Evidence of the Fact of Christ's Resurrection
Canon Liddon. Mark 16:9 Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. The empty tomb of Jesus recalls an event which is as well attested as any in history. It is so attested as to put the idea of what is called "illusion" out of the question. The main purpose, the first duty, of the apostolic ministry was to witness to the fact that Christ had risen. The apostles did not teach the resurrection as a revealed truth, as. they taught, e.g., the doctrine of justification; they taught the resurrection as a fact of experience — a fact of which they themselves had had experience. And this is why the different evangelists do not report the same appearances of our risen Lord. Each one reports that which he himself witnessed, or that which was witnessed by the eyewitness on whose authority he writes. Put the various attestations together, and the evidence is irresistible. That which these witnesses attest must be true, unless they have conspired to deceive us, or are themselves deceived. The idea that they are deceived, however, cannot be entertained by any man who understands human character; the idea that they were themselves deceived is inconsistent with the character of the witness which they give. No doubt there are states of hallucination, states of mental tension, in which a man may fancy that he sees something which does not in fact present itself to his senses. The imagination for the moment is so energetic as to impose upon the senses an impression which corresponds to that, whatever it be, which creates an emotion within the soul. Nay more, the New Testament itself speaks of inward revelations, sometimes during sleep, sometimes during the waking hours, as was that rapture of which St. Paul wrote, into "the third heaven, whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body I cannot tell — God knoweth." But the accounts of the appearances of our risen Lord do not at all admit of either of these explanations. If He had been seen only for a passing moment, only by one or two individuals separately, only in one set of circumstances, under one set of conditions again and again repeated, then there would have been room for the suspicion of a morbid hallucination, or at least of an inward vision. But what is the real state of the case? The risen One was seen five times on the day that He was raised from the dead; He was seen a week after; He was seen more than a month after that; and frequently, on many occasions, during the interval; He was seen by women alone, by men alone, by parties of two and three, by disciples assembled in conclave, by multitudes of men, five hundred at a time; He was seen in a garden, in a public roadway, in an upper chamber, on a mountain in Galilee, on the shore by the lake, in the village where His friends dwelt. He taught as before His death, He instructed, He encouraged, He reproved, He blessed, He uttered prolonged discourses which were remembered, which were recorded; He explained passages of Scripture, He revealed great doctrines, He gave emphatic commands, He made large and new promises, He communicated ministerial powers; and they who pressed around Him knew that His risen body was no phantom form, for He ate and drank before them just as in the days of yore, and they could, if they would, have pressed their very fingers into the fresh wounds in His hands and feet and side. In short, He left on a group of minds, most unlike each other, one profound ineffaceable impression, that they had seen and lived with One who had died indeed and had risen again, and that this fact was in itself and in its import so precious, so pregnant with meaning and with blessing to the human race, that it threw in their minds all other facts into relative insignificance; it was worth living for, it was worth dying for. (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. WEB: Now when he had risen early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.