“I now come,” said Scaurus, “to one of the most interesting of all the traditions of the resurrection—the ‘rolling away of the stone’ from the tomb. As to the alleged facts, all the evangelists agree. But Mark alone has preserved traces of what I take to be the historical fact, namely, that the narrative, as it now stands, has sprung from Christian songs and hymns based on Hebrew scriptures and Jewish traditions. I shewed you above how the precept, ‘Go forth with the staff alone,’ did not mean ‘with a walking-stick’ but ‘with the staff of God,’ a metaphor from the story of Jacob in Genesis. Curiously enough, the same story will help us to explain the rolling away of the stone.
“There Jacob rolls away the stone from the well for Rachel in order that her flocks may obtain water. The Jews have many symbolical explanations of this ‘rolling of the stone.’ One is, that the stone is the evil nature in man. When worshippers go into the synagogue, the stone (they say) is rolled away. When they come out, it is rolled back again. Philo comments fully on the somewhat similar action of Moses helping the daughters of Jethro, taking it in a mystical sense. The scriptures may be regarded as the ‘water of life’ or ‘living water.’ The ‘stone’ prevents the ‘water’ from issuing to those that thirst for it. You may perhaps remember that Paul says something of the same kind, but using a different metaphor. To this day, he says, a ‘veil’ lies on the hearts of the Jews when the scriptures are read.[258] So Luke says—concerning one of Christ’s predictions about his resurrection—‘it was veiled from them.’ Luke also relates that Christ, after the resurrection, conversed with two disciples, but did not make himself visible to them till he had ‘interpreted the scriptures’ to them. Then, when he broke bread, ‘their eyes were opened and they recognised him.’ This ‘interpreting,’ the two disciples call ‘opening the scriptures.’ The ‘opening of the scriptures’ might be called ‘taking the veil from the heart,’ or ‘rolling away the stone.’ But the last phrase might still better be used for ‘rolling away the burden of unbelief’.”
All this seemed fanciful to me. But as I knew very little about Jewish tradition I waited to see what traces of this poetic language Scaurus could shew in the Greek text of Mark. Before passing to that, however, Scaurus shewed me, from Isaiah, that “the stone” might be used in two senses, a good and a bad; a good, for believers, as being “the stone that had become the head of the corner”; but a bad, for unbelievers, as “the stone of stumbling and rock of offence.” And he said that the stone rolled away by Jacob was called by some Jews the Shechinah or glory of God. According to Matthew, the “stone” at the door of the tomb was “sealed” by the chief priests, the enemies of Christ. There it stood, as an enemy, saying to the disciples, “Your faith is vain. He will come out no more. He is dead.” This was “a stone of stumbling.” On the other hand Scaurus said he had read an epistle written by Peter, which bids the disciples come to Christ as “a living stone.”
“Now,” said Scaurus, “taking the accounts literally, we must find it impossible to explain how the women, at about six o’clock in the morning, could expect to find men at the tomb ready and willing to roll the stone away for them; or, if guards were on the spot, how the guards could be induced to allow it. And there are also other difficulties, too many to enumerate, in the differences between the evangelists as to the object of the women’s visit. But taking the account as originally a poem, we are able to recognise (I think) two or three historic facts found in Mark alone.
[259]
“First, take the statement that the women ‘said,’ or ‘said to themselves,’ ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?’ I am not surprised that someone has altered this into, ‘Who has rolled away the stone for us?’ Improbable though the latter is, it is at all events conceivable. But it is inconceivable that women, going to the guarded door of a prison, should ask, as a literal question, ‘Who will open the door for us?’ Taken literally, Mark’s text implies something almost as absurd as this. But now take it as a prayer to heaven. Then you may illustrate it by the language of the Psalmist, ‘Who will rise up for me against the evil-doers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?’—followed by ‘Unless the Lord had been my help my soul had soon dwelt in silence.’ So the Psalmist says, ‘Who will bring me into the fenced city?’ and then adds, ‘Hast not thou cast us off, O God?’ You see in all these cases the question is really a prayer, a passionate and almost desperate prayer, implying ‘What man will do this for us? No man. No one but God.’ So it is in the Law, ‘Who will go up to heaven? Who will go down into the deep?’ These last words Paul quotes as the utterance of something approaching to despair. So I take the women’s words as having been originally a cry to God, ‘Who, if not God, will roll away the stone!’
