The Empty Tomb
When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Christ, chapter 12. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.
The empty tomb, as an enduring symbol of the Resurrection, is the ultimate representation of Jesus’ claim to being God. The apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:17 that the Resurrection is the very linchpin of the Christian faith: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.”
Theologian Gerald O’Collins put it this way: “In a profound sense, Christianity without the resurrection is not simply Christianity without its final chapter. It is not Christianity at all.”[1]
The Resurrection is the supreme vindication of Jesus’ divine identity and his inspired teaching. It’s the proof of his triumph over sin and death. It’s the foreshadowing of the resurrection of his followers. It’s the basis of Christian hope. It’s the miracle of all miracles.
But was Jesus really buried in the tomb? History tells us that as a rule, crucified criminals were left on the cross to be devoured by birds or were thrown into a common grave. This prompted John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar to conclude that Jesus’ body probably was dug up and consumed by wild dogs. This is not necessarily an outlandish conclusion if all you looked at was customary practice; but it ignores specific evidence in this case.
For one thing, the burial is mentioned by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, where he passes on a very early creed of the church, going back to within just a few years of the crucifixion (remember, we discussed this when we discussed the eyewitness evidence). This creed is incredibly early and therefore trustworthy material. It is essentially a four-line formula: The first line refers to the Crucifixion, the second to the burial, the third to the Resurrection, and the fourth to Jesus’ appearances. The second line affirms that Jesus was indeed buried.
He may have been buried, but was it in a tomb? And was it through Joseph of Arimathea, this mysterious character who comes out of nowhere to claim the body? This creed is actually a summary that corresponds line by line with what the gospels teach. When we turn to the gospels, we find multiple, independent attestation of the burial story, and Joseph of Arimathea is specifically named in all four accounts.
On top of that, the burial story in Mark is so extremely early that it’s simply not possible for it to have been subject to legendary corruption. First, Mark is generally considered to be the earliest gospel. Second, his gospel basically consists of short anecdotes about Jesus, more like pearls on a string than a smooth, continuous narrative. But when you get to the last week of Jesus’ life - the so-called passion story - then you do have a continu-ous narrative of events in sequence. This passion story was apparently taken by Mark from an even earlier source - and this source included the story of Jesus being buried in the tomb.
Is Joseph of Arimathea Historical? Mark says the entire Sanhedrin voted to condemn Jesus. If that’s true, that means Joseph of Arimathea cast his ballot to kill Jesus. Isn’t it highly unlikely that he would have then come to give Jesus an honorable burial? Well, Luke may have felt this same discomfort, which would explain why he added one important detail - Joseph of Arimathea wasn’t present when the official vote was taken, so that would explain things concerning the vote.
But the significant point about Joseph of Arimathea is that he would not be the sort of person who would have been invented by Christian legend or Christian authors. Given the early Christian anger and bitterness toward the Jewish leaders who had instigated the crucifixion of Jesus, it’s highly improbable that they would have invented one who did the right thing by giving Jesus an honorable burial - especially while all of Jesus’ disciples deserted him!
Besides, they wouldn’t make up a specific member of a specific group, whom people could check out for themselves and ask about this. So we can confidently conclude that Joseph is undoubtedly a historical figure. Furthermore, if this burial by Joseph were a legend that developed later, you’d expect to find other competing burial stories, but you don’t.[2]
Therefore, the majority of new Testament scholars today agree that the burial account of Jesus is fundamentally reliable. John A. T. Robinson, the late Cambridge University New Testament scholar, said the honorable burial of Jesus is one of the earliest and best-attested facts that we have about the historical Jesus.
While the creed says Jesus was crucified, buried, and then resurrected, it doesn’t specifically say the tomb was empty. Doesn’t this leave room for the possibility that the Resurrection was only spiritual in nature (as Jehovah's Witnesses believe) and that Jesus’ body was still in the tomb? The creed definitely implies the empty tomb. The Jews had a physical concept of resurrection. For them, the primary object of the resurrection was the bones of the deceased - not even the flesh, which was thought to be perishable.
After the flesh rotted away, the Jews gathered the bones of their deceased and put them in boxes to be preserved until the resurrection at the end of the world, when God would raise the righteous dead of Israel. In light of this, it would have been simply a contradiction of terms for an early Jew to say that someone was raised form the dead but his body was still left in the tomb. So this early Christian creed is saying implicitly, but quite clearly, that the tomb was empty.
