true scientist would say, well, let me see what the evidence is. If it proves paltry, let us dismiss the thing. If there is undeniable and un-get-riddable evidence, then we shall have to re- re- reconstruct our theory. I submit the same process is necessary when we come to consider this greatest of all miracles. Let us not start with a priori ideas that miracles are impossible, but rather examine the evidence. Then a word about the men who circulated the stories. We have every right, of course, to examine their character and to assess what the worth of their evidence is likely to be as we pass our judgment on the type of men they were. Here I submit that we are dealing with men who were thoroughly honest. I mean by that, that they were not the kind of men that would have deliberately and knowingly set about a story that was not true, but a concocted thought. These These men men. may have been silly, and some saintly men have indeed been silly. They may have been credulous. I think we must allow that they were not deliberate deceivers. The gospel they preached was a gospel that exhorted men to holy living, living and to telling the truth. They did in fact succeed, this is a matter of history, they did succeed in turning thousands of their contemporaries from the Greek standards of living that held truth at a minimum and thought lying was rather clever, to the Christian standard of telling the truth. Theirs would have been characters very difficult to explain if they built this religion whose insistence is on truth, on the foundation of a something that they knew to be a fraud. They stood by and watched their converts lose their lives, because they would believe that Jesus was risen from the dead. They stood by, do you think, knowing that they were deliberately deceived, that they had concocted the story, a story that they knew wasn't true, and they had sold their story to the cont- their contemporaries, and were prepared to stand by and watch their converts be executed? No, that surely is an impossible view. Whatsoever they have told us, we can know for certain that they really thought themselves that it happened. But then, as I say, holy men, saintly men can be mistaken. They can sometimes be silly. Let us therefore consider some of the many hypotheses that have been put forward to explain their stories of the resurrection. Some people have said that Jesus Christ didn't really die. That having swooned because of his intense suffering, he was put in the grave for dead, but the cool of the grave revived him. And mustering some strength, he called out and appeared to some of his friends in a ghastly state that made them think he was a ghost come back from the dead, and eventually crept off into some hole somewhere and died, nobody knows where, but lived long enough to set abroad the superstition that he was risen from the dead. Uh, then Mark in his gospel tells us that Joseph of Arimathea went to Pilate to beg the body for burial, and Pilate, being surprised that the prisoner was already dead, summoned the centurion who was in charge of the execution squad and inquired whether he were already dead. And when he learned from the centurion that the corpse was dead, he gave the corpse to t- to Joseph. We must ask ourselves, is that story an invention of the early Christians? Or does it sound like a story that would really happen? What would you think of Pilate? Roman governor. Military general. Do you think he would have disposed of the body irresponsibly? Do you think the story rings true that he would first of all have questioned the centurion in charge of the execution squad and made perfectly certain that that body was dead? I submit to you that being Pilate and being a Roman and being a Roman general and being a Roman governor, he would have done precisely what Mark said he did. And anyway, if our Lord had been put by some unaccountable reason half dead in the tomb, is it likely that a man who had been crucified with a spear thrust through his side, scourged, wrapped round with a hundred weight of spices round him. Would have had strength enough to get up and undo the wrappings and push aside that great stone that was, um, laid at the mouth of the cave. The story is foolish. Let me dismiss that one at once. Let us come then to the idea that the early Christians sincerely believed that Jesus rose from the dead, but they believed this because, being slightly neurotic, as some religious people are, and wishing heartily that Jesus Christ would rise again, and believing strongly in their hearts that he would rise, they were eventually the victims of hallucinations and saw visions that made them think he was alive. And mistook in all good faith, mistook visions for facts. Then the records tell us that not merely did some individuals see Jesus Christ after his resurrection privately, but in one place Paul claims before his contemporaries that over five hundred men at once saw Jesus Christ. And Paul adds more than half of those men are still living. An open invitation, of course, to his contemporaries, if they wished, to visit those men and hear those their story. It's not likely that five hundred men at once are all neurotics. But moreover, the evidence is exceedingly strong that the early Christians were not, in fact, expecting Jesus Christ to rise. I think of Luke's evidence. He and others say that on that first day of the week, the women folk came to the sepulcher with ointments to embalm the body. The story is natural. It's a very likely thing that the women would want to do. The very fact that they came to embalm the body shows exceedingly clearly that they were not expecting the body to rise. Now it is true that if people are really