3
The Empty Tomb
The historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus consists primarily in the evidence supporting three main facts: the empty tomb of Jesus, the appearances of Jesus to his disciples, and the origin of the Christian faith. If it can be shown that the tomb of Jesus was found empty, that He did appear to His disciples and others after His death, and that the origin of the Christian faith cannot be explained adequately apart from His historical resurrection, then if there is no plausible natural explanation for these facts, one is amply justified in concluding that Jesus really did rise from the dead.
Some modern theologians have objected to this conclusion because it infers from the facts that Jesus rose from the dead, and we are not bound to accept that inference. But not only would such an objection destroy all knowledge of history whatsoever, it would also destroy virtually all knowledge in practical affairs, thus making life impossible. For example, if one day we heard shots from a neighbor’s house and saw a man fleeing from the house, and if we found our neighbor dead on the living room floor, and if the police apprehended the fleeing man, and fingerprint and ballistics tests showed that he was carrying the murder weapon, then, if these theologians were correct, we could still not conclude that he shot our neighbor, since this is an inference. But such evidence is accepted in any court of law. The point is that the truth of an inference should be proved beyond any reasonable doubt.
So with the resurrection. If we saw a friend killed and attended his funeral, and if a few days later his grave was found empty and he appeared and spoke to us on several occasions, then, as E. L. Bode remarks in his excellent study on the historical evidence for the empty tomb, the inference that he has been raised to life would not seem to be unwarranted or merely subjective.1 Therefore, it only remains to be seen whether in fact the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is of such a quality.
THE FACT OF THE EMPTY TOMB
In this chapter I want to consider with you the historical evidence in support of the empty tomb. That evidence may be considered under ten main headings.
1. The historical reliability of the account of Jesus’ burial supports the empty tomb. If it can be shown that the story of Jesus’ burial in the tomb is basically reliable, then the fact that the tomb was later found empty is also close at hand. For if the burial account is reliable, then the site of Jesus’ grave was well known. But in that case, the tomb must have been empty when the disciples began to preach the resurrection, for several reasons. In the first place, the disciples themselves could never have believed in the resurrection of Jesus when faced with a tomb containing His corpse. In the second place, no one would have believed them, even if they had claimed that He was risen, since it would have been stupid (in fact, impossible) for anyone to believe a man had been raised from the dead when His body was still in the grave. And in the third place, the disciples’ opponents would have exposed the whole affair as a sham by displaying the body of Jesus, perhaps even parading it through the streets of Jerusalem, thus bringing the Christian heresy to a sudden and grisly end.
If the burial account is historically credible, the fact of the empty tomb is nearly proved. Those who deny the empty tomb, such as the German theologian Hans Grass, realize this and thus are forced to argue at length against the burial account as well. Unfortunately for them, however, the burial account is widely recognized to be one of the most historically reliable narratives concerning Jesus’ suffering and death, and their arguments have therefore something of an air of desperation about them. The evidence for the historical reliability of the burial story may be summarized in ten statements.
a) Paul’s testimony provides early evidence for the historicity of Jesus’ burial. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 Paul quotes an early Christian saying that summarizes the content of the earliest Christian preaching:
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received,
that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried,
and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.2
After quoting this saying, Paul continues the list of witnesses: “Then He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles; and last of all, as it were to one untimely born, He appeared to me also” (1 Corinthians 15:6-8).
Paul wrote 1 Corinthians about A.D. 55, but the saying he quotes goes back even further. Since he says in 1 Corinthians 15:11 that all the apostles preach what is here summarized, it is likely that the saying stems from the earliest days of the Christian fellowship (church would be an inappropriate word) in Jerusalem. The apostles included Peter and the other disciples and perhaps even Jesus’ own brothers (see 1 Corinthians 9:5). Thus, this saying summarizes the preaching of the original disciples themselves.
This conclusion is confirmed by comparing the disciples’ sermons recorded in the book of Acts with the summary quoted by Pauclass="underline" the summary is like an outline on which the sermons are built. Since the material in the sermons is quite old, the summary quoted by Paul must be very old as well.
In fact, from information supplied elsewhere by Paul, we have a good idea of just how old this saying is. Jesus was crucified about A.D. 30. In A.D. 33 Paul became a Christian when he saw an appearance of Jesus on the way to Damascus in Syria. In Galatians 1:18 Paul mentions that three years after his conversion (thus, A.D. 36) he went to Jerusalem and visited Cephas (that is, Peter) and James for two weeks. If Paul had not already received this saying from Christians in Damascus (which I think is probable, as he spent three years there), then he must have received it during this visit to Jerusalem. For Paul spent two weeks with Peter and spoke with James, both of whom claimed to have seen Jesus alive from the dead; therefore, in the words of the great Cambridge New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd, “We may presume that they did not spend all their time talking about the weather.”3 The facts about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection must have been the center of their discussion.
As a matter of fact, the very word Paul uses to describe this visit is a term used by Greek writers to designate fact-finding missions to, well-known cities and sites of interest for the purpose of obtaining first-hand information about them. This suggests that Paul went to Jerusalem specifically in order to gain information about his faith from first-hand witnesses. If he had not already heard the saying in Damascus, Paul probably received it from Peter and James during this visit. It is interesting that the two individuals mentioned by Paul in his list of witnesses to the resurrection appearances (1 Corinthians 15:5-8) are Peter and James.
The upshot of all this is that the Christian saying quoted by Paul must have been in circulation prior to his visit in A.D. 36 and thus must have been formulated within the first five years after Jesus’ death.
Now in this saying, the second line is that “he was buried.” Some theologians wish to say that this does not refer to the burial of Jesus in the tomb, but merely underlines the fact of his death, as if to say, “He was dead-and-buried.” The evidence, however, stands against such an interpretation. Notice the structure of the saying. It consists of four lines each beginning with “and that.” The repetition of those words is grammatically unnecessary and indeed most English translations smooth out the saying by omitting them. But why did the drafters of the saying repeat that grammatically unnecessary phrase before each line? The most likely answer is that they wanted to emphasize the equal weight of each line and order them in a series. In other words, reference to the burial is not meant merely to underline the death, but stands as a separate and independent event in the chain of events concerning Jesus’ death and resurrection.