ctual fact past all
controversy being out of the question, all that can be offered for the
attempt to rate the narrative at its proper value, either as history or
as fiction, is hypothesis. The choice lies for us between two
hypotheses. Surely, that hypothesis is the more credible which is based
on a solid body of objective facts, and meets all the conditions of the
case.

Will it be replied to this that the critics can show for their
hypothesis the admitted fact of the human proclivity to invent legends
of miracle? The decisive answer is that the burden of proof rests on him
who contests any statement ostensibly historical. If such a statement be
found to square with admitted objective facts, it must be accepted
notwithstanding considerations drawn from the subjective tendency to
invent extraordinary tales.

Were raisings of the "dead" recorded in the Old Testament alone,
objection would less often be offered to this transference of them,
along with other occurrences once deemed miraculous, to a place in the
natural order of things. The statistics of premature burial and of the
resuscitation of the apparently dead before burial are sufficiently
strong to throw grave doubt on any contention that the resuscitations
narrated of Elijah[17] and Elisha[18] do not belong in that historical
series. It has been frequently observed, however, that there is much
reluctance to apply to the New Testament the methods and canons of
criticism that are applied to the Old. It will be so in the present
case, through apprehension of somehow detracting from the distinctive
glory of Christ. That fear will not disturb one who sees that glory not
in his "mighty works," the like of which were wrought by the prophets,
but in the spiritual majesty of his personality, the divineness of his
message to the world, and of the life and death that illustrated it.

One case, at least, among Jesus' raisings of the "dead," that of the
young daughter of the ruler of the synagogue,[19] is admitted even by
sceptical critics to have been a resuscitation from the trance that
merely simulates death. But the fact that there is a record of his
saying in this case, "the child is not dead, but sleepeth," and no
record of his saying the same at the bier of the widow's son,[20] is
slight ground, yet all the ground there is, against the great
probabilities to the contrary, for regarding the latter case as so
transcendently different from the former as the actual ree