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Observations on the History and Evidences of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
1747 · 320 pages
Observations on the History and Evidences of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
by Gilbert West
Gilbert West took the resurrection as his share of the project he and Lord Lyttelton had agreed on: to expose Christianity between them. Working through the four accounts section by section — the women at the sepulchre, the appearances, the apparent discrepancies between Matthew and Mark — he concluded that the narratives are reconcilable and the event attested. It is the eighteenth-century original of the investigative form Frank Morison used in 1930.
The convert behind the argument
West was a poet and translator of Pindar who, like his friend Lyttelton, had taken up the fashionable deism of his generation. He set out to write against the resurrection, and produced this defence of it. The two men, in the phrase preserved with these books, came together not to exult over an imposture exposed but to lament their own folly.
Summary
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 artefacts of independent testimony about a crowded morning, and that a harmonised 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.
Who was Gilbert West?
Gilbert West (1703–1756) was an English poet and translator, educated at Eton and Oxford, best known before this book for his translations of Pindar. He held a post in the office of the Lord Privy Seal and was, with his friend George Lyttelton, part of the circle around Frederick, Prince of Wales.
He adopted deist opinions as a young man and undertook, with Lyttelton, to write Christianity out of credibility. The attempt converted him. Oxford gave him an honorary doctorate for the resulting book, and Samuel Johnson included him in the Lives of the Poets, where the story of the conversion is retold.
Common questions
- What is Gilbert West's Observations on the Resurrection?
- A section-by-section examination of the four resurrection accounts, arguing that their apparent discrepancies are what independent testimony normally looks like and that a consistent sequence of events can be reconstructed from them.
- Why are West and Lyttelton always mentioned together?
- Because they agreed to divide the work of refuting Christianity between them — West on the resurrection, Lyttelton on the conversion of St. Paul — and both were converted by the research. Their two books were published in the same year, 1747, and were often bound and sold together afterwards.
A note on the text. Observations on the History and Evidences of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is in the public domain. What you're buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
Related reading
The other half of the plot
Observations on the Conversion of St. Paul
George Lyttelton · 1747
Lord Lyttelton's half of the same agreement, published the same year — the conversion of St. Paul, examined by a man who set out to expose it.
The same experiment, 1930
Who Moved the Stone?
Frank Morison · 1930
Frank Morison did this again in the twentieth century, arguing with the sceptical scholarship of his own day rather than West's. Neither book cites the other; that two men should try the same demolition and both change sides is the interesting part.