How Secure Was the Tomb? As best as archaeologists have been able to determine from excavations of first-century sites, there was a slanted groove that led down to a low entrance, and a large disk-shaped stone was rolled down this groove and lodged in place across the door. A smaller stone was then used to secure the disk. Although it would be easy to roll this big disk down the groove, it would take several men to roll the stone back up in order to reopen the tomb. In that sense it was quite secure.
Wasn’t Jesus’ tomb also guarded? William Lane Craig doesn’t rely on the guard story because of how disputed it is in contemporary scholarship. He prefers to base his arguments on evidence that’s most widely accepted by the majority of scholars. He says it may have been important in the eighteenth century when critics were suggesting the disciples stole Jesus’ body, but nobody espouses that theory today. When you read the New Testament, there’s no doubt the disciples sincerely believed the truth of the Resurrection, which they proclaimed to their deaths. The idea that the empty tomb is the result of some hoax, conspiracy or theft is simply dismissed today, so the guard story has become sort of incidental.
Okay, but still, were any guards present? Is there any good evidence the guard story is historical? Yes, just think about the claims and counterclaims that went back and forth between the Christians and the Jews in the first century. Christians say Jesus has risen. Jews say the disciples stole the body. Christians say the guards at the tomb would have prevented such a theft. Jews say the guards fell asleep. Christians reply that Jews bribed the guards to say they fell asleep. How would this conversation have looked if there were no guards? This suggests the guards really were historical and that the Jews knew it, which is why they had to invent the absurd story about the guards having been asleep while the disciples took the body.
There’s some question about whether it was Roman guards or Jewish temple guards, since Matthew, who is the only one to mention the guards, doesn’t say specifically. The word Matthew uses to refer to the guards is often used with respect to Roman soldiers, so Craig at least is inclined to believe they were Roman soldiers.
What about the contradictions? In Matthew, when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary arrived toward dawn at the tomb there is a rock in front of it, there is a violent earthquake, and an angel descends and rolls back the stone. In Mark, the women arrive at the tomb at sunrise and the stone had been rolled back. In Luke, when the women arrive at early dawn they find the stone had already been rolled back.
In Matthew, an angel is sitting on the rock outside the tomb and in Mark a youth is inside the tomb. In Luke, two men are inside.
In Matthew, the women present at the tomb are Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. In Mark, the women present at the tomb are the two Marys and Salome. In Luke, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and the other women are present at the tomb.
In Matthew, the two Marys rush from the tomb in great fear and joy, run to tell the disciples, and meet Jesus on the way. In Mark, they run out of the tomb in fear and say nothing to anyone. In Luke, the women report the story to the disciples who do not believe them and there is no suggestion that they meet Jesus.
And John conflicts with much of the other three gospels.
In light of all this, how can one consider the empty tomb story credible? One must understand the historian’s craft. The historian looks at these narratives and says, “I see some inconsistencies, but I notice something about them: they’re all in the secondary details.” The core of the story is the same: Joseph of Arimathea takes the body of Jesus, puts it in a tomb, the tomb is visited by a small group of women followers of Jesus early on Sunday morning following his crucifixion, and they find that the tomb is empty. They see a vision of angels saying that Jesus is risen.
The careful historian doesn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. He says, “This suggests that there is a historical core to this story that is reliable and can be depended upon, however conflicting the secondary details might be.”
So we can have great confidence in the core that’s common to the narratives and that would be agreed upon by the majority of New Testament scholars today, even if there are some differences concerning the names of the women, the exact time of morning, the number of angels, and so forth. Those kinds of secondary discrepancies wouldn’t bother a historian. The usually skeptical historian Michael Grant: “True, the discovery of the empty tomb is differently described by the various gospels, but if we apply the same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other ancient literary sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was, indeed, found empty.”
Can the discrepancies be harmonized? If all four gospels were identical in all their particulars, that would have raised the suspicion of plagiarism. The differences between the narratives suggest that we have multiple, independent attestation of the empty tomb story.
Sometimes people say Matthew and Luke plagiarized Mark, but when you look at the narratives closely, you see divergences that suggest that even if Matthew and Luke did know Mark’s account, they still also had separate, independent sources for their stories.
So with these multiple and independent accounts, no historian would disregard the evidence just because of secondary discrepancies. How about a secular example: There are two narratives of Hannibal crossing the Alps to attack Rome, and they’re incompatible and irreconcilable. Yet no classical historian doubts that Hannibal did mount such a campaign. That’s a nonbiblical illustration of discrepancies in secondary details failing to undermine the historical core of a historical story.
