turn did not give a complete account. The second is that Saint Paul is not writing to prove the Resurrection to his readers; he is simply giving them a brief reminder of facts they well know and he well knows. There is no reason to treat the fifteenth chapter of the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians as an example of what Saint Paul would have said if he had been writing to plead the truth of the Resurrection. This apparent difficulty, the supposed discrepancies between the Gospel and Saint Paul’s Epistle, is no reason for dismissing the Resurrection story. Indeed, the real difficulty is finding a natural explanation for the transformation that took place in Saint Paul’s life; the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of finding a natural explanation for what must surely have been a supernatural event.
WEEKLY TESTIMONY TO TRUTH OF RESURRECTION An extraordinary event occurs once every week. It is said man can get used to almost anything. It is certain, we do not notice what a remarkable thing we do every Sunday. We obey the Ten Commandments or, at least, we try to obey them. Almighty God ordered mankind to rest on the seventh day of the week and we know that the Jews faithfully observed the Sabbath. Then a most remarkable thing happened. A very small group of men, the Apostles, took it upon themselves to make the Sabbath an ordinary day and substituted in its place, the first day of the week. We in modern times rarely realize that, to the orthodox Jew of the first century, this must have appeared as an act of hideous blasphemy. These few men amended one of the Commandments of God and Christians have followed their example throughout the ages. The earliest Christians were Jews and those converted Jews formed a large proportion of the Christian Church throughout the first century. Only extraordinary consideration could have caused them to tamper with one of the Ten Commandments. What could it be other than the conviction that it was on the first day of the week that the Lord had risen from the dead? Christ’s Resurrection was so decisive and so certain that it displaced even the Sabbath of the time. Every Sunday is a new argument for the Resurrection.
PROBLEM OF THE RISEN BODY Though what has been said in these pages is adequate to show that Our Lord’s Resurrection is a sober historical fact, it would be untrue to say no problems remain in connection with the Appearances. One great difficulty is the nature of the risen body of Christ. It must be confessed that a full explanation would appear to be beyond our finite human minds. But there are some things that must be said. One is that the historical truth of the Resurrection is not affected in the slightest by our inability to understand every question connected with it. My inability to understand how the egg changes into the chicken does not alter anything; the egg hatches out even if I do not believe that it will do so. Another thing that must be said is that our Risen Lord was different in some ways to the Christ before the Crucifixion--yet He was not a spirit. The true explanation must tconsider the fact that the Risen