Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? (2 page)

1.
      
the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb by a group of
his female followers on the Sunday morning after his
crucifixion;

2.
      
various individuals and groups’ experiencing
appearances of Jesus alive after his death; and

3.
      
the origin of the earliest disciples’ belief that God had
raised Jesus from the dead.

If these three facts can be established as historical, the question will then be whether they are best explained by what I’ll call the “Resurrection Hypothesis”—namely, that God raised Jesus from the dead, or by some other explanation.

All historians recognize that Jesus of Nazareth met his untimely death by Roman crucifixion at the time of the Jewish Passover feast in Jerusalem. We therefore take that historical fact as given. The question then facing the historian is, What happened following Jesus’ crucifixion? This book looks first at the facts to be explained, and then at competing explanations of these facts.

Part I:

THE EMPTY TOMB

There are at least five independent lines of evidence supporting the fact that the tomb in which Jesus was interred Friday evening after his crucifixion was found empty by a group of women on the following Sunday.

THE HISTORICAL
CREDIBILITY

T
he historical credibility of Jesus’ burial supports the historicity of the empty tomb. If the accounts of Jesus’ burial in the Gospels are basically accurate, even given some divergence in the secondary details, then the location of Jesus’ tomb was known in Jerusalem to both Jew and Christian alike. For according to the accounts, Jesus was buried by a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin named Joseph of Arimathea, and women who followed Jesus observed his burial. But in that case, the tomb must have been empty when the disciples began to preach that Jesus had risen from the dead.

Three reasons underlie this inference:

•
         
The disciples of Jesus could not have believed that Jesus had risen if his corpse still lay in the tomb. It would have been completely un-Jewish, not to say preposterous, to believe that a man whose dead body was known to lie in his tomb had been raised from the dead.

•
         
Even if the disciples had been so rash as to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection despite his occupied tomb, hardly anyone else would have believed them. One of the most noteworthy facts about the early Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection was that it flourished in the very city where Jesus had been publicly crucified. So long as the inhabitants of Jerusalem thought that Jesus’ corpse lay in the tomb, few would have been prepared to believe such silliness as the claim that God had raised Jesus from the dead.

•
         
Finally, even if people had believed that Jesus had risen, the Jewish authorities would have crushed the whole affair simply by pointing to Jesus’ occupied tomb or perhaps even opening the tomb to reveal the corpse as decisive proof that Jesus had not risen back to life.

Even if the remains of the corpse were no longer recognizable due to putrefaction, the burden of proof would have still been upon anyone who said that these were
not
Jesus’ remains. But no such dispute over the identification of Jesus’ corpse ever seems to have taken place; the disputes between early Jewish non-Christians and Jewish Christians lay elsewhere, as we shall shortly see.

It won’t do to suggest that the Jewish authorities didn’t take the Christian movement seriously and so they didn’t bother dealing with it. They were, after all, the same men who were responsible for Jesus’ condemnation and delivery to the Romans for execution. As their engaging the Pharisee named Saul of Tarsus to persecute Jewish Christians amply illustrates, the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem were bent on squelching the budding Jesus movement.

Thus, if the story of Jesus’ burial is historical in its core, then it is a very short inference to the fact that Jesus’ tomb was also found to be vacant. For that reason, critics who deny the fact of the empty tomb have felt compelled to argue against the historicity of the burial as well. This is awkward, however, since the majority of New Testament critics today recognize Jesus’ burial in the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea to be one of the best-established facts about the historical Jesus. While many a lengthy discussion could be had regarding the evidence for Jesus’ burial, two points will suffice.

First Point: Early, Eyewitness Accounts

First,
Jesus’ burial is reported in extremely early, independent sources.
The Gospel of Mark is the earliest of the four Gospels, generally thought to have been written before AD 70. Most scholars think, however, that Mark used an even earlier source when writing his account of Jesus’ suffering and death (the so-called the Passion Story), which most critics think is based on eyewitness testimony. The account of Jesus’ burial in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea is part of this pre-Markan, Passion source. Thus, we have here a very early source for Jesus’ interment by Joseph.

Moreover, Paul in his first letter to the church in Corinth cites an old Christian tradition that he had received from the earliest disciples (1 Cor. 15:3—5). Paul probably received this tradition no later than his visit to Jerusalem in AD 36 after his conversion in AD 33 (Gal. 1:18), if not earlier while he was living in Damascus. This tradition, therefore, goes back to within the first five years after Jesus’ crucifixion in AD 30. The tradition is a summary of the central points of early Christian proclamation. Its parallel form would have made it easy to memorize, and it may well have been used in Christian instruction. It runs:

•
         
that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures;

•
         
and that he was buried;

•
         
and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures;

•
         
and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.

Notice that the second line of this tradition refers to Jesus’ burial.

So, was the burial mentioned in Paul’s tradition the same event as the burial by Joseph of Arimathea? We can answer that question by a comparison of Paul’s four-line tradition with the Gospel narratives on the one hand and the sermons in the Acts of the Apostles.

This remarkable correspondence of independent traditions is convincing evidence that Paul’s four-line tradition summarizes the basic events of Jesus’ passion and resurrection, including his burial in the tomb. In the pre-Markan passion source and the pre-Pauline tradition delivered to the Corinthians, we thus have evidence from some of the earliest, independent sources in the New Testament for the burial of Jesus in the tomb.

And there are more; further independent testimonies to Jesus’ burial by Joseph are also found in the sources behind the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John. Although the majority of scholars agree that Matthew and Luke used Mark’s Gospel as one of their sources, the differences between Mark’s account of the burial and those of Matthew and Luke suggest that they also had other sources than just Mark. Moreover, since scholars generally agree that the Gospel of John was written independently of the other three Gospels, we have yet another independent source for the burial in John’s account. Finally, there are the early sermons in the Acts of the Apostles, which probably preserve the early preaching of the apostles. These sermons also refer to Jesus’ interment in a tomb. Thus, we have the extraordinary number of at least five independent sources for Jesus’ burial, some of which are extremely early.