And there are ways to harmonize some of the differences between the accounts. For example, the time of the visit to the tomb - one writer might describe it as still being dark, the other might say it was getting light, but that’s sort of like the pessimist and the optimist arguing over whether the glass is half full or half empty. It was around dawn, and they were describing the same thing with different words.
As for number and names of the women, none of the gospels pretend to give a complete list - they all include Mary Magdalene and other women. It’s pretty nitpicky and rigid to say that’s a contradiction. But what about the different accounts of what happened afterward? Mark said the women didn’t tell anybody and the other gospels say they did. When you look at Mark’s theology, he loves to emphasize awe and terror and fright and worship in the presence of the divine. So this reaction of the women - of fleeing with fear and trembling, and saying nothing to anyone because they were afraid - is all part of Mark’s literary and theological style. It could well be that this was a temporary silence, and then the women went back and told the others what had happened. In fact, it had to be temporary; otherwise, Mark couldn’t be telling the story about it!
In Matthew 12:40, Jesus says that as Jonah was in the fish for 3 days and 3 nights, so he would be in the earth. Some say this is an example of Jesus being wrong in not fulfilling his own prophecy. Most scholars recognize that according to early Jewish time reckoning, any part of the day counted as a full day. Jesus was in the tomb Friday afternoon, all day Saturday, and on Sunday morning - under the way Jews conceptualized time back then, this would have counted as 3 days. It's just another example of how many of these discrepancies can be explained or minimized with some background knowledge or just by thinking them through with an open mind.
Can the witnesses be trusted? Does the women’s relationship with Jesus call the reliability of their testimony into question? This argument backfires on those who use it. These women were indeed friends of Jesus. But when you understand the role of women in first-century Jewish society, what’s really extra-ordinary is that women are featured as the discoverers of the empty tomb in the first place! Women were on a very low rung of the social ladder in first-century Palestine. Women’s testimony was regarded as so worthless that they weren’t even allowed to serve as legal witnesses in a Jewish court of law. In light of this, it’s remarkable that the chief witnesses to the empty tomb are these women who were friends of Jesus. Any later legendary account would have certainly had male disciples discovering the tomb.
Why did the women visit the tomb? Did their actions really make sense? Why were the women going to anoint the body of Jesus if they already knew that his tomb was securely sealed? For people who are grieving, who have lost someone they desperately loved and followed, to want to go to the tomb in a forlorn hope of anointing the body... well, I don’t think some critic should come along later treating them like robots and say, “They shouldn’t have gone.” Certainly the notion of visiting a tomb to pour oils over a body is a historical Jewish practice. But we’re not in the right position to pronounce judgment on whether or not they should have simply stayed at home. This was mere days after His death. Several years after my wife's death, I found a hairbrush with some of her hair in it. All I could think about is that I may have some of her there, some genetic material. And more than anything in the world, I wanted to make a new Leigha out of it. I am well aware how crazy that sounds, but I can't even begin to explain some of the crazy ideas that went through my head. The desperation to have her back was sometimes overwhelming. And that was years, not mere days, after her death. It'll soon be 8 years since her death, and I still choke up at the thought.
Why didn’t Christians cite the empty tomb? Why didn’t the disciples or later Christian preachers point to the empty tomb? Why didn’t they say, “You don’t believe us? Go look in the tomb yourselves! Here’s the address.”
One atheist critic said Peter doesn’t mention the empty tomb in his preaching in Acts 2 and concluded, “If even the disciples didn’t think the empty tomb tradition was any good, why should we?” Actually, the empty tomb is found in Peter’s speech. In verse 24 he proclaims, “God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death.” Then he quotes from a psalm about how God would not allow his Holy One to undergo decay. This had been written by David, and Peter says, “I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day.” But, he says, Christ “was not abandoned to the realm of the dead, nor did his body see decay. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it.” It’s clearly implicit that the tomb was left empty.
Then later in Acts 13:29-31, Paul says, “When they had carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the cross and laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead, and for many days he was seen by those who had traveled with him from Galilee to Jerusalem.” Again, the empty tomb is implicit there. It’s rather unreasonable to contend that these early preachers didn’t refer to the empty tomb just because they didn’t specifically use the words empty tomb. There’s no question that they knew - and their audiences understood from their preaching - that Jesus’ tomb was no longer occupied.[3]
What’s the affirmative evidence? Instead of just responding to objections and arguments challenging the empty tomb, how might a Christian build an affirmative case for it?
