Encore post: To the ancient Greek philosophers, and many people today, it is nonsense. (Acts 17:32) We all know what happens to the body after death. We’ve seen it on T.V. In crime shows and in horror films. Some families have the bodies of their loved ones cremated. It decays and eventually turns to dust, just as God promised Adam. (Genesis 3:19)
Yet God clearly promises this wonderful miracle. While we cannot understand how this can be true, we know that God, who is almighty and who created us and whole world, can do whatever he wants to do. (Matthew 22:23-33) The resurrection of the body is the bottom line for the Christian hope. Because Christ rose from the dead, we will rise from our graves on the last day. (1 Corinthians 15:12-58)
The resurrection teaches us a few very important things. First, the body matters. The way we talk about the death of a loved one makes it sounds like only our spirit matters. Yet God did not make us to be spirits only, but both body and spirit. Death unnaturally separates the two. But on the last day, when death is defeated, we will be restored and our bodies glorified like that of Jesus. Job’s prophecy will come true for him — and for us. (Job 19:25-27) Our bodies are good, even if the evils of this world mar them. We can accept ourselves the way he made us.
We also can live life in hope of the next. We do grieve when death separates us from loved ones. But we will see them again, quicker than we suppose. We can face down the demands of an evil world, knowing it is temporary and life eternal awaits. Best of all, we will live forever with him who bought us, shed his own blood for us and broke the power of sin and death over us. He is with us always, today and forever.
©2018 Robert E. Smith. All rights reserved. Permission granted to copy, share and display freely for non-commercial purposes. Direct all other rights and permissions inquiries to cosmithb@gmail.com
Robert, I am wanting a copy of this but did not know how to copy from Facebook to a document for Bible study.
What you would do is come to the blog directly. (which you’ve done with this comment) Select the post you want to copy, copy it and then paste it into your own document. If the post is from days past, use the menus in the left hand column or the search box to find it.
Do you believe that Christians can believe in the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus due to strong historical evidence, blind faith, or a combination of both?
Yes. 😉 The resurrection is the only explanation for the empty tomb that accounts for all the evidence. Yet, as Jesus himself said, if people will not believe, then they will not believe even if someone comes back from the dead!
Most scholars believe in the historicity of the empty tomb. I therefore accept the majority expert position on this issue. But aren’t there many other possible explanations for an empty tomb?
In short, nothing that holds up. Many theories have been proposed, but none account for all of the evidence we have.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but the “facts” or evidence in this case, agreed upon by most scholars as reported by evangelical Christian apologist Gary Habermas, are the following:
–Jesus was crucified by the Romans.
–He was buried.
–His tomb was found empty.
–Shortly after his death, some of his followers claimed that he had appeared to them in some fashion.
Here is one possible, natural explanation for these facts:
Someone moved the body, for reasons we will never know. The women found the tomb empty on Sunday morning (because someone had moved the body). The empty tomb triggered speculation as to the cause of Jesus’ missing body. Initially even the disciples suspected that someone had moved the body, but with time, false Jesus sightings began to occur. Most were illusions: seeing something in the environment and mistaking it for something else. This could include cases of mistaken identity, such as seeing someone in the distance that looks like Jesus but being unable to catch up to this person to verify his identity; seeing a bright light which one perceives as an appearance of Jesus. Soon the empty tomb was perceived to be due to a “raising from the dead” case. God had raised Jesus from the dead and that is why his tomb was empty. This triggered frenzied speculation that Jesus’ promise of a New Kingdom was still possible. This gave the disciples new found courage. They began to preach Jesus’ message with boldness. Quickly the concept of “raised from the dead” turned into “resurrected from the dead”, as Jesus came to be seen as the “first fruits of the resurrection”. The resurrection of the righteous dead had begun! Sell all your possessions and move to Jerusalem to live in a commune, praying and fasting. The End is nigh!
These are explanations offered, but they do not hold water. For instance… moving the body. There is the minor problem of a sealed tomb under armed guard. Roman guards took their jobs seriously. If the authorities moved the body, they simply would produce it and crush the rumors. All of the other arguments suffer the same fate. The only one that doesn’t is the resurrection. Period.
