rst preaching of the disciples in Jerusalem,
something that entirely changed the character of that group of men.

Something happened, so tremendous and so vital, that it changed not
only the character of the movement and the men--but with them the
whole history of the world. The evidence for the resurrection is not
so much what we read in the Gospels as what we find in the rest of
the New Testament--the new life of the disciples. They are a new
group. When it came to the cross, his cross, they ran away. A few
weeks later we find them rejoicing to be beaten, imprisoned and put
to death (Acts 5:41). What had happened? What we have to explain is
a new life--a new life of prayer and joy and power, a new
indifference to physical death, in a new relation to God. That is
one outcome of the cross and of what followed; and as historians we
have to explain it. We have also to explain how the disciples came
to conceive of another Galilean--a carpenter whom they might have
seen sawing and sweating in his shop, with whom they tramped the
roads of Palestine, whom they saw done to death in ignominy and
derision--sitting at the right hand of God. Taken by itself, we
might call such a belief mere folly; but too much goes with it for
so easy an explanation. The cross was not the end. As Mr. Neville
Talbot has recently pointed out in his book, "The Mind of the
Disciples", if the story stopped with the cross, God remains
unexplained, and the story ends in unrelieved tragedy. But it does
not end in tragedy; it ends--if we can use the word as yet--in joy
and faith and victory; and these--how should we have seen them but
for the cross? They are bound up with his choice of the cross and
his triumph over it all. Death is not what it was--"the last line of
all," as Horace says. Life and immortality have been brought to
light (2 Tim. 1:10). "The Lamb of God taketh away the sin of the
world." So we read at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel, and the
historical critic may tell us that he does not think that John the
Baptist said it. None the less, it is a wonderful summary of what
Jesus has done, especially wonderful if we think of it being written
fifty or sixty years after the crucifixion. For, as we survey the
centuries, we find that the Lamb of God has taken away the sin of
the world--to a degree that no one can imagine who has not studied
the ancient world. Those who know the heathen world intimately will
know best the difference he has made.