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Having now given the three versions in extenso. I should like to add a few words in support of my allegation (in the Note at the commencement of the volume) that each version is in conformity with the canons of positive science.

The second, which may be called the sombre ending, needs no defence as far as natural science is concerned. Jesus simply dies; and is probably thrust hurriedly into the ground on, or near, the spot where he was executed.

The third may be called the apparitional ending, and in reference to the bearing of modern science upon this, a few remarks must be made.—The fact of apparitions as such seems to be scientifically established. But the method of physical procedure —if one may so express oneself—in these cases, we have, with our present amount of knowledge, no means of accurately ascertaining. I see no reason, however, why we should identify Jesus with the Messiah, etc., even if he “rose from the dead,” when rising from the dead, in the sense of apparitional appearance after death, is, as Messrs. Myers' and Gurney's recent work upon the subject exhaustively proves, so common as to become positively annoying.

It is difficult to see how a book like Westcott's “Gospel of the Resurrection,” based as its whole


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argument is upon the assumption that the resurrection of Jesus was an entirely unique and exceptional fact in history, retains the slightest force when it is shown—and this “Phantasms of the Living” seems conclusively to show—that the dead are constantly in the habit of re-appearing; or, to speak more correctly, that apparitional appearance at or near the moment of a death, whatever this may indicate (and as to this point we are as yet completely in the dark), is of almost daily occurrence.

In fact, as in nearly all that relates to religion, the old method of thought is being rapidly reversed. The resurrection of Jesus no longer, as was originally held, implies and involves the resurrection of the whole human race. The greater includes the less: it is the resurrection of the whole human race—uninterruptedly proceeding, by strict physical and psychical law, it may be—which involves and implies that of Jesus.

We now come to the ending given in the text; which may be called the resuscitational ending. As I have already remarked, I selected this for the body of the work, principally for dramatic and poetical reasons. It enables an author to develop in fuller detail the character of Mary; and, if the play should some day be acted, it would give special scope and opportunity to an actress of genius.

Apart from this, however, it is by no means


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impossible that the resuscitational ending may, after all, be the nearest to historic fact. There have always been thinkers and critics who have believed that Jesus did not actually die upon the cross; that, during the unusually short time that he remained there, his body merely underwent a temporary suspension of animation; that he was taken down and restored to life in some such way as that suggested in the text of my play; and that from subsequent occasional appearances of the actual living Jesus the legend of the resurrection arose.

The following passage (the italics in which are my own) from William Rathbone Greg's “Creed of Christendom,” has great interest, as bearing upon this point:—“Three different suppositions may be adopted, each of which has found favour in the eyes of some writers. We may either imagine that Jesus was not really and entirely dead when taken down from the cross, a supposition which Paulus and others show to be far from destitute of probability (Strauss, iii. 288): or we may imagine that the apparition of Jesus to his disciples belongs to that class of appearances of departed spirits for which so much staggering and bewildering evidence is on record (see Bush's Anastasis, 156); or, lastly, we may believe that the minds of the disciples, excited by the disappearance of the body, and the announcement by the women of his resurrection, mistook some passing individual for their crucified Lord, and that from such an origin multiplied rumours of his re-appearance


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arose and spread. We do not, ourselves, definitively adopt any of these hypotheses: we wish simply to call attention to the circumstance that we have no clear, consistent, credible account of the resurrection; that the only elements of the narrative which are retained and remain uniform in all its forms,—viz., the disappearance of the body, and the appearance of some one in white at the tomb, are simple and probable, and in no way necessitate, or clearly point to, the surmise of a bodily resurrection at all.”—

Greg's “Creed of Christendom” (1883), Vol. II., pp. 153, 154.

It is worth while to add that, on a careful study and comparison of the eleven accounts of post-mortem appearances of Jesus given in the Gospels, the reader cannot fail to be struck by their curious vagueness, and by the fact that many of them harmonise almost equally well either with the apparitional or with the resuscitational theory of the resurrection.

 

“Phantasms of the Living.”