# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1902_S47
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1902. 47

[how it] each means, and that each is truthful in it. So the intention of the evangelist Luke, in telling us of the thief at the right hand of Jesus, is to make us notice what a consolation and refreshing of the soul befell Jesus in the midst of the revilings that surrounded him, since at least the one thief turned to him in humble and believing prayer, whereas Matthew and Mark quite evidently had another intention in their narrative. They name for us quite deliberately the various classes of men who took part in the reviling, and wish to say by it: There was no one so distinguished, even if he was a high priest or a scribe, who would have shrunk from foaming out words of reviling and blasphemy against Jesus; and again no one was so lowly and so abject that he would not have believed Jesus to be still much more wretched than he, even if he was an evildoer, a murderer, who himself hung on the cross. All, all, people of every station in life, high and low, educated like a scribe or rough like a soldier, helped to make true what the 22nd Psalm prophesies of Christ: "All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head."

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
(Matt. 28. Mark 16. Luke 24. John 20, 21.)

The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is, of all the facts that the New Testament reports, the one that is most contradicted, and contradicted too on the ground that it cannot be true because the four evangelists do not agree about it, here at the resurrection still less than elsewhere.

That at this point of the gospel history this charge too is raised with redoubled strength need not greatly astonish us. "And if Christ be not risen," says the apostle Paul in 1 Cor. 15:14, "then is our preaching vain" (κενόν, empty, without object). Naturally, to be an apostle of Jesus Christ meant, above all, to be a witness of his resurrection. "Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God," says the apostle, "because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not." "And if Christ be not raised," he says, "your faith is vain" [German: "idle"], empty, "ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished." If, therefore, Satan wishes to shake and rattle at such a point of the Christian doctrine, which really is a pillar of the house with which it stands and falls, he had to apply the strongest lever here, at the resurrection of Christ. If the resurrection of Christ from the dead is not a fact, then in truth the whole of Christianity is swindle and fraud; then, above all, Christ himself is not only one deceived, who has deceived himself, but