The Forty Days After Our Lord's Resurrection

I have long had the conviction that the results

of that fuller and more exact interpretation of the books of the New Testament

to which biblical scholars have been conducted, might be made available for

framing such a continuous and expanded narrative of the leading incidents in

our Redeemer’s life as would be profitable for practical and devotional, rather

than for doctrinal or controversial purposes. It was chiefly to try whether I

could succeed in realizing the conception I had formed of what such a narrative

might be made, that the volume on the Last

Day of Our Lord’s Passion was published. The favourable reception which it

met has induced me to issue a companion volume on the succeeding and closing

period of our Lord’s life on earth. Should this meet with anything like equal

favour, I will be encouraged to prosecute the task of completing the narrative

in a similar form.

To one who previously had doubts of the historic truth of the entire

Gospel narrative, a personal inspection of the localities in which the events

are represented as having occurred, must have a peculiar interest and value. It

was in such a state of mind, half inclined to believe that the whole story of

the Gospel was legendary, that M. Renan visited the Holy Land three years ago.

He has told us the result. “All that history,” he says, “which at a distance

seemed to float in the clouds of an unreal world took instantly a body, a

solidity, which astonished me. The striking accord between the texts and the

places, the marvellous harmony of the evangelical picture with the country

which served as its frame, were to me as a revelation. I had before my eyes a

fifth gospel, mutilated but still legible, and ever afterwards in the recitals

of Matthew and Mark, instead of an abstract Being that one would say had never

existed, I saw a wonderful human figure live and move.” In listening to this

striking testimony as to the effect of his visit to the East, we have deeply to

regret that with M. Renan the movement from incredulity towards belief stopped

at its first stage.