So then, let me remind you that, in this chapter from which my text is taken, we have a record of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, older than, and altogether independent of, the records contained in the gospels, which are all subsequent in date to it; that this Epistle to the Corinthians is one of the four undisputed Epistles of the Apostle, which not the most advanced school of modern criticism has a word to say against; that, therefore, this chapter, written, at the latest, some seven and twenty years after the date of the Crucifixion, carries us up very close to that event; that it shows that the Resurrection was universally believed all over the Church, and therefore must have then been long believed; that it enables us to trace the same belief as universal, and in undisputed possession of the field among the churches, at the time of Paul’s conversion, which cannot be put down at much more than five or six years after the Crucifixion, and that so we are standing in the presence of absolutely contemporaneous testimony.  This is not a case in which a belief slowly and gradually grew up.  Whether we accept the evidence or not, we are bound to admit that it is strictly contemporaneous testimony to the fact of Christ’s Resurrection.

And the witnesses are reliable and competent, as well as contemporaneous.  The old belief that their testimony was imposture is dead long ago; as, indeed, how could it live?  It would be an anomaly, far greater than the Resurrection, to believe that these people, Mary, Peter, John, Paul, and all the rest of them, were conspirators in a lie, and that the fairest system of morality and the noblest consecration that the world has ever seen, grew up out of a fraud, like flowers upon a dunghill.  That theory will not hold water; and even those who will not accept the testimony have long since confessed that it will not.  But the Apostle, in my context, seems to think that that is the only tenable alternative to the other theory that the witnesses were veracious, and I am disposed to believe that he is right.  He says, ‘If Christ be not risen, then, are we’ the utterly impossible thing of ‘false witnesses to God,’ devout perjurers, as the phrase might be paraphrased:  men who are lying to please God.  If Christ be not risen, they have sworn to a thing that they know to be untrue, in order to advance His cause and His kingdom.  If that theory be not accepted, there is no other about these men and their message that will hold water for a minute, except the admission of its truth.

The fashionable modern one, that it was hallucination, is preposterous.  Hallucinations that five hundred people at once shared!  Hallucinations that lasted all through long talks, spread at intervals over more than a month!  Hallucinations that included eating and drinking, speech and answer; the clasp of the hand and the feeling of the breath!  Hallucinations that brought instruction!  Hallucinations that culminated in the fancy that a gathered multitude