Observations on the History and Evidences of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ

West proceeds section by section rather than thematically, which is what makes the book feel modern. He works through the appearance to Mary Magdalene, the report of the women, the testimony of Matthew and Mark compared, the points at which they are thought to disagree, the interview on the road to Emmaus, and the state of mind of the disciples after the crucifixion.

His governing claim is that the apparent contradictions among the accounts are the ordinary artifacts of independent testimony about a crowded morning, and that a harmonized sequence can be constructed which does violence to none of them. He treats the disciples’ despair before the event and their conduct after it as the central evidential fact to be explained.

Published in the same year as Lyttelton’s essay on St. Paul, and usually read with it, the book was reprinted throughout the nineteenth century. Its method — examine the narratives as a lawyer or historian would examine any contested testimony — is the one Frank Morison arrived at independently in 1930; Morison’s book never mentions West, which makes the resemblance the more striking.

The 1834 Boston edition, which includes a brief memoir of the author, is free at Archive.org; an earlier 1749 printing is also available. Our edition is a corrected typesetting of the text.

This edition follows the Boston reprint of Gilbert West’s Observations on the History and Evidences of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, published by James Loring in 1834. The treatise was first printed at London in 1747.

The 1834 setting was chosen deliberately, and not because it was nearest to hand. Archive.org holds nine printings of this book, and eight of them are eighteenth-century settings using the long s — the letter that a scanner reads as an f. That produces a class of error no dictionary can find, because the wrong reading is usually a real word: “fins” for sins, “fo” for so, “fame” for same. A page full of it scores clean on every check we have and says things West did not write. The 1834 reprint has no long s at all, and runs at about a fifth of the scanning damage of the alternatives. It also carries Samuel Johnson’s short memoir of the author.

We checked it for cuts before using it. A nineteenth-century American reprint of an apologetic work is often an abridgement, and where we found one — the American Tract Society’s Jenyns, which says on its own front page that “a few passages, not essential to the argument, have been omitted” — we set it aside rather than publish another publisher’s judgment about what an author should not have said. This printing announces nothing of the kind. The four places in it that speak of an “abridgment” are West’s own prose about the Gospel narratives.

What has been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by the author. Running heads, page numbers and catchwords have been removed; words broken at the line ending have been rejoined; letters the scanner confused have been restored where the book’s own vocabulary settles the question. West’s spelling, punctuation and wording stand as the 1834 printing has them, including his capitalisation of the sacred names and his eighteenth-century habit of quoting Scripture inside his own sentences.

His thirty sections are numbered as the book numbers them. The first is set as an arabic 1 in the scan and as a roman I everywhere else in the book; we have made it consistent.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.