But the story of guards at the tomb is not an accepted historical fact.
This story therefore cannot be considered “evidence”. Even Gary Habermas does not include this detail in his list of “Minimal Facts”. Most scholars, even most Roman Catholic scholars who very much believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, reject the Guards at the Tomb Story as a theological or literary embellishment. Most scholars do not believe this pericope is historical. We should not include it as evidence in our search for a solution to the Empty Tomb mystery.
But let’s imagine that there were guards at the tomb. There are many possible scenarios for a guarded tomb to be found empty.
Here are two: Pilate changed his mind about burying the executed “king of the Jews” in a proper burial site. Pilate ordered the guards to move the body in the middle of the night without notifying the Jews. Or, maybe the burial in the tomb of Arimathea was a temporary burial. The Sanhedrin moved the body, with Pilate’s permission, after sunset on Saturday night. No one informed the disciples. They showed up on Sunday morning and found an empty tomb…
Sure it is a fact. It is reported by Matthew, an eyewitness to the events of Holy Week. The scholars you quote have rejected the Gospels out of hand as eyewitness accounts, but do so on purely subjective grounds. I will not reject the most reliable sources of these events on such a basis. So, the tomb was guarded and by Roman soldiers. Your speculation is fanciful at best. It was not in any of their interests to move the body, and, even if they did, not to produce it the moment a new movement rose up claiming that he was risen. And do not forget that the women at the tomb, the disciples and five hundred others saw and touched the risen Christ. The disciples almost to the man were martyred maintaining that testimony. So, the rabbinic slander that the disciples stole the body doesn’t hold up either. Who dies for a lie?
And I do not consider any of this a search. I fully accept the gospels and they are quite clear on the events of that week. How they all fit together is game, but not their reliability and accuracy.
If it were only liberal and atheist scholars who reject the Guards at the Tomb story as non-historical, I would agree with you that a potential bias may exist. But what about the fact that most Roman Catholic scholars reject the historicity of the guards at the tomb story? Can anyone credibly claim that most Roman Catholic Bible scholars have a bias against the supernatural and against miracles?
Roman Catholic NT scholars, who once again, very much believe in the supernatural, miracles, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus also reject the eyewitness authorship of the Gospels. The consensus of position of all New Testament scholars (except for a small minority of mostly evangelicals and fundamentalist Protestants) reject the eyewitness authorship of the Gospels.
What is interesting is that even the minority of scholars who do believe in the eyewitness/associate of eyewitness authorship of the Gospels can’t even agree on the identity of these eyewitnesses! Probably the most influential conservative, evangelical scholar of our day, Richard Bauckham, states in his book “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses” that he does not believe that the Apostle Matthew authored the Gospel According to Matthew that we possess today. He also does not believe that John the Apostle, son of Zebedee, authored the Gospel According to John. If the minority of scholars who believe in the eyewitness authorship of the Gospels can’t even agree on the identity of the Gospels’ authors, just how good is the evidence for the eyewitness authorship of these four books?
Again, I really don’t care what the identification of such scholars are. It is not their faith that we are talking about. That someone is a Roman Catholic does not mean they are correct. The fact is that Matthew is an eyewitness to the resurrection. The identification of Matthew as the author of the Gospel goes back to antiquity. I give them the benefit of the doubt. To call it into question is modern arrogance. The account is the among the four oldest that report the details of the life of Jesus. It is one of the best attested texts in antiquity. It reports there were guards, so there were. To conclude otherwise is to cast all literary texts of antiquity into doubt.
By the way, none of the commentaries I have quickly checked call the account into question, nor even mention that it is doubted by some scholars. So, I have difficulty even accepting your contention that a majority doubt the historicity of the guards. You will have to do better than just assert it to convince me of even that.
