Evidence · Case 02 · Resurrection of Christ
The empty tomb across the accounts
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Sources
Mark 16:1 to 8, NASB,
Objections & responses
- Paul, the earliest source, never mentions an empty tomb. If it were part of the earliest tradition, wouldn’t he have said so?
Paul never narrates any details of Jesus’s life beyond the creed, so his silence about the tomb is silence about everything, not a specific gap. And the creed he quotes says buried and then raised, a sequence that meant, to a first-century Jew, that the buried body came out of the grave. His argument in 1 Corinthians 15:35 to 54 about what kind of body is raised presupposes that resurrection involves the body that died. The empty tomb is implied rather than stated, which is not the same as absent.
- Victims of Roman crucifixion were normally left on the cross or thrown into common graves. Isn’t a private tomb from a member of the Sanhedrin itself suspicious?
This is Bart Ehrman’s argument and it deserves a direct answer. Roman practice varied by province and circumstance: Philo and Josephus both record bodies released for burial, especially around festivals, and the skeleton of a crucified man named Yehohanan, found in a family tomb in Jerusalem, shows that crucifixion victims could and did receive proper burial in Judea. Joseph of Arimathea is an unlikely invention: a member of the very council that condemned Jesus, named in all four Gospels, whose story gives the church nothing except the embarrassment that the disciples themselves did nothing. Most scholars, including many skeptics, accept the burial.
- Couldn’t the earliest preaching in Jerusalem have gone ahead with the tomb still occupied, if nobody checked or the body had decayed beyond recognition?
That theory requires the disciples to announce a bodily resurrection in the same city where the body lay, within weeks, while neither the Sanhedrin nor the Roman authorities thought to open the tomb. The earliest counter-claim on record, in Matthew 28, is that the disciples stole the body, which concedes the tomb was empty and argues about why. Opponents who could have ended the movement by producing a corpse accused the disciples of theft instead. That is hard to explain if the tomb still held Jesus.