The Credal Design of the Chester Cycle

Abstract

The recurring dramatic imperative of the English Corpus Christi plays-Behold and believe!-is most emphatically employed in the sequence of episodes that opens with Christ's Resurrection and climaxes at Thomas's conversion.' The paradigm of this sequence, which constitutes the rising action of each cycle's Resurrection Group, is an intense and prolonged trial of faith, wherein skepticism and middling conviction time and again confront accumulating evidence of the reality of Christ's Resurrection and of his physical return to the world of men. The conflict within this sequence is generated in the form of an agon of faith and disbelief, as Christ's followers debate the validity of proffered evidence, the credence of testimonies, and the seeming rationality of their own flechinge doubts. The debate is sometimes acrimonious; the pattern of suspended disbelief and backsliding faith repeats itself; the pilgrimage toward truth is hesitant and awkward. But even for those of little faith, the sum of evidencethe empty tomb, the discarded graveclothes, Christ's appearances to the Marys, his breaking the sacramental bread at Emmaus,2 his eating fish and honey, and finally offering his bloody side to touch-ultimately comes to constitute indubitable proof that Christ has risen as he had prophesied. As John says in Chester: