But back to Kirsopp Lake. As a liberal theologian, he rejected the physical resurrection in favor of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul alone.8 Hence, he was forced to explain away the evidence for the empty tomb of Jesus in another way. He held that the women went to the wrong tomb on Sunday morning and found the caretaker in this tomb. He said something like, “You’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He is not here.” The women, however, were so rattled that they fled. Afterward the disciples saw visions of Jesus, and the women’s story was twisted into the discovery of the empty tomb.
Lake’s theory, however, generated little following and has been universally rejected by contemporary critics:
1. According to the gospel accounts, the women noted precisely where Jesus was laid (Luke 23:55) because they intended to return Sunday morning to visit the grave. It is therefore improbable that they would have gone to the wrong tomb.
2. Lake selects arbitrarily the facts he wants to believe. For example, he accepts the words “He is not here; behold here is the place where they laid Him” but quietly passes over “He has risen.” Moreover, the fact that Mark refers to the angel at the tomb as a “young man” does not mean he was an ordinary human figure. The Greek word here is often used of angels,9 and the white robe in which he was dressed is the typical Jewish portrait of angels.10 All the other gospels agree that the figure in the tomb was an angel, and the women’s reaction of fear confirms that he was. Biblical scholars agree that Mark intends the man to be an angel. There is, therefore, really no ground for believing that the women ran into the caretaker, who pointed them to the other tomb. Lake’s reconstruction is clever, but arbitrarily selective and without foundation.
3. The decisive consideration against the wrong tomb theory, however, is that a later check would have revealed the error at once. Indeed, one wonders why the women did not, after their initial fright, go to the correct tomb. In any event, the disciples themselves would have checked it out later. They never could have believed in the resurrection with Jesus’ body still in the tomb. And even if the disciples had not looked at the tomb, the Jews would have done that duty for them. If the resurrection was a colossal mistake based on the women’s error, then the enemies of Christianity would have been more than happy to point that out, indicating where the correct tomb was or maybe even exhuming the body. The idea that the resurrection stemmed from the women’s going to the wrong tomb is too shallow.
What all these alternative theories to the resurrection have in common is that they grant the substantial reliability of the gospel accounts. Granted that the disciples found the empty tomb and saw appearances of Jesus, how is that to be explained? Modern scholarship has rejected across the board these attempts to explain away the empty tomb and appearances. These theories are no longer the issue.
THE LEGEND THEORY
Since the time of D. F. Strauss, the prevailing theory in denial of the resurrection has been that the accounts themselves are legendary. Strauss saw that it was hopeless to grant the facts and then try to cook up some natural explanation for them. Once the skeptic granted the basic historical reliability of the gospel accounts, his case was lost. Strauss therefore denied the apostolic authorship of the gospels and rejected their accounts as unhistorical legends.11 There never was an empty tomb, nor was there ever any guard around it. These are legendary stories that built up over the years. Similarly, the stories of Jesus’ appearances in the gospels are just legends. Strauss did admit that the disciples must have seen something (otherwise the list of witnesses to the appearances of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 cannot be explained), but he dismisses these as hallucinations on the part of the disciples. Strauss believed that after Jesus’ death, the disciples went back to Galilee. By reading the Old Testament, they became convinced that the Messiah would die and rise from the dead. Since they believed Jesus was the Messiah, they thought he would surely rise. So eventually they had hallucinations of him. Much later they returned to Jerusalem to preach the resurrection, and by that time the location of Jesus’ tomb had apparently been forgotten. The gospel accounts that we have were written much later and are unhistorical legends that accumulated over the years.
This then is the real issue in contemporary scholarship. The position of the most influential New Testament critic of this century, Rudolf Bultmann, with regard to the resurrection is virtually indistinguishable from that of Strauss. Modern critics who deny the resurrection have followed Strauss in arguing that the resurrection of Jesus is a legend.
In summary, then, we have seen that the history of the debate over the resurrection of Jesus has produced several dead ends in the attempt to explain away the evidence of the resurrection. The conspiracy theory, the apparent death theory, the wrong tomb theory, and their variations have all proved inadequate as plausible alternative explanations for the resurrection. This is of great help to us because it clears the ground for a consideration of the really crucial issue facing us today. This is Strauss’s alternative: that the resurrection of Jesus is a legend. Modern critics who deny the resurrection have stuck on Strauss’s position. If it fails, then the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection can no longer be denied. In the next three chapters, therefore, we shall conduct a searching examination of this position through a critical sifting of the positive evidence for the resurrection.
NOTES
1. Eusebius Demonstratio evangelica 3. 4, 5.
2. H. S. Reimarus, Reimarus: Fragments, trans. R. S. Fraser, Lives of Jesus Series (London: SCM, 1971), pp. 172, 212.
3. William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity, 5th ed., 2 vols., 1796, reprint (Westmead, England: Gregg International, 1970).
4. Quintillian Declamationes maiores 6. 9.
5. David Friedrich Strauss, A New Life of Jesus, authorized trans., 2d ed., 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1879), 1:412.
6. Frankfurter Zeitung, 4 October, 1914, p. 2.
7. Karl Barth, “Evangelical Theology in the 19th Century,” Scottish Journal of Theology: Occasional Papers 8 (1959): 58.
8. Kirsopp Lake, The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (London: Williams & Norgate, 1907), pp. 247-79.
9. See 2 Maccabees 3:26, 33; Luke 24:4; Gospel of Peter 9; Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 5. 277.
10. See, for example, Revelation 9:13; 10:1.
11. David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot, ed. with an Introduction by Peter C. Hodgson, Lives of Jesus Series (London: SCM Press, 1973), pp. 57-89, 565-782.