Evidence · Case 02 · Resurrection of Christ

Theft or fraud by the followers

One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.

The claim here is that the disciples stole the body and then preached a story they knew was false. The strongest form of this view is that the followers had a motive to keep the movement alive. Several of the earliest leaders, including Peter, Paul, and James the brother of Jesus, kept preaching under known lethal risk and were eventually killed; James’s death is recorded by Josephus, and Peter’s and Paul’s rest on 1 Clement (about AD 96) and later tradition. No source says they were offered a chance to recant, so the argument is about persistence under danger, not a recorded refusal. People will die for something they wrongly believe is true, but they rarely persist to the death in something they know they made up. A deliberate hoax does not fit their willingness to pay that price.

Sources

Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, “The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus” (opens in a new tab)
Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, “The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus” (Kregel, 2004)

Objections & responses

“People don’t die for a lie” is weak. Leaders of many movements have died rather than admit fraud, and the evidence that the apostles died for their testimony is mostly late legend.: The second point is conceded: only the deaths of Peter, Paul, and James are well attested, and later apostolic martyrdom stories are unreliable. The argument does not need twelve martyrs. It needs a few people who were in a position to know whether the body was stolen and who accepted death rather than recant. Paul and James are the hardest cases for a fraud theory, since neither was part of any hypothetical conspiracy; they joined from outside, on the strength of their own experiences. A hoax by the disciples does not explain why the movement’s enemy and the founder’s skeptical brother came to believe it.
Maybe someone