Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play — and Kindle via Send to Kindle
- ✓ Choose your format — EPUB or PDF
- ✓ Instant download after purchase
- ✓ Yours to keep — no subscription
Who Moved the Stone?
1930 · 220 pages
Who Moved the Stone?
by Frank Morison
Why our edition. In the free scan at least 1 word in 89 is garbled. Ours corrects the damage. The full text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of Who Moved the Stone?, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
An advertising man who had absorbed the confident skeptical 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.
How Frank Morison changed his mind
As a young man in the 1890s he believed science had settled it that miracles do not happen. He planned a short book, Jesus, the Last Phase, on Jesus’ last seven days with the miraculous stripped away. Ten years later he finally did the research, and it turned him round. This is the book he wrote instead.
“It was as though a man set out to cross a forest by a familiar and well-beaten track and came out suddenly where he did not expect to come out.”
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 skeptical 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.
Which edition of Who Moved the Stone? is this?
The 1930 American edition, from The Century Co., is free at Archive.org, and the work entered the US public domain in 2026. The free scan is an image-heavy copy whose OCR is rough in the front matter; our edition is a corrected, properly typeset text.
This is a modern reading edition of Who Moved the Stone? — examination of the last week of the life of Jesus, published in 1930. Frank Morison was the pen name of Albert Henry Ross (1881–1950), an English advertising agent who had absorbed the confident sceptical scholarship of his youth and set out to write the book that would dispose of the resurrection narratives for good. He could not write it. What he wrote instead is this, and his first chapter is called The Book that Refused to Be Written.
Ross died in 1950, so the book has been in the public domain in the United Kingdom since 2021. Its American copyright was taken out by The Century Co. in 1930, ran its full ninety-five years, and expired at the end of 2025.
A note on what we changed. This edition was set from a scan of the 1930 Century Co. printing, and every change we made was to undo something the scanning had done to it, not something Morison did. We removed the debris the camera picked up from the gutter and the edge of each page — three hundred and forty-five lines of it, and in places the scanner had read that shadow as words and set them down in the middle of a sentence. We rejoined the nine hundred words the printer had broken at the end of a line, so that "of- ficial" and "char- acteristic" are whole again. We restored the ten section breaks Morison sets within his chapters, which the scan had read as specks and which our own earlier passes had thrown away with them. And we restored the four Gospel accounts of the Roman trial in Chapter IV: the printer set them in parallel columns, the scanner read straight across them, and the result on the page was St. Luke's words and St. John's on one line. They are set here one after another, each under the name of its evangelist.
Beyond that we repaired individual readings, about sixty of them, and each one is written down with its reason in the files this edition was built from. They are of one kind: the scan had made an English word into something that is not one. The ffi ligature came out as "fh", so "difficulty" arrived as "difhculty"; a letter dropped, so "Fortunately" arrived as "Nortunately" and "Jerusalem" as "Jerusglem". Nine of the fifteen chapters open with a line the printer set in small capitals, which is the hardest thing on a page for a scanner to read, and nine of them were wrong.
What we did not change matters more. We did not rewrite a sentence, modernise a spelling, or remove a passage. Morison's 1930 English stands as he wrote it — "to-morrow" and "to-day" keep their hyphens, "sepulchre" and "honour" keep their spellings. Where the scan was damaged past the point where the word could be recovered with certainty, we left it alone rather than guess; a handful of such places remain, and they are marked by nothing, because inventing a word would be the one thing worse than a broken one.
The free scan is linked from this book's page.
Common questions
- What is Who Moved the Stone? about?
- An investigation of the last week of Jesus’ life and the evidence for the resurrection, by a London advertising man who set out to write the story with the miracles left out, 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 edition entered the US public domain in 2026, and a scan of the American printing, from The Century Co., 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.
- Did Frank Morison set out to disprove the resurrection?
- Not quite, by his own account. He planned a book on Jesus’ last seven days, to be called Jesus, the Last Phase, with the miraculous stripped away, because he believed science had ruled miracles out. The research led him the other way.
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.
That free scan runs about 3.6 errors per 1,000 characters (OCR mistakes, stray marks, broken words). Our edition corrects them.
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. There is no sign Morison had read him: the two arrived at the method separately, 183 years apart.
A scientist who changed his mind
The Examination and the Return
George John Romanes · 1895
Romanes was Darwin’s protégé and literary executor, and had published against theism under a pseudonym. These notes are what he was writing when he died.
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.
More like this
We publish first-person accounts of changed lives, and translate works into English that have never been in it. Pick what you want to hear about — nothing is pre-selected, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe.