olve a large recognition of the
miraculous, they also contain perplexities for those who do not stumble at
the supernatural; hence there have been many attempts to find other
solutions of the problem. Some of the explanations offered may be
dismissed with a word: for instance, those which, in one form or other,
renew the old charge found in the first gospel, that the disciples stole
the body of Jesus, and then declared that he had risen; and those which
assume that the death of Jesus was apparent only, that he fainted on the
cross, and then the chill of the night air and of the sepulchre served to
revive him, so that in the morning he was able to leave the tomb and
appear to his disciples as one risen from the dead. This apparent-death
theory involves Jesus in an ugly deception, while the theory that the
disciples or any group of them removed the body of Jesus and then gave
currency to the notion that he had risen, builds the greatest ethical and
religious movement known to history on a lie. A slightly different
explanation which was very early suggested was that the Jews themselves,
or perhaps the gardener, had the body removed, and that when Mary found
the tomb empty she let her faith conclude that his absence must be due to
his resurrection.

218. This last explanation has in recent times been revived in connection
with the so-called vision-hypothesis by Renan and Reville. Mary found the
tomb empty, and being herself of a highly strung nervous nature--she had
been cured by Jesus of seven devils--by thinking about the empty tomb she
soon worked herself into an ecstasy in which her eyes seemed to behold
what her heart desired to see. She communicated her vision to the others,
and by a sort of nervous contagion, they, too, fell to seeing visions, and
it is the report of these that we have in the gospels. The
vision-hypothesis takes with some, Strauss for instance, a different form.
These deny that the tomb was found empty at all, and regard this story as
a contribution of the later legend-making spirit. They hold that the
disciples fled from Jerusalem as soon as the death of Jesus was an assured
fact, and not until after they found themselves amid the familiar scenes
of Galilee, did their faith recover from the shock it had received in
Jerusalem. In Galilee the experiences of their life with Jesus were lived
over again, and the old confidence in him as Messiah revived. Thus
thinking about the Lord, their hearts would say