Was Jesus’ Body Really Absent from His Tomb?
Interview #11: William Lane Craig, PH.D., D.Th.
Is Joseph of Arimathea Historical?
- Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrin. In Mark’s gospel it says that the entire Sanhedrin voted to condemn Jesus. Why would Joseph give Jesus a ceremonial burial after voting for his death?
- Luke’s gospel adds the important detail that Joseph of Arimathea was absent for the Sanhedrin vote.
- Joseph of Arimathea would be a highly improbable figure for the early Christian gospel writers to invent. The Jewish leaders instigated the crucifixion. Why would Christians invent one who did the right thing?
- If this burial by Joseph was a legend that developed later, you’d expect to find other competing burial traditions about what happened to Jesus’ body. However, you don’t find these at all.
Reconciling Contradictions
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.
Michael Grant
- We have two narratives of Hannibal crossing the Alps to attach Rome, and they’re incompatible and irreconcilable. Yet no classical historian doubts the fact 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.
- Most scholars recognize that according to early Jewish time-reckoning, any part of a day counted as a full day.
Can the Witnesses Be Trusted?
- The gospels agree that the empty tomb was discovered by women who were friends and followers of Jesus. Does their relationship with Jesus call the reliability of their testimony into question?
- Women were on a very low run on 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.
- It is absolutely remarkable that the chief witnesses to the empty tomb are these women who were friends of Jesus. Any later legendary account would have certainly portrayed male disciples as discovering the tomb.
- This shows that the gospel writers faithfully recorded what happened, even if it was embarrassing.
The Affirmative Evidence
- 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.
- The site of Jesus’s tomb was known to Christian and Jew alike. So if it weren’t empty, it would be impossible for a movement founded on belief in the Resurrection to have come into existence in the same city where this man had been publicly executed and buried.
- We can tell from the language, grammar, and style that Mark got his empty tomb story from and earlier source. In fact, there’s evidence it was written before 37 AD which is much too early for legend to have seriously corrupted it.
- There’s the simplicity of the empty tomb story in Mark. Fictional apocryphal accounts from the second century contain all kinds of flowery narratives.
- The unanimous testimony that the empty tomb was discovered by women argues for the authenticity of the story.
- The earliest Jewish polemic presupposes the historicity of the empty tomb. In other words, there was nobody who was claiming that the tomb still contained Jesus’ body.
- As long as the existence of God is even possible, it’s possible that he acted in history by raising Jesus from the dead.