ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the course of the narrative from the early pamphlet on the Evidence for the Resurrection to Erewhon Revisited, published a year before Samuel Butler's death. The interpretation of the events surrounding the Resurrection and the Crucifixion interested Butler throughout his life. On his return to England in 1865, he published the anonymous rationalistic pamphlet The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as Given by the Four Evangelists Critically Examined. Butler is setting himself up as an impartial judge weighing the textual evidence of four witnesses. Butler's professed aim in writing the Evidence is to demonstrate that there is little reliable textual evidence from the Gospels that the Resurrection ever happened. The conclusion Butler ineluctably draws from his two premises, therefore, is that Christ never died on the cross. By definition, miracles are violations of the laws of nature and contradict our experience of the uniformity of nature, one element of 'the holy trinity of agnosticism'.
