Evidence for Jesus' Empty Tomb

Some people will emphasize a criterion called a dissimilarity where what Jesus did or what happened to Jesus is not like what Judaism believes and is not like what Christianity believes. That’s the strongest form of it. A variation goes it’s not quite like Judaism. It’s not quite like Christianity. And if you look at it, it actually looks like something that moves between the two moving from one to the other. That’s called the continuum approach and sometimes is labeled double dissimilarity. That’s another criterion that gets used.

A third one is called coherence. Anything that gets through particularly those first two and coheres with it can be credible. And another one that’s important is what’s called embarrassment. The early church would never create this kind of an event. This is one that does apply theoretically to the empty tomb because your first witnesses are women; we’ll probably come back to that in more detail. But that’s the criterion of embarrassment. The church would never make up a story where your core witnesses are people who culturally generally wouldn’t count as significant witnesses for a significant event and have credibility. So those are some of the criteria. I haven’t named them all but those are some of the key criteria that come up when people are asking how can I test on a kind of neutral standard that something has credibility.

Today, most scholars believe in some sense Jesus is a healer and an exorcist in some sense, and the majority believe in an empty tomb. So as I tried to say in that article, I tried to talk about trends from 1975 to the present, and the empty tomb is one of them that’s been on a fairly upward rise from that time. And today most scholars believe in the empty tomb from what I’ve been able to tell from a headcount from 1975 to date, French German and English sources, about 75 percent of New Testament scholars accept the empty tomb way more than when I was in grad school. And as Darrell just said, by far the main reason that critics give for the historicity of the tomb is the testimony of the women. And for a lot of people who may be listening or watching this, they may think well there’s some collusion here. These fellows are just agreeing to tell the story this way.

But we have to think about how the Gospels were written, how far around the Mediterranean would you have to look to find the next writer and so on, and when these writers sat down and wrote the account what’s the likelihood that all four of them would have begun by saying the women came to the tomb. And if we back up a little bit, it’s not just that the women came to the tomb; they’re practically the only ones present at the cross. They’re practically the only ones present at the burial with the exception of two very little-known disciples, Joseph and Nicodemus. They’re the first ones to come to the empty tomb, and they’re the first ones to see the appearances. So in the women, we have a uniting of both the two characteristics that Darrell mentioned, both the empty tomb and the appearances. All this with women.

Now when you think about where the Gospels were written, you think about different parts – I mean for example, the tradition that John was written to Ephesus. If you stretch these Gospels out around that are, why do they all tell the story this way, and why do they put a weak foot forward? You know it’s not true like a lot of people report. It’s not true that women could not testify in the court of law; they could. But there was pretty much an inverse relation between how important the fact was and whether they would bring women to testify that have a lot of to do with whether there were men present.

But then the next part of the historical event that Christians like to talk about, he died for sin. Okay, now how do I touch, feel, or taste that you know? That’s the interpretation of the significance of the event. So I have an empty tomb and people believe that there’s an empty tomb and then there’s the explanation for how the tomb got empty and that takes on a variety of forms, including some of these more, for lack of a better description, theological explanations for its significance, and that’s a whole ‘nother level of conversation and a whole ‘nother level of debate.

And let me say one more thing. In Luke and John, we have the story that in Luke only Peter is mentioned but later in that chapter that says, “Certain of us went,” so there’s plural, more than one. And in John, there’s Peter and John and they go to the tomb. Now if you really wanted to be crafty, you could be telling the truth and say Peter and John were the first two witnesses and they went to the tomb and found the tomb empty. If you wanted to, you could start the story with the men a couple of hours later. But no, they stuck to the story in four different places. Four out of four stuck with the women because they were primary even before Peter and John went. So I think this whole story is amazing because they all did the women at different locations, and they could have told the truth and gone with the men, but they didn’t; they told the story with the women. I think those are accounts are just amazing.

Now to John and Peter’s credit, as John’s Gospel notes, they are bothered enough by this report to check it out; you know they don’t hang around to give the women a hard time. But the bulk of the response is no, no, no, this can’t be. And my point here is, again this is another example of the criterion of embarrassment, you’re commending your leaders by how you tell your story, and so you’re gonna create a story that has your leaders basically looking like buffoons in terms of the hope of the Christian Gospel and belittling these women who are testifying to something that really happened? You know most stories that you get like this when you get to the point where the hero does the miraculous, everyone goes you know hallelujah, end of story. That’s not what you get here.

And so that’s another dimension that adds I think to the level of the appearance of credibility and authenticity, 'cause they’re even critical of their own leaders and how they initially responded to the report of the empty tomb, which interestingly enough, ironically tells you how women’s testimony was viewed in the culture. Okay. It wasn’t taken seriously, and they had to be convinced by other means before they actually believed it.

And I really think far from scholars being immune to this kind of stuff, I think we vote with our moods sometimes. We don’t want the other side, whoever that is, to get the upper hand, and critics don’t like to tell the other side that they’re right. So I think largely it’s nonfactual issues that are keeping people from agreeing. But even so, 75 is way up from when I was in grad school, so I’m pleased with the change.

I think the next one is just as important as the women, and that is if you’re gonna preach bodily resurrection, which was a radical idea in the ancient world, if you’re gonna preach bodily resurrection and there’s somebody in that grave, do it in Rome, do it in Ephesus, do it in Egypt, but don’t do it in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the last place you can preach that story if the tomb was occupied. And it would be so easy to disprove it. And by the way, critics say something like, “Well, according to your own book, they didn’t start preaching for 50 days.” In 50 days, the body would be messed up biologically and you wouldn’t be able to tell who it is. Two comments. Number one, Michael Cone and I have both interviewed scholars, you know doctors who work with bodies and causes of death, and the body would not be messed up in 50 days in a normal dry Middle Eastern spring environment.