“Secondly, note that Mark says nothing about any guards at the tomb. According to him, no obstacle was to be anticipated by the women, in their attempt to enter the tomb, except the weight of the stone, which was ‘exceeding great.’ No other evangelist says this. But I have seen traditions describing the stone as so heavy that twenty men could scarcely roll it, or that it required the efforts of the elders and scribes aided by the centurion and his soldiers. In my opinion the omission of the ‘greatness’ by Matthew and Luke, and the literalising of it by later traditions, arise from a misunderstanding of its poetical and spiritual character. The ‘stone’ was ‘exceeding great’ in this sense, that it could not be moved except by the help of God.
“Thirdly, ‘the women looked up and saw it (i.e. the stone) rolled upward,’ that is, as I take it, to heaven, in a vision.[260] The word here used for ‘look up’ may mean ‘regain sight,’ as though the women were blind to the fact till they had uttered their aspiration (‘who will roll it away?’) and then their eyes were opened. Anyhow, it is more than ‘looked.’ I think it means ‘saw in a vision’.” I was certainly astonished at this use of “look up,” but much more at the “rolling up” of the stone.
“As to Mark’s ‘rolling up’,” said Scaurus, “I have looked everywhere, trying to find his word used by others in the sense of ‘roll away,’ or ‘roll back.’ But in vain. Its use here is all the more remarkable because, when Jacob rolls away the stone for Rachel, the word ‘roll away’ is used. You may say, ‘This shews that the term is not borrowed from Jacob’s story.’ I cannot agree with that. The Christian hymn might contrast Jacob, the type of Christ, rolling the stone merely on one side, with Christ, the fulfilment, rolling it right up to heaven. I should add that a marginal note in Mark inserts an ascension of angels with Jesus at this point.”
In attempting to do justice to this narrative and to Scaurus’s criticisms of it, I felt at a great disadvantage owing to my ignorance of Jewish literature and thought; and at first I was much more disposed to put by the whole story as an inexplicable legend than to accept Scaurus’s explanation. But afterwards, looking at Matthew’s narrative, I found that Matthew described an “angel” as “rolling away the stone,” and as saying to the women, “Fear not.” This seemed decidedly to confirm the conclusion that the women saw “a vision of angels” (a phrase used by Luke) in which vision the stone was seen rolled away—or (as Mark says) “rolled upward”—when the angels went up to heaven. But all this—though it confused and wearied me—did not prevent me from believing that the spirit, or spiritual body, of Christ had really risen from the dead, since I had all along supposed that this alone was what was meant by Christ’s resurrection, in accordance, as it appeared to me, with Paul’s statements. Nothing that Scaurus had said, so far, seemed to me to shake Paul’s testimony to the resurrection.
But Scaurus’s next remarks dealt with this matter, and greatly shook my faith. “I had almost forgotten,” he said, “to speak of Christ’s appearance to Paul. It was clearly a mere[261] image of Paul’s thought, called up by his conscience—nothing more. I need write no further about it. Flaccus has sent you Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. If you are curious, look there, and you will find enough and more than enough. My belief is, that, if Stephen had not seen Christ, Paul would not have seen Christ. That puts the matter epigrammatically, and therefore (to some extent) falsely; for all epigrams are partly false. But it is mainly true. There may have been other Stephens whom Paul persecuted. But Stephen, I think, summed up the effect of all. Read what Paul says to the Romans about the persecuted and their conquest of persecutors:—‘Bless them that persecute you’; that is, instead of resorting to the fire of vengeance against one’s enemy, use, he says, the refiner’s fire of kindness, ‘for in doing this thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head’; finally, ‘Be not conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good.’ Read this. Then reflect that Paul ‘persecuted.’ Then read the Acts and see how he persecuted Stephen, and how Stephen interceded for his enemies. I take it that Paul is writing from experience—that the intercession of Stephen ‘overcame’ Paul (he would say ‘overcame,’ I should say ‘hypnotized’ him) and compelled Paul to see what Stephen saw, namely, Jesus raised from the dead and glorified. Read the Acts and see if I am not right.”
