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Who Moved the Stone?
1930 · 210 pages
Who Moved the Stone?
by Frank Morison
An advertising man who had absorbed the confident sceptical scholarship of his day sat down to write the book that would dispose of the resurrection narratives once and for all, and produced this instead. Morison examines the last week as an investigator would — the trial, the burial arrangements, the guard, the conduct of the women and the disciples, the rival explanations — and reports that the evidence would not go where he intended to take it. It entered the US public domain in 2026.
The convert behind the argument
Frank Morison was the pen name of Albert Henry Ross, a printer's compositor turned advertising man who rose to a directorship at the London agency S. H. Benson. He belonged to a generation for whom the miraculous element in the Gospels had been settled against by scholarship, and he says he wanted to strip it away and recover the man underneath. The investigation turned under him, and he wrote the opposite book.
Summary
Morison explains at the outset that the book he wrote is not the book he set out to write. He had intended to strip the miraculous from the last week and recover the man underneath, and describes the project as one he had held since his student days.
The method is journalistic rather than theological. He reconstructs the sequence of the arrest, the night trial and its irregularities, the burial and who arranged it, the sealing and guarding of the tomb, and the movements of the women and the disciples over the sabbath — and then tests the competing explanations for the empty tomb against those reconstructions, including the theories of the leading sceptical scholars of his day such as Kirsopp Lake.
His conclusion is not a devotional one but an evidential one: the alternative accounts each require the sources to behave in ways they do not, and the conduct of the followers after that weekend is the fact hardest to explain away. The book has stayed in print for most of a century because it argues in the register of a court reporter rather than a preacher.
Who was Frank Morison?
Albert Henry Ross (1881–1950) was born at Kings Norton, just south of Birmingham, the son of a wine merchant, and educated at King Edward VI School in Stratford-upon-Avon. The 1901 census finds him working as a printer's compositor. He moved to Lever Brothers and then to the London advertising agency S. H. Benson on Kingsway, where he ran the printing department, became a director in 1936, and stayed until he retired in 1947. Dorothy L. Sayers was a copywriter at the same agency through the 1920s, and later drew on Morison's reconstruction of the trial for her play cycle The Man Born To Be King.
He served in the Royal Flying Corps from 1916 as an instructor in aerial bombing and then in the Air Ministry's intelligence directorate, taking a temporary commission in 1918 — experience he used in War on Great Cities (1937), which predicted what bombing would do to a city like London. He wrote as Frank Morison throughout, and reviewers of the 1930s widely assumed the author was a lawyer; he was not, as the Australian scholar Ross Clifford later established. He died at Headley Down in Hampshire in 1950.
Who Moved the Stone? reached print through Faber & Faber, where T.S. Eliot read the manuscript in December 1929 and pressed for publication, then sent a copy to G.K. Chesterton — whose two books also sit on this shelf. Chesterton wrote that he had picked it up under the impression that it was a detective story, and found the case argued in a logical and even legal manner.
Common questions
- What is Who Moved the Stone? about?
- It is a journalist's investigation of the last week of Jesus's life and the evidence for the resurrection, written by a man who began it intending to disprove the resurrection and changed his mind in the course of the work.
- Is Who Moved the Stone? in the public domain?
- Yes, in the United States. The 1930 first edition entered the US public domain in 2026, and a scan of it is freely available at Archive.org.
- Who was Frank Morison?
- Frank Morison was the pen name of Albert Henry Ross (1881–1950), an English advertising man — latterly a director of the agency S. H. Benson — and a freelance writer. Reviewers at the time often took the author for a lawyer, which he was not.
A note on the text. Who Moved the Stone? 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 same experiment, 1747
Observations on the History and Evidences of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
Gilbert West · 1747
Gilbert West examined the same evidence the same way — as contested testimony — and, like Morison, set out to discredit it and published the opposite. There is no sign Morison had read him: the two arrived at the method separately, 183 years apart.
Its first champion
The Everlasting Man
G.K. Chesterton · 1925
T.S. Eliot, who had pushed this book through at Faber, sent a copy to Chesterton — who reviewed it warmly, having picked it up under the impression that it was a detective story.