expecting something to happen, they will on times think that they have seen it happen. A search party in the desert looking for somebody who is lost, hoping against hope to see that somebody, will be liable, after the end of some hours of strain, to keep on seeing that person, or at least thinking it sees them. But the early Christians were not expecting it was the last thing they ever expected to see. The women were coming to embalm the body permanently. Yes, but somebody will say, that's very good. But later on, when they had time to think, the early Christians got over their initial disappointment by the invention of the story of the resurrection. This is an argument commonly put forward by Orthodox Jews, for instance. They say that Christians believe that Jesus was the Messiah, but the Messiah died, and therefore their faith was shaken, but presently they thought of a way of reviving their faith, and they said, our Lord didn't set up a kingdom on earth, but he rose again in the spiritual sense and has set up a spiritual kingdom. In other words, the whole doctrine of the resurrection was an afterthought by Christians. But Luke's evidence again cuts across that. He tells us that when the women came to the sepulcher, the angel said, why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen as he spoke to you. These were his words while he was yet with you. The claim is, story of the resurrection was not an afterthought invented by Christians. It was stated by Christ himself before he died. If it didn't come true, then Jesus Christ has been found untrue. But you say your theory contradicts the first theory. If Jesus Christ said he was going to die and rise again, then the disciples must have been expecting him to rise. Luke tells us the answer again. They were not expecting Jesus Christ to rise, even though he said he would rise, and that's for a very good reason. Luke tells a story that one day two disciples were walking from Jerusalem to a mass when a stranger drew near. A stranger that was, in fact, our risen Lord, but they did not recognize him. He was the last person on earth they were expecting to see. Why so? He inquired their troubles. They said, you know, we had expected that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, but he was crucified, and this is the third day since these things were done. And moreover, certain women of our company have brought us tales that he's risen again, but they didn't see him, and these two men were obviously unconvinced by such stories. Though they repeated the words our Lord had frequently used, the third day I will rise again, the penny still didn't drop. Why didn't it drop? The answer is seen in what the stranger did. He took their Bible and he said, you fools and slow of heart to see, ought not the Christ first to suffer these things and then enter into his glory? The reason why the early Christians were not expecting Jesus to rise was because they had never expected him to die in the first place. Their conception of Messiah was the common conception of their day. Their conception of Messiah was, as they stated, they expected Jesus Christ to raise a great army, capture the kingdom, and ascend the throne. And a wa- person who claimed to be the Messiah and let himself be defeated and lose his life on a cross, that was a contradiction in terms. And to say he had risen again wouldn't necessarily have got rid of the difficulty. A Messiah who died was a contradiction in terms to a Jew. It was no good talking about the resurrection to a Jew until you had first proved that the Messiah was destined first to suffer and die, which is precisely what the stranger did on the Emmaus Road. He took the Old Testament, and he said, gentlemen, have the- have you not noticed how the Old Testament says that Messiah will first die before he enters into his glory. That came as a revelation to them, but there it was. The Old Testament does so say that Messiah would first die. Convinced that the Old Testament said that Messiah should first die, their minds were open now to begin to think. Well, if Messiah has died according to the promise, how will he reach his glory? Is there a chance that those tales that the women brought were true? They came to recognize that the stranger who stood beside them was in fact the Messiah risen. We shall want to know how they recognized him. For you see, somebody is sure to say, but yes, given the fact that the Old Testament prophesied that the Messiah would die and rise again, could it not be that some unprincipled rogue, noticing this in the Old Testament, went around masquerading as Jesus Christ of Nazareth, dressing up like him, affecting his manners, and passed himself off to these innocent early Christians as being the Messiah risen and backing home his claim with Old Testament prophecy. Now, yes, that does raise an important thing. How did those early Christians become sure that the figure that stood beside them was Jesus Christ and not an imposter? Luke's evidence seems exceedingly simple on the face of it. The more one considers the matter, it becomes exceedingly powerful. He went into a meal with them, and as he broke the bread, he became known to them. It was a simple act of breaking the bread at meal. A tiny little detail that an imposter would not have thought up. But you see, disciples were very interested in the way that Jesus of Nazareth broke bread. If the stories are true, there had been that famous afternoon when he had taken bread in the desert and to their astonishment had multiplied it in his hands. And the crowds had been fed, and every attention of those disciples would have been fastened on those hands as the bread multiplied itself in them. There