It had not occurred to me before, while I was reading what Flaccus’s letter said incidentally about the inclusion of the Acts of the Apostles in my parcel, that this book would probably give me Luke’s account of the conversion of the apostle Paul, which had been so much in my thoughts, in my conjectures, and even in my dreams. Now, therefore, although barely a dozen lines of Scaurus’s letter remained to read, I immediately put them aside and took up the Acts. Here I found that I had been wrong in most of my wild anticipations about the circumstances of Paul’s conversion; but I had been right in supposing that the conversion took place near Damascus, and that the utterance of Christ would contain the words, “I am Jesus.” Moreover the words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” accorded (not indeed exactly but as to their general sense) with my dream about the Christian martyrs—how[262] they looked at me, as though saying, Why didst thou rack me? Why didst thou torture me?; and how they blessed me, and looked up to heaven; and how they made me fear lest I, too, should be compelled to look up and see what they saw.
Now therefore once more I was seized with a kind of fellow-feeling for Paul as he journeyed to Damascus. I began again to imagine his efforts to prevent himself from thinking of Stephen, and from seeing Stephen’s face looking up to heaven, and from hearing Stephen’s blessing. It seemed to me that I, too, should have rebelled as Paul rebelled at first, striving against my conscience, like the bullock that kicks against the goad. Then I asked, “Should I have done what Paul did afterwards? Should I, too, have been ‘overcome’ as Paul was, being brought under the yoke?” I thought I might have been.
But was it seemly or right that a free man should be brought under a “yoke”? That was the question I had now to answer. I seemed to have come to the branching of the paths. All depended on the nature of the “yoke.” What was it? On the one hand, Paul said it was “the constraining love of Christ.” He had made me feel that there was nothing base in it, nothing to be ashamed of. Nay, under Paul’s influence, this “yoke” had begun to seem an ensign of the noblest warfare, a sign of royalty, the emblem of service undertaken by God Himself, the yoke of the risen Saviour, the Son of God, enthroned by the Father’s side in heaven, and in the hearts of men on earth. But on the other side stood Scaurus, maintaining that all these Jewish stories were dreams—not falsehoods, but self-deceits more dangerous than falsehoods. He had also convinced me that the gospels contained an unexpected multitude of errors and exaggerations and disproportions. This I could not honestly deny. Thus the gospels flung me back—or at least, as interpreted by Scaurus, seemed to fling me back—from the faith to which I was just on the point of attaining through the epistles. In my bewilderment I was no longer able to say clearly and firmly as before, “Nevertheless the moral power of the gospel is attested by facts that Scaurus and Arrian both admit, facts that Epictetus would be only too[263] glad to allege for himself—by myriads of souls converted from vice to virtue. Does not this moral power rest on reality?”
The Christians themselves seemed to attach so much importance to “Christ in the flesh” that I began to attach importance too. The evangelists appeared to say, in effect, “If we cannot prove that Christ in the flesh arose from the dead, then we admit that He has not arisen.” So they—or rather my impression about them—led me away to say the same thing. A few days ago, I had neither desired nor expected that Christ should be demonstrated to have risen in the flesh. Now I said, “I fear it cannot be proved that Christ in the flesh, that Christ’s tangible body, rose from the dead. Nay, more, I feel that the belief in what might be called a tangible resurrection arose from some such causes as Scaurus has specified. So I must give up all belief.”
I ought to have waited. I ought to have asked, “All belief in what?” “Belief in what kind of resurrection?” Scaurus himself had casually admitted that visions, though not presenting things tangible, might present things real. If so, then the visions of Israel might be real, the visions to Abraham and the patriarchs, to Moses, to the prophets. These might be a series of lessons given to the teachers in the east to be passed on to the learners in the west. Among the latest of these was a vision of “one like unto a Son of man.” He was represented as “coming” with the clouds of heaven. That was a noble vision. Yet how much better and nobler would be a vision of the Son of man “coming” into the hearts of men, taking possession of them, reigning in them, establishing a kingdom of God in them! Such a Son of man had been revealed to Paul, “defined” as “the Son of God” “from the resurrection of the dead.” Being both God and man He brought (so Paul said) God and man into one, imparting to all men the sense of divine sonship, the light of righteousness and spiritual life, triumphant over spiritual darkness and death. This is what I ought to have thought of, but did not.