You are 100% correct. Just because most Roman Catholic scholars doubt the historicity of the Guards at the Tomb story, does not make the story false. However, what it does demonstrate is that the consensus scholarly position AGAINST the historicity of Matthew’s guards at the tomb story cannot credibly be based entirely on a bias against the supernatural or a bias against traditional Christianity. After all, Roman Catholic scholars still believe in the Virgin Birth, the reality of miracles, and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. They have zero incentive to deny that any miraculous event occurred in the life and death of Jesus.
Probably the most influential Roman Catholic scholar of our generation, Raymond E. Brown, had this to say about the Guards at the Tomb story:
““There is a major argument against the historicity [of the Guard Story] that is impressive indeed. Not only do the other Gospels not mention the guard at the sepulcher, but the presence of the guard there would make what they narrate about the tomb almost unintelligible. The three other canonical Gospels have women come to the tomb on Easter, and the only obstacle to their entrance that is mentioned is the stone. Certainly the evangelists would have had to explain how the women hoped to get into the tomb if there were a guard placed there precisely to prevent entry.
In the other Gospels, the stone is already removed or rolled back when the women get there. How can we reconcile that with Matt’s account where, while the women are at the sepulcher, an angel comes down out of heaven and rolls back the stone? There are other internal implausibilities in Matthew’s account (e.g., that the Jewish authorities knew the words of Jesus about his resurrection and understood them when his own disciples did not; that the guards could lie successfully about the astounding heavenly intervention);but they touch on the minor details of the story.
The lack of harmony with the other Gospels touches on the heart of the story, i.e., the very existence of a guard. Can one save historicity by going back to a preGospel situation and contending that the Jewish Sanhedrin member who buried Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, may have taken some precaution to protect the sepulcher, and that this developed into the story that Matthew now tells? That is a very hypothetical suggestion, however, for neither Matthew nor The Gospel of Peter connects the guard to Joseph, and even a minor precaution should have left a trace in the other Gospels as an obstacle to the women on Easter.”
–Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, p. 1311-1312
I think you are missing the point. Evidence is not up for a vote. Notice why these scholars doubt the historicity of the event. It is their reasoning that causes them to reject the testimony of someone who was there. In doing so, they cause all of Matthew to be called into doubt. I take exception to that and I would argue the point with them, given the opportunity. So, we’re back to square one. We have two, possibly three eyewitnesses stating that the tomb was empty and who personally knew Jesus and touched him after he was risen from the dead. Even setting the latter aside, the former is evidence. On the guards at the tomb, we have one witness, who was present in Jerusalem that day who reports this. It is perfectly consistent with the character of the men involved. Even if you are not inclined to take the man at his word (which I am), it seems probable. So, we’re back to the fact that the tomb was empty and the disciples did not steal the body because they would not be able to defeat the guards. All other theories fail because they cannot overcome this fact and similar ones.
In an interview on conservative Christian apologist John Ankerberg’ radio program, prominent evangelical Christian historian and apologist William Lane Craig had this to say about Matthew’s Guards at the Tomb story:
[T]he vast majority of New Testament scholars would regard Matthew’s guard story as unhistorical. I can hardly think of anybody who would defend the historicity of the guard at the tomb story, and the main reasons for that are two. One is because it’s only found in Matthew and it seems very odd that if there were a Roman guard or even a Jewish guard at the tomb that Mark wouldn’t know about it nor would there be any mention of it. The other reason is nobody seemed to understand Jesus’s resurrection predictions. The disciples who heard it most often had not an inkling of what he meant and yet somehow the Jewish authorities were supposed to have heard of these predictions and understood them so well but they were able to set a guard around the tomb. And again that doesn’t seem to make sense so most scholars regard the guard at the tomb story as a legendary Matthean invention that isn’t really historical.”
Although Craig later clarified that he personally does believe in the historicity of the Guards at the Tomb story, it is obvious that he is very aware that he belongs to a very, very small minority of experts who do.
OK. Will give you that critical scholars contest the historicity of the guards at the tomb. It does not change that it is a fact and to contest it means to cast doubt on the words of someone who was a disciple of Jesus, present in Jerusalem that day and claims to have met and touched him after he rose from the dead. And they can only get there by contesting the unanimous opinion of the early church that Matthew is the author of the gospel. I think that is pretty weak scholarship.