had been that exceedingly sacred occasion of the Last Supper, when Jesus had taken bread and broken it and said, take eat, this is my body. Whatever they still understood or didn't understand, they must have perceived that there was something big here. Our Lord, in fact, in breaking that bread, was symbolizing his own sacrifice, how he loved those men and loved the world, that he was going to give his body in sacrifice for them. They recognized this stranger in their room as he broke bread. It was one of those small yet utterly inimitable things about Jesus Christ. It was beyond the power of an imposter to reproduce. Hard you say, but I'm surely there is another explanation. It was that as the disciples got together and thought of their Lord and thought of the wonderful way he had symbolized his sacrifice for them, by psychic power they conjured up his image until it seemed to have objective reality. But that won't fit the facts again. These early Christians say, not so. When he came in the room, they didn't think, they did in fact think he was a spirit, but he said, I'm not a spirit, handle me and see, and asked for food and ate food with them. Peter constantly repeats that in his gospel preaching. We ate and drank with him after his resurrection. Now, if the people are together in a huddle and they've had a holy experience such as will provoke visions, one of the surest ways to break them and test the vision is to suggest that somebody goes out and gets a cup of tea. That'll slice through the holy atmosphere at once. That's precisely what Jesus Christ did, according to these apostles. He said, has anybody got some food here? Give me some something to eat. And have you noticed another thing in the evidence? That is this. From about that time, there began a great movement from Jerusalem that we have come to know as Christianity. It began as a tremendous evangelical movement. It was begun by Jews. Seeing it is such a colossal movement that has existed and exists still, we must try and find some cause for this effect. Why did it break out then? Until that point, the Jews had not been singularly evangelical. There had never been any movement comparable with Christianity breaking out of Judaism. Then why, why now? Why did it start then? The disciples say it started when the risen Lord himself made them see the points of the Old Testament prophecies, that the Messiah should first die, then rise again, and that forgiveness of sin should be preached in his name. You see, this in the strict sense was an absolutely novel thing. Before that, the Jews had a moral code, they had a Ten Commandments. The wonder of the Gentile world, a commandment, a set of commandments that brought great respect from the Gentile. But the law of Moses never moved anybody yet to be an evangelist. You will notice that when the apostles went round to start Christianity, it was not the Christian ethic they preached. The golden rule, do unto others as you would be done by, was not the rule that turned over the Roman world and started Christianity. It was not ethics. It was not a message of being good that sent the apostles through the Roman world, inflamed with a zeal to convert their fellow beings. What was it that sent them? This. They found solid reasons for knowing that their sins were forgiven. They had a story to tell their fellows, which, if true, brought their fellow men forgiveness, personal forgiveness, known here and now. A certainty of eternal life, known here and now on earth. It was not primarily a message of being good. They had found an answer to sin. Where? Well, in this, that Jesus had died and risen. The missionary movement didn't start before. It didn't even start in the days when Jesus was alive on earth, because there was no gospel to preach then. It wasn't until he had both died and risen that there was any message to preach. Once the significance of that death and resurrection dawned upon them, it proved a tremendous dynamo of energy that flung them round the Roman world to tell people this is this extraordinary news. It is that, of course, that makes me deliver these lectures. This is not a dry academic subject. You see, if Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, then he is the Son of God as he claimed to be. And the first and biggest upshot of it all is just this, that his claim that he's died for our sins is true. And now that he's risen, we may have personal forgiveness of sin, and we may be sure of it now, in value of the sacrifice that he has offered. This is the answer to human sin, if it be true. This is the most personal thing that we ever heard of, if it be true. I would like to go on piling up the evidence, but time for bit. But as a parting thrust, allow me just to direct your attention, if you please, to the evidence that Saint John gives us. Just to remind you that his evidence is in two forms. John tells us that when he and Peter went to the tomb, they discovered their grave clothes. And when they went in, the significance of it all began to dawn upon them. They found the grave clothes lying out at length. They found the napkin that had been around the head still in its place, rolled up in the manner of a turban. They began to think. Those grave clothes grow on one the more one thinks. How has the body come through? There is, of course, the Christian explanation that a resurrection took place, and the body came right through the grave clothes and left them there. If, if there was no resurrection, we are in the presence of the most ghastly fraud that was ever perpetrated on mankind. Namely, that somebody in the cool of that morning went along to that grave, unwound the clothes around the body, put the body out, and