First, the empty tomb is definitely implicit in the early tradition that is passed along by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, which is a very old and reliable source of historical information about Jesus.
Second, Christian and Jew alike knew the site of Jesus’ tomb. So if it wasn’t empty, it would be impossible for a movement founded on the belief of the Resurrection to have come into existence in the same city where this man had been publicly executed and buried.
Third, we can tell from the language, grammar and style that Mark got his empty tomb story - actually, his whole passion narrative - from an earlier source. In fact, there’s evidence it was written before AD 37, which is much too early for legend to have seriously corrupted it. A. N. Sherwin-White, Greco-Roman classical historian from Oxford University, said it would have been without precedent anywhere in history for legend to have grown up that fast and significantly distorted the gospels.
Fourth, there’s the simplicity of the empty tomb story in Mark. Fictional apocryphal accounts from the second century contain all kinds of flowery narratives, in which Jesus comes out of the tomb in glory and power, with everybody seeing him, including the priests, Jewish authorities, and Roman guards. Those are the way legends read, but these didn’t come until generations after the events, which is after eyewitnesses had died off. By contrast, Mark’s account is simple, straightforward, and unadorned by theological reflection.
Fifth, the unanimous testimony that the empty tomb was discovered by women argues for the authenticity of the story, because this would have been embarrassing for the disciples to admit and most certainly would have been covered up if it was a legend.
Sixth, the earliest Jewish polemic presupposes the historicity of the empty tomb. In other words, there was no one claiming the tomb still contained Jesus’ body. The question always was, “What happened to the body?” The Jews proposed the ridiculous story that the guards had fallen asleep. Obviously, they were grasping at straws. But the point is this: they started with the assumption that the tomb was vacant! Why? Because they knew it was!
What about alternative theories? Kirsopp Lake suggested in 1907 that the women merely went to the wrong tomb. When the caretaker at an unoccupied tomb told them Jesus “is not here,” they ran away, afraid. The Jewish authorities knew the site of the tomb. Even if they had made this mistake, the Jewish authorities would have been only too happy to point out the tomb and correct the disciples’ error when they began to proclaim Jesus had risen from the dead.
Other options are not very likely either. Obviously, the disciples had no motive to steal the body and then die for a lie. Certainly the Jewish authorities wouldn’t have removed the body. So we’re left with the theory that the empty tomb was a later legend and by the time it developed, people were unable to disprove it, because the location of the tomb had been forgotten. That’s why we’ve focused so much on showing the empty tomb story goes back to within just a few years of the events themselves. This renders the legend theory worthless. Even if there are some legendary elements in the secondary details of the story, the historical core of the story remains firmly established.
Even though these alternative theories have holes in them, aren’t they more plausible than the absolutely incredible idea that Jesus was God incarnate who was raised from the dead? That is the real issue here. People who push these alternative stories would probably admit they are implausible, but they’re not as improbable as the idea that this spectacular miracle occurred. At this point the matter is no longer a historical issue; instead, it’s a philosophical question about whether miracles are possible.
The hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead is not at all improbable. In fact, based on the evidence, it’s the best explanation for what happened. What is improbable is the hypothesis that Jesus rose from the dead naturally. That is outlandish, and any hypothesis would be more probable than saying the corpse of Jesus spontaneously came back to life. But the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead doesn’t contradict science or any known facts of experience. All it requires is the hypothesis that God exists, and I think we’ve demonstrated already that there are good independent reasons for believing that he does. And as long as the existence of God is even possible, it’s possible that he acted in history by raising Jesus from the dead.
Sir Norman Anderson, a Cambridge-educated legal intellect, who was offered a professorship for life at Harvard and served as dean of the Faculty of Laws at the University of London, summed up the issue from a legal perspective this way: “The empty tomb, then, forms a veritable rock on which all rationalistic theories of the resurrection dash themselves in vain.”[4]
[1] Gerald O’Collins, The Easter Jesus, 134, cited in Craig, The Son Rises, 136.
[2] Compare, for example, the variations of the myth of Mithras
[3] Besides, they weren’t there to preach an empty tomb (to say, “There’s an empty tomb over there, check it out”); it was incidental to their central message. And let’s consider idolatry as well.
[4] J. N. D. Anderson, The Evidence for the Resurrection, 20.