apostle Paul, in the fifteenth
chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians: a letter whose authenticity
no criticism has dared to doubt. This letter was written in the spring of
58: and Paul himself had already been changed from a persecutor into a
believer in Christ in the year 36--_i.e._, one year after the death of
Jesus, which took place in 35; he went to Jerusalem in 39, and here
everything was related to him by Peter, as we know from his letter
(likewise not contested) to the Galatians. Thus the authentic information
of the man, who in 58 collected the historical proofs of the reality of the
resurrection of Jesus for his Corinthian Christians, goes back to four
years after the death of Jesus, and to the personal witnesses of the
appearances; as in that letter he also refers to the fact that "many of
these five hundred brethren are still living." Moreover, it is an
established fact, that the first written evidences of the evangelical
history from which our canonical gospels subsequently originated, likewise
contained accounts of the appearance of the risen one. Finally, it is an
established fact that, from the very beginning, the whole meaning of
evangelical preaching turned on the two facts of the death and of the
resurrection of Jesus, as on the two cardinal points of all preaching of
salvation; also that all the faith of those who embraced the Gospel was
founded upon these two facts, as upon the historical fundamentals of the
{337} salvation which comes from Jesus; and that thus Christianity, with
all its effects, which have unhinged the old world and diffused streams of
blessing over mankind, has its historical basis in faith in the death of
Jesus and his resurrection. This is our historical chain of proof. And that
evidence which gives certainty to its most important link, on which
everything depends--the _appearance_ of the risen one--is the entire
failure of all the attempts at explaining that appearance from a seeming
death, from an intended deception, from a self-delusion, from a vision and
an ecstasy, from a poetic myth; in short, from any other cause than, that
the Lord really appeared to his disciples as the man who was dead, but who
is risen and lives. We cannot follow Keim in all his methods of
reconstructing the life of Jesus, and we believe that he is much too timid
regarding the consequences which follow from an objective, real appearance
of Jesus after his death; but we acknowledge it as a high me