deliberately wound the clothes back again, and the turban. With obvious intent deliberately to deceive. And if you do not believe in a resurrection, you must find a somebody in history that would have perpetrated such an evil crime. And you must find an answer to the question, why did not the authorities hunt that somebody to the death and make him expose where he had put the body? There is another bit of evidence. Says John, Mary was at the tomb at the time, and when the apostles went home, she stayed. Stayed because of that womanly instinct that all of us surely have observed. There is something in a woman's heart that will not let her let go of somebody that she has loved. Why, many a mother still has in her dressing table drawer a little lock of hair. It's the lock of Sonny's hair when he was two. Well, Sonny has grown up now and is a big, big man. Perhaps he hasn't got any hair anymore. But she can't let that little lock of hair go. You may call it sentiment or what you wish. It's that in the feminine psychology that clings. It is that in feminine psychology and male psychology as well that has built shrines around religious figures. Why did not the early Christians make a shrine of the tomb in the garden? You'll find the answer to that in Mary's story. What made her let go of the tomb? It wasn't logical argument. It wasn't deduction from the evidence that they had seen in the grave clothes. Her story is this. She let go that tomb because in the garden... she met a something that satisfied her heart with all its emotions. She met a living Christ. It is a remarkable thing that those oriental women and men never once made a shrine of that tomb in the garden. They seemed completely to have forgotten it. It waited for a decadent Christianity to start paying pilgrimages to a tomb where Jesus Christ was no longer present. To bring it to a conclusion, someone will say, that's all very well, but that's ages ago, if Jesus Christ is alive. If Jesus Christ is alive and showed himself alive to the people of his day, then let him do the same for me. Someone will say, God knows I'm honest. I'm willing to believe that Jesus Christ is risen and is the Son of God, and I'm willing to commit my life entirely to him, if God only will give me the evidence. Let Jesus Christ come and appear to me now as he appeared to those early Christians, and I'll believe. But if he won't, I shall go off with the impression that he can't. Fair question, that. It's not been asked now for the first time. Thomas said precisely the same thing. He said, I don't believe this story of a resurrection, or at least I'm prepared to believe it, if he will show himself to me and let me touch his hands and put my finger in the nail print and in his side. His challenge was heard and answered. But as Christ answered, he made this remark, Thomas, you believe because you've seen. Happy are the people who believe without seeing. And when we think of it, seeing is not, after all, the best method of evidence, is it? Why, if Jesus Christ appeared here tonight in person, I warrant that half of us would say it was merely a ghost or a figment of imagination. If seeing were the only proof, then our blind friends are forever lost, for they have no evidence. There is available to us another piece of evidence that convinced Thomas. When Jesus Christ appeared to him, we are told that he repeated Thomas's words, word for word, and Thomas never handled him and never put his finger in his side, as far as we know, because that astounding revelation that Thomas was known, had not in fact been alone, but the risen Christ had been by his side all the time when he had made his challenge, bit deep into Thomas's conscience. I close this lecture with a challenge to any of my friends here present who are not yet Christians. I have submitted historical evidence, and there is much more that I haven't said. There is a quicker route to this thing than even historical evidence. If Jesus Christ is risen, Jesus Christ is here. Would you know that? Then dare to make an experiment, will you? What evidence would prove to you that Jesus Christ is risen? Dare you get- dare you challenge him to that? Dare you give him an open check, so to speak? Jesus Christ claims to be able to give you eternal life and introduce you to God. It would be in the best scientific tradition to make the experiment. Say it with honesty, then you may say what you will. Say it honestly and deliberately, then you can say now, Jesus Christ, if you are risen. And you can convince me you're risen? Then I'm prepared for all the consequences. I'm prepared to receive you as my God and my Lord, and I want the eternal life that you claim you can give. Now, Jesus Christ, I'm ready. I'm honest. Convince me you are, make yourself known, and I'm ready. I can do no more than challenge you honestly to make that experiment. If it works, we'll have need of no other evidence. If it doesn't work, there is no other evidence to be had. Shall we take the matter to God in prayer? O God, from the consideration of these long and interesting historical questions, we come now to thee with this practical challenge. We pray thou wilt give us the wisdom to see what is involved in the things that we have been discussing. In thy kindness, we pray that thou wilt now show us all the importance of investigating this matter personally. Strengthen those who are already Christians, we beseech thee, that their faith rests in solid facts. And any who are not yet Christians, we pray that thou will give them the grace honestly to make this experiment and challenge Jesus Christ to make himself known to them, they being willing for all the consequences. We ask it in his holy name.