Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? (10 page)

Although no scholars defend Klausner’s hypothesis today, I have seen attempts on the Internet to revive it. Its weaknesses are evident in light of what I have already said about the other theories:

1.
Explanatory scope:
The Displaced Body Hypothesis tries to explain the empty tomb, but says nothing about the post-mortem appearances and the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Independent hypotheses must be adopted to explain the full scope of the evidence.

2.
Explanatory power:
Obviously, Klausner’s hypothesis has no explanatory power with regard to either the appearances or the origin of the Christian faith. What about the empty tomb? Here the hypothesis faces a rather obvious problem: Since Joseph, as well as any servants helping him, knew what they had done with the corpse, the theory is at a loss to explain why they didn’t correct the disciples’ blunder once they began to proclaim that Jesus had been raised from the dead—unless, that is, one resorts to contrived conjectures to save the day, that Joseph and his servants suddenly died after moving the body!

Sometimes, people will object by saying that the disciples couldn’t have been corrected, because Jesus’ body would have decomposed beyond recognition. Therefore, it would have been futile for the Jewish authorities to point to the real location of Jesus’ corpse; however, it’s also not true. Jewish burial customs typically involved digging up the bones of the deceased after a year had passed and placing them in an ossuary.

So gravesites, even for criminals, were carefully noted. And certainly, the body of a crucified man would have been identifiable from the injuries he sustained. In any case, the objection misses the central point: The earliest Jewish/ Christian disputes about Jesus’ resurrection were not over the location of his grave or the identity of the corpse, but over why the tomb was empty. So, the alternative to the resurrection was theft. Had Joseph of Arimathea displaced the body, the Jewish/Christian controversy would have taken a very different course than the one it took.

3.
Plausibility:
The Displaced Body Hypothesis is implausible in a number of ways. In so far as we can rely on Jewish sources, the criminals’ graveyard was located less than six hundred yards from the site of Jesus’ crucifixion. Jewish regulations, moreover, required that executed criminals be interred immediately on the day of their execution. Therefore, Joseph both could and would have placed the body directly in the criminals’ graveyard, thereby precluding any need to move it later or defile his own family tomb with the corpse of a criminal. In fact, Jewish law actually forbade moving a body later, unless it was to the family tomb of the deceased. Joseph had adequate time prior to sunset for a simple burial, which probably included washing the corpse and wrapping it up in a sheet with dry spices.

4.
Less contrived:
The theory is a bit contrived in ascribing to Joseph motives and activities for which we have no evidence at all. It becomes very contrived if we have to start inventing things like Joseph’s death in order to save the hypothesis.

5.
Disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs:
The Displaced Body Hypothesis is disconfirmed by what we know about the Jewish burial procedures for criminals, which were mentioned in the third point.

6.
Exceeds other hypotheses in fulfilling conditions 1—5:
Again, no historian shares this estimation of the theory’s worth.

HALLUCINATION
HYPOTHESIS

Back in 1835, in his book
The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined,
the German biblical critic David Friedrich Strauss proposed that the resurrection appearances were merely hallucinations on the disciples’ part. The most prominent defender of the Hallucination Hypothesis today is the German New Testament critic Gerd Ludemann. How does it fare when assessed by our criteria?

1.
Explanatory scope:
The Hallucination Hypothesis has inadequate explanatory scope. First, it says nothing to explain the empty tomb. Therefore, one must either deny the fact of the empty tomb (and, therefore, the burial as well) or else conjoin an independent hypothesis to the Hallucination Hypothesis to account for the empty tomb.

Second, the Hallucination Hypothesis fails to explain the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Some scholars have made a great deal out of the alleged similarities between the post-mortem appearances of Jesus and visions of recently departed loved ones on the part of bereaved persons. But while such visions are certainly intriguing, the overriding lesson of such experiences is that the bereaved do not as a result of such visions—however real and tangible they may seem—conclude that their deceased loved one has come physically back to life. Rather, the bereaved believe that they have seen their deceased loved one in the afterlife. As N. T. Wright observes, for someone in the ancient world, visions of the deceased were not taken as evidence that the person is alive, but as evidence that he is dead!

Moreover, in a Jewish context there are more appropriate interpretations of such experiences besides resurrection. Were the disciples to project visions of Jesus after his death, then—given Jewish beliefs about life after death—they would have seen Jesus in heaven or in Abraham’s bosom, where Jews believed the souls of the righteous dead went to abide until the final resurrection. Such visions would not have led, however, to belief in Jesus’ resurrection; at the most, it would have only led the disciples to say that Jesus had been assumed into heaven, not raised from the dead.

In Jewish thinking, an assumption into heaven is not the same as a resurrection. Assumption is God’s taking someone bodily out of this world into heaven; for example, in the Old Testament stories of Enoch and Elijah, these men did not die but were taken directly into heaven by God. A dead person might also be assumed into heaven. In an extra-biblical Jewish writing called The Testament of Job (40), the story is told of two children killed in the collapse of a house. When the rescuers clear away the rubble, the bodies of the children are nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, their mother sees a vision of the two children glorified in heaven, where God has taken them up.

In contrast to assumption into heaven, the Jewish conception of resurrection is God’s raising up of a dead person in the space-time universe. The person is not taken out of this world, but raised up in it. Assumption and resurrection are, therefore, distinct categories in Jewish thought.

Given Jewish beliefs concerning assumption and resurrection, the discovery of the empty tomb and hallucinations of Jesus would at most have caused the disciples to think that Jesus had been assumed into glory, for this was consistent with their Jewish frame of thought. But they wouldn’t have come to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead, for this fundamentally contradicted Jewish beliefs about the resurrection of the dead. Thus, even given hallucinations, belief in Jesus’ resurrection remains unexplained.

2.
Explanatory power:
Not only does the Hallucination Hypothesis say nothing to explain the empty tomb and the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, but it also has weak explanatory power even when it comes to explaining the appearances. Let’s suppose that Peter experienced a guilt-induced vision of Jesus, as Ludemann imagines, or, more plausibly, was one of those people who experience a vision of a deceased loved one. Would this supposition suffice to explain the resurrection appearances? Not really, for the diversity of the appearances bursts the bounds of anything found in the psychological casebooks. Think about it: Jesus appeared not just one time, but many times; not at just one locale and under one circumstance, but at a variety of places and under a variety of circumstances; not to just one individual, but to different persons; not just to individuals, but to various groups; not just to believers, but to unbelievers . . . and even enemies. Positing a chain reaction among the disciples won’t solve the problem, because people like James and Paul don’t stand in the chain; so those who would explain the resurrection appearances psychologically have to construct a composite picture by cobbling together different, unrelated cases of hallucinatory experiences. The necessity of this expedient only serves to underline the fact that there’s nothing like the resurrection appearances in the psychological casebooks.