Back to the Empty Tomb (Part 14)
As we have seen, the Apostles and Evangelists put greatest emphasis on their witness to encounters with the risen Lord — for obvious reasons (an empty tomb, all by itself, does not prove that Jesus rose from the dead). On the other hand, they were careful to record the discovery of the empty tomb on Easter morning as well. For only if that tomb was empty, and the body of Jesus truly and inexplicably gone could their testimony about seeing him alive after his death carry any weight.
We have already considered, in our last installment in this web series, St. Paul’s witness to the empty tomb and the resurrection of Jesus in I Corinthians 15 (the earliest written historical testimony about these events). For the empty tomb in particular, however, there is plenty of solid historical evidence on hand beyond what St. Paul implied in his epistle to the Corinthians..
That Jesus was laid in an easily identifiable grave by Joseph of Arimathea is a solid historical fact, reported by all four gospels, and disputed by no one at the time. It is also highly unlikely that the benevolence of Jewish aristocrat and Sanhedrin member Joseph of Arimathea would have been invented by Christian apologists, given their hostility to the early Jewish leaders of the Sanhedrin who had unjustly condemned the Savior of the world to death. Chris Price adds:
Joseph, it is important to remember, was a prominent, well-known man, so his tomb would have been extremely easy to locate by people in Jerusalem, making it impossible that the disciples, women, or enemies for that matter, could have repeatedly gone to the wrong tomb by mistake. In fact, the tomb, as described in the Gospels, is that of a rich man and these types of burial sites were not exceedingly numerous in Jerusalem, again making it simple to find the tomb and look into the strange events and odd claims made by the disciples. (Radical Hope, p. 35)
The “Wrong Tomb” theory obviously runs aground at this point. But there is plenty of other evidence against it as well. John Stott explains:
[T]here is the theory that the women went to the wrong tomb. It was still dark, and they were dazed with sorrow. They could easily, it is claimed, have made a mistake.
This sounds plausible on the surface, but it hardly bears examination. To begin with, it cannot have been completely dark. It is true that John says the women came “while it was still dark.” But in Matthew 28:1 it is “toward the dawn,” while Luke says it was “at early dawn,” and Mark distinctly says that “the sun had risen.”
Further, these women were no fools, At least two of them had seen for themselves where Joseph and Nicodemus had laid the body. They had even watched the whole process of burial, “sitting opposite the sepulchre.” The same two … returned at dawn, bringing with them Salome, Joanna, and the “other women,” so that if one mistook the path or tomb, she is likely to have been corrected by the others. (Stott, Basic Christianity, p. 60)
Actually, the fact that the tomb was first discovered empty by women is a strong argument in favor of the validity of this story in the gospels, for according to ancient Judaism, women were not reliable witnesses in court. In reporting the initial discovery of the empty tomb by women, therefore, the evangelists were recording an historical embarrassment — certainly not the kind of thing they would have fabricated themselves if they were just writing fictional propaganda.
Most importantly, if the tomb was not actually empty, then the Jewish or Roman authorities surely would have produced the body to crush the rumor that Jesus had risen from the dead. In fact, none of the early Jewish polemical sources denies that the tomb of Jesus was easily recognizable, and completely empty on Easter morning. Their claim that the disciples stole the body and invented the lie that Jesus had risen actually presupposes that even the enemies of Jesus believed in the empty tomb.
Some scholars have suggested that the Jewish and Roman authorities could not produce the body because it had been tossed into a common grave with the other executed criminals by the Roman soldiers. This, of course, contradicts all of the evidence we have from the gospels about the use of the grave provided by Joseph of Arimathea. Moreover, as Israeli archaeologist Shimon Gibson wrote:
The idea that an executed Jew would have been chucked into a common burial pit after being removed from the cross is unlikely. It may have been the normal practice for criminals of the lower classes and for slaves elsewhere in the Roman Empire, but it is unlikely to have been practiced in Jerusalem because of Jewish religious sensibilities. The truth is the Roman authorities would have wanted to keep the Sanhedrin and the locals agreeable. (Cited in Hutchinson, Searching for Jesus, p. 234)
This would be true especially of the body of a Jewish religious figure executed during the Passover festival, when the city was filled with religious pilgrims. In fact, there was a general Roman law throughout the Empire at the time called the Pandectae that stated that “The bodies of persons who have been punished should be given to whoever requests them for the purpose of burial” (cited in Hutchinson, p. 232). In any case, no one at the time claimed that the body of Jesus could not be produced because it simply had been thrown into a common burial pit.