Such an all-present power of divine sonship Paul seemed also to have in view when he likened belief in the risen Saviour to the faith described by Moses in Deuteronomy. The true[264] believer, said Paul, is not the slave of place, saying, “Who shall go up to heaven?” that is, to bring Christ down to us from the right hand of God. Nor does he say, “Who shall go down to the abyss?” that is, to bring Christ up to us from the dead. The word of faith is “very near.” It is “in the heart.” It says, “Believe with the heart that God raised Christ from the dead.” Such belief is not from the “eyes” nor from the “understanding”—as if one saw with one’s own eyes the door of the grave burst open by an angel, or heard the facts attested in a lawcourt by a number of honest and competent eyewitnesses incapable of being deceived and of deceiving. To say, “I believe it because Marcus or Gaius believed it,” is to avow a belief in Marcus or Gaius, not in Christ, unless the avower can go on to say “and because I have felt the risen Saviour within me.”
He alone really and truly believes in the resurrection of Christ whose belief is based on personal experience. If he has that, he can contemplate without alarm the divergences of the gospels in their narratives of this spiritual reality. He will understand the meaning of Paul’s words, “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me”—not “to me,” but “in me.” For indeed it is a revelation—not a demonstration from the intellect and senses alone—derived from all our faculties when enlightened by God. God draws back the veil from our fearful and faithless hearts and gives us a convincing sense of Christ at His right hand and in ourselves. This “conviction” is derived from no source but the convincing Spirit of the Saviour, coming to us in various ways, and through many instruments, but mostly through disciples whom the Saviour loves, and who have received not only His Spirit but also the power of imparting it to others.
All these things I knew afterwards, but not at the time I am now describing. I had indeed already some faint conjecture of the truth, but not such as I could put into definite words. I was defeated. In the bitterness of defeat I exclaimed, “There is more beyond, but I cannot reach it. I cannot even suggest it. These evangelists give me no help. They take part with Scaurus against me. I am beaten and[265] must surrender.” Yet I felt vaguely that I was not fairly beaten. I was like a baffled suitor retiring from a court of justice, crushed by a hostile verdict, victorious in truth and equity, but beaten and mulcted of all his estate on some point of technical law.
In this mood, sullen and sick at heart, weary of evidence and evidential “proofs” that were no proofs, and irritated rather with the evangelists than with Scaurus—who, after all, was doing no more than his duty in pointing out what appeared to him historical errors—I was greatly moved by an appeal to my love of truth with which my old friend concluded his letter. It was to this effect.
“Well, Silanus, now I have really done. I cannot quite understand what induced me to take up so much of my time, paper, and ink—and your time, too, which is worse—and all to kill a dead illusion. Why do I say ‘dead’ if it was never alive? Perhaps it was once nearly alive even in my sceptical soul. I think I have mentioned before that I, even I, have had moments when the dream of that phantom City of Truth and Justice had attractions for me. Perhaps I fancied it might be possible to receive this Jewish prophet as a great teacher and philosopher—helpful for the morals of private life at all events, even though useless for politics and imperial affairs—apart from the extravagant claims now raised for him by his disciples. But it is gone—this illusion—if it ever existed. The East and the West cannot mix. If they did, their offspring would be a portent. This Christian superstition is a mere creature of feeling, not of reason. I do not say it has done me harm to study it. Else I would not have sent you this letter. It is perhaps a bracing and healthful exercise to remind ourselves now and then that things are not as we could wish them to be, and that we must not ‘feign things like unto our prayers.’ A truthful man must see things as they are in truth. The City of Dreams has closed its gates against me, and I am shut out. It is warm in there. I am occasionally cold. So be it! Theirs is the fervour of the fancy, the comfortable warmth of the not-true. I must wrap myself in the cloak of truth—a poor uncomfortable thing, perhaps,[266] but (as Epictetus would say) ‘my own.’ Truth, my dear Silanus, is your own, too—that is to say, truth to your own reason, truth to your own conscience. Never let wishes or aspirations wrest that from you. ‘Keep what is your own!’”
For the time, this appeal was too strong for me. I wrote to Scaurus briefly confessing that the City of Dreams had had attractions for me, as well as for him, but that I had resolved to put the thought away, though I might, perhaps, continue a little longer the study of the Christian books, which I, too, had found very interesting. When I grew calmer, I added a postscript, asking whether it was not possible that “feeling,” as well as “reason,” might play a certain lawful part in the search after truths about God. My last words were an assurance that, whereas I had been somewhat irregular of late in my attendance at Epictetus’s lectures, I should be quite regular in future. This indeed was my intention. As things turned out, however, the next lecture was my last.