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    former doctrine ! To me it appears that they must have cal «* cuiated ill in adopting such a fraud . Why were they not content to preach the spiritual resurrection , which they believed true ? If our author is correct , the deluded , devoted , wonderloving Jews in general would piously have taken their assertion for fact , as the followers of Sabbathai Sevi believed respecting

    their leader , who , as far as the quotations go , appears to have been transported to heaven by the consent of his followers , without their taking the trouble to secure his body . The apostles only provoked detection by pretending ( if it was only pretence ) that the body of Jesus had risen . If they had been contented to say what ( according to our author ) they believed , * that his spirit was gone to heaven , and would return to the earth , '

    their followers might have safely believed , and their enemies could not have confronted them . To give out a bodily resurrection , if the event was not real , was to volunteer gratuitous difficulties , not necessary , according to this author , for filling the gaping credulity of the Jewish multitude , but certainly exposing them ( whatever he may say to the contrary ) to every risk of detection at the hands of the rulers . My second observation on his theory is ,

    that if the fraud had been necessary for the reception of the Gospel ( which on his theory it was not ); it was , by his own showing , absolutely impracticable . He asks , and endeavours to answer the question by a negative , ' whether the apostles would incur any risk of detection in attempting to execute their plan of joining the doctrine of a bodily resurrection , which they knew to be untrue , to that of a spiritual one , which they sincerely believed ?*—( p . 128 . )

    Their scheme to prevent detection by their enemies , the priests * was , he says , of course , to obtain possession of the body , and give out that it had risen . * During the night' ( of Friday , the day of the Crucifixion ) ' Peter , with any disciples or apostles in whom he might most trust , might come to the sepulchre , and having displaced the stone from the entrance , by the same human efforts which had placed it there , might take away the body of Jesus . '—

    ( p . 129 . ) This might have been conjectured with something approaching to possibility—and therefore have been taken as historical fact—had it not been before distinctly allowed by the writer , that the apostles' faith in their master * might , for a moment , waver at a conjuncture so distressing as that of his public execution , ' ( p . 120 , ) and if he was not found arguing ( not very conclusively it is true , but no doubt stating his own deliberate

    opinion ) that the apostles were ignorant of our Lord ' s prediction that he should rise from the dead .- —( p . 129 . ) Now , though the c momentary 9 distress of the apostles at finding their every hope extinguished in the death of Jesus , may , perhaps , be thought to have been over before night , if we question the author ' s verbal self-consistency ; yet it will hardly be thought consistent with human nature to represent the periods of despair , and grief , and

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    Orthodoxy and Unbelief . 837

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  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1832, page 837, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1826/page/45/