perhaps for
thousands of years.

To confine ourselves, however, to the Easter aspect of the matter, I
think you will find--if you read the Gospel story with unprejudiced
eyes--that the closing scenes of Christ's career are quite imaginary.
The story of his Trial and Crucifixion is utterly at variance with Roman
law and Jewish custom. It also includes astonishing incidents--such
as the earthquake which rent the veil of the temple, the three hours'
eclipse of the sun, and the wholesale resurrection of dead "saints"--of
which the Romans and the Jews were in a still more astonishing
ignorance. What must have startled the whole or the then known world,
if it happened, made absolutely no impression on the Hebrew and Gentile
nations, and not a trace of it remains in the pages of their historians.
Can you believe that the most remarkable occurrences on record escaped
the attention of all who were living at the time, with the exception
of a handful of men and women, who never took the trouble to write an
account of their experiences, but left them to be chronicled by unknown
writers long after they themselves were dead?

All the documentary evidence we possess is Christian. It is the witness
of an interested party, uncorroborated by a particle of testimony from
independent sources. I do not forget that the literature of your early
Church includes a letter from Pontius Pilate to the emperor Tiberius,
giving a detailed account of the trial, sentence, crucifixion, and
resurrection of Christ; but this is one of the many forgeries of
your early Church, and is now universally rejected as such alike by
Protestant and by Catholic scholars. To my mind, indeed, this forgery
itself proves the falsehood of the Gospel narrative; it shows that the
early Christians felt the necessity of some corroborative evidence,
and they manufactured it to give their own statements an air of greater
plausibility.

Taking the Gospels as they stand, I will ask you to read the story in
Matthew (not that I believe _he_ wrote it) of the watch at Christ's
sepulchre. The Jewish priests come to Pilate, and ask him to let the
sepulchre be sealed and guarded; for the dead impostor had declared he
would rise again on the third day, and his disciples might steal his
body and say he had risen. The guard is set, but an angel descends from
heaven, terrifies the soldiers, rolls away the stone, and allows Jesus
to escape. Whereupon the Jewish priests give the soldiers m