But number two, here’s the key. If you found any body in the tomb, Christians lose. They didn’t say Jesus is in the tomb. They said, “Nobody is in the tomb.” They said, “The tomb is empty.” If you find a body in the tomb, you lose. They could only preach that message if there was no body or nobody, and that’s how it went. And so it was only on the presupposition, anybody could take a stroll and find out if there is a body there or not. If nobody else is there, you can look in; you can check it out. And they couldn’t do it. So if you’re gonna preach bodily resurrection, that tomb better be open. Whether you can identify the corpse or not, it’s irrelevant. There ought to be no corpse inside that tomb if your proclamation is not just that Jesus isn’t there but that nobody is there. That’s gotta be pretty much verifiable. And by the way, all the accounts going back to the early Acts sermon summaries in Acts 1 through 5, 10, 13, 17, they agreed that the preaching started in Jerusalem. So again, bad place to start if the tomb is not empty.

Now the irony is of course that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus bury Jesus in the tomb that they bury him in in order to give him an honorable burial and in order to show respect for him. But they do keep this one part of the Jewish tradition that fits the background. So that’s actually another little detail that tells you the story works because it fits into the cultural backdrop of what happens when someone is executed as a criminal they don’t get buried in a family tomb. So I see the detail as being actually pointing to the authenticity and actually showing awareness of this other tradition that we’re talking about.

One more thing I would note are the Acts sermon summaries. Again, Acts 1 through 5, 10, 13, and 17. Acts 13’s Pauline statement there is that Jesus was buried and his body did not undergo decay, as was the case with David. Sort of like Acts 2, only Peter is doing the preaching in Acts 2 and Paul in Acts 13. Those are early. Bart Urman dates the Acts sermon summaries to one to two years. He doesn’t specify which is which, but he dates them to one to two years after the cross. If the sermon summaries are one to two years after the cross, he specifically thinks that Acts 13 is among the earliest. Now he’s got other theological reasons for admitting that. But if the Acts sermon summaries are within the year or two and Mark has come back ten or twenty years, we’ve got two sets of very early arguments for what’s going on with the empty tomb, and of course multiple sources.

Here’s the point I like to make. In what goes into the Gospels, there’s a tradition. If that tradition has been solidly communicated, it doesn’t matter when it’s written down, okay, because the tradition is older than the incorporation of the material in the writing. And so it’s actually the quality of the tradition that we get that’s important to the Gospel authenticity as opposed to the dates of the Gospels per se. And that’s important because if we think about the roots of that tradition in Christian circles, we have to use, in the words of that great theologian Chris Burman, we have to go back, back, back, back, back to the experience of Paul. The experience of Paul is, and this is something Gary teaches when he’s in public and I’ve played with it, and it goes the experience of Paul is within about 18 months to a couple of years of the actual crucifixion.

The experience of Paul takes place when he is an opponent of Christianity. The experience of Paul takes place because he’s heard the apostolic preaching. And the experience of Paul takes place so that when he sees the raised Jesus he automatically and instantly is able to process that message that the apostles were giving me that I was denying must now seem to be true. So that experience even predates when Paul has the experience. It goes back to the preaching and teaching he heard that allows him to process that experience. And so we’re literally at that point, in terms of the core tradition of a resurrection of Jesus, on top of the events themselves with someone who lived in the city where it happened. And this gap that we often talk about in relationship to when the events happen versus when the Gospels was written all of a sudden has shrunk down to being basically nothing.

In fact, when I do this on stage, I start off and go from one end of the stage to the other. And by the time I’m done with this explanation, I stand right next to where I’d marked that the crucifixion happened and I just take a little hop step to show we’re right up against the event now. So this is a very, very important part of the roots of the tradition, and the roots of that tradition can be shown to go all the way back virtually to the events themselves.

So if the cross is in the spring, months is probably gonna be before the year is over. So you’re in maybe the fall of the year at the latest. I’m thinking about other people; there’s a number of New Testament scholars. I can go down the line and mention names, but there’s a lot of scholars that say 30 AD. Larry Hurtato says days after the event. This stuff is so early. I mean Jesus Seminar members. When you go back and look or John Dominic Crossan in his books will say that, by the way, multiple attestation for these sightings. Dom Crossan gives three independent sources for the empty tomb, and he doesn’t even believe it and he’s got three independent sources.

So the data here are very early. They’re from the people who walked by. They’re from people who are willing to give their lives, because while we can’t be sure of most of the martyrdoms of the apostles, we have very good data for James, Peter, and Paul, and some people think we’ve got a good source for John in the second century. So John comes into the seen in Galatians 2, so when Paul goes back in the late 40s, they’re specifically talking about the Gospel, Galatians 2:2. And the other disciples add nothing to Paul’s message, meaning they’re on the same page. I mean why do they give Paul and Barnabus a right hand of fellowship. I’ve never been in a church where we do that for heretics, so they must agree with them. In fact, Paul specifically says, “They added nothing to me,” so they agreed with the message of the Gospel. I think maybe the best thing Paul gives us is the testimony of the others.

Bart Ehrman he says, “Paul spent 15 days with Peter and James.” And then he pauses and he says, “I’d like to have spent 15 days with Peter and James.” And then he asks this question, if you don’t have an evangelical-type presupposition and think that at least a couple of the Gospels you can get back to eye witnesses, and even those where you aren’t sure, there’s still eye-witness testimony. If you don’t have that presupposition, what’s gonna be the earliest data we have? And Bart Urman adds there, he says, “Where do we get earlier than this? Where do we get closer to the eye-witness testimony than Paul’s talking to these fellows in Jerusalem?” To me that is the tightest connection on the empty tomb appearances report.