A Christian bishop living in the fourth century, Eusebius, quoted the writings of a Christian bishop in northern Asia Minor, Papias, who lived in the early second century, who claimed that he had received information from disciples of the disciples of the disciples of Jesus that Matthew the Apostle had written a gospel in Hebrew. Most scholars, including conservative, evangelical Christian NT scholar Richard Bauckham, state that the Greek Gospel of Matthew found in our Bibles today could not have been translated from the Hebrew. There is just too much textual evidence against this theory. So where did our Greek Gospel of Matthew come from? Our first clear attribution of authorship for the Greek Gospel of Matthew which we have today, came from Irenaeus at the end of the second century. That is almost 150 years after the death of Jesus! That is a long period of time for rumor and legend to develop as to the authorship of this text. Is it really possible to state as “fact”, based on this very thin evidence, that the author of the Gospel of Matthew was an eyewitness?
Bauckham, a favorite Bible scholar of many conservative evangelical Christian apologists, states in his book, “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses” that the author of the Gospel of Matthew invented the story of the calling of Matthew the tax collector! To Bauckham, this is good evidence that Matthew the Apostle did not write our Greek Gospel of Matthew. Why would Matthew the tax collector make up a story about his own apostolic calling???
Bauckham is not the only conservative Christian scholar who believes that embellishments (fiction) exist in the Gospel of Matthew. Conservative evangelical scholar Mike Licona got into big trouble with his denomination when he stated that he thought that Matthew’s Dead Saints Shaken out of their Graves Story was a theological embellishment (fiction).
Why would an eyewitness disciple of Jesus make up so much of his story about Jesus? And, why would a disciple of Jesus incorporate almost every passage in the Gospel of Mark into his gospel??? The evidence is very, very strong that Matthew the Apostle did NOT write the Gospel of Matthew.
Are you suggesting that since the belief in the traditional authorship of the Gospels has been around for so long that we should believe it? Do you really espouse the idea that the longevity of a belief increases its chances of being true? If that is the case, no one should have accepted Copernicus’ claim that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa. Long held beliefs have frequently been proven false. Evidence is much more reliable than tradition.
I don’t think you appreciate the conservative nature of the transmission of tradition. It is the fact that the early church, Papias just one voice in it, believed Matthew to be the author of the Gospel. They are considerably closer to the source than you, I or any modern scholar. Besides, it is mere speculation that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic. I’m inclined to believe it was written in Greek, by Matthew, in the first century, before 70 AD. And this is not the place to debate why. I really don’t care if Bauckham disagrees. All you have typed here is modern speculation. So, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. In short, I believe Matthew, the Tax Collector of Capernaum, disciple and apostle of Jesus, eyewitness to the life, ministry, sufferings, death and resurrection of Jesus, is the author of the gospel bearing his name. In this I am in the company of the vast majority of Christians of all time, including those of the early church. I believe to conclude that the book made anything up is to render it useless to us and to make it not the Word of God, entirely unreliable in matters of salvation. Matthew did not make up a single detail. The speculation that you have cited amounts to the opinion of moderns. I will trust ancient sources, especially the words of Scripture, the best attested of them all. They have been and continue to be validated by archaeology and science day by day.
“In this I am in the company of the vast majority of Christians of all time, including those of the early church.”
The vast majority of Christians of all time believed that the sun revolved around the earth and that disease is caused by sin, not “invisible” bacteria and viruses. Evidence has proven these long held beliefs to be false.
I would encourage you to investigate this matter further. I would highly recommend NT scholar Raymond Brown’s book, “The Death of the Messiah”. Brown compares each pericope of the Passion Story in Mark with the same pericope in the other three Gospels. Brown calls it like it is. He displays no bias. He provides the evidence why Christians can believe in the historicity of the Empty Tomb. But he also honestly and thoroughly gives the evidence why he and most Bible scholars doubt the eyewitness authorship of the Gospels. I promise you it will be one of the most interesting books you will ever read.
Peace and happiness!
Gary