Other scholars have conjectured that the Roman and Jewish authorities never produced the body of Jesus to squash the Christian movement in its infancy, simply because the body of Christ would have been so thoroughly decomposed by the time they needed to exhume it that it would have been unrecognizable. Putting such remains on display would have proven nothing, and convinced no one that they were truly the bodily remains of Jesus of Nazareth. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, however, have successfully disputed this theory:
[I]n the arid climate of Jerusalem, a corpse’s hair, stature, and distinctive wounds would have been identifiable, even after 50 days. [From footnote 32: This information was obtained from the Medical Examiner’s Office for the Commonwealth of Virginia. The physician in charge said that even in Virginia, which has a climate warm and damp enough to promote quick decomposition, an unprepared corpse undergoing a normal rate of decomposition should still after 50 days have its hair and identifying stature. The wounds would “definitely” be identifiable. Thus, a corpse in a much worse state than what would be expected for arid Jerusalem would still be identifiable after 50 days.] (Habermas and Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, p. 70 and 287)
Another possibility is that the tomb really was empty — and the body of Jesus could never be produced — only because it had been stolen by thieves on Saturday night. There certainly were such things as “grave robbers” in ancient times. But why would thieves have bothered to break into the grave of someone known to be penniless and disgraced? Perhaps they expected that the grave would include devotional offerings paid for by its rich owner, Joseph of Arimathea. The fine linens that the body of Jesus was wrapped in surely would have been worth a tidy sum. But in this case, inexplicably, they left behind those expensive grave cloths, and ran off instead with a naked corpse! That is doubly bizarre because, besides being the most valuable item in that grave, the linens would have been carefully wound and secured all around the dead body of Jesus, in the traditional Jewish manner. In order to (inexplicably) leave behind those valuable cloths, the thieves would have had to take the time to unwind and unravel them. Is that the kind of thing thieves do? Surely they would be acting fast to avoid discovery, and would more likely have carried off the body of Jesus, grave cloths and all, and only worried about unwinding the linens later! Or, alternatively, if the main thing they wanted was the cloths, they would have unwound them and left the corpse behind. The last thing they would have done would have been to unwind the valuable grave cloths, leave them behind, and take the naked corpse instead!
There is another bizarre twist to this as well, which again makes the “thieves stole the body” theory highly unlikely. Apparently they not only unwound the grave cloths from the body, they also rewound them and set them down on the rock shelf of the tomb just the way they would have been as if they still encompassed the dead body of Jesus! John Stott points this out for us (Basic Christianity, p. 65-67), and reminds us of some important things about the mystery of the Resurrection:
Now, supposing we had been present in the sepulcher when the resurrection of Jesus actually took place. What should we have seen? Should we have seen Jesus begin to move, and then yawn and stretch and get up? No. We do not believe that he returned to this life. He did not recover from a swoon. He had died, and rose again. His was a resurrection, not a resuscitation. We believe that he passed miraculously from death into an altogether new sphere of existence. What then should we have seen had we been there? We should suddenly have noticed that the body had disappeared. It would have “vaporized,” being transmuted into something new and different and wonderful. It would have passed through the graveclothes, as it was later to pass through closed doors, leaving them untouched and almost undisturbed. Almost, but not quite. For the body cloths, under the weight of 100 pounds of spices, once the support of the body had been removed, would have subsided or collapsed, and would now be lying flat. A gap would have appeared between the body cloths and the head napkin, where his face and neck had been. And the napkin itself, because of the complicated crisscross pattern of the bandages, might well have retained its concave shape, a crumpled turban, but with no head inside it.
A careful study of the text of John’s narrative suggests that it is just these characteristics of the discarded graveclothes which he saw. First, he saw the cloths “lying.” The word is repeated twice, and the first time it is placed in an emphatic position in the Greek sentence. We might translate, “He saw, as they were lying (or “collapsed”), the linen cloths.” Next, the head napkin was “not … with the linen cloths but … in a place by itself.” This is unlikely to mean that it had been bundled up and tossed into a corner. It lay still on the stone slab, but was separated from the body cloths by a noticeable space. Third, this same napkin was “not lying … but wrapped together.” This last word has been translated “twirled.” (The Authorized Version “wrapped together” and the Revised Standard Version “rolled up” are both unfortunate translations.) The word aptly describes the rounded shape which the empty napkin still preserved.
It is not hard to imagine the sight which greeted the eyes of the apostles when they reached the tomb: the stone slab, the collapsed graveclothes, the shell of the head-cloth and the gap between the two. No wonder they “saw and believed.” A glance at these graveclothes proved the reality, and indicated the nature, of the resurrection. They had been neither touched nor folded nor manipulated by any human being. They were like a discarded chrysalis from which a butterfly has emerged.
Next Time: The Strength of the Evidence for Easter
Robert Stackpole, STD
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