‘The Cross-Examination of the Physiologist’

This chapter examines the Metaphysical Society’s ‘most notorious paper ever’, T. H. Huxley’s ‘The Evidence of the Miracle of the Resurrection’ delivered in January 1876, which contended that Jesus’s death upon the Cross was impossible to verify and that his supposed Resurrection was more likely to have been merely a naturalistic revival rather than a supernatural miracle. Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence, the chapter reconstructs the composition, presentation, and aftermath of Huxley’s infamous paper, as well as contextualizing it in relation to the wider revival of the so-called ‘swoon theory’ in the 1870s. By doing so, Huxley’s paper also casts new light on the Metaphysical Society’s internal tensions, even between those members who usually worked together as supporters of scientific naturalism, as well as the discordance between its elitist model of authority and the new age of mass democracy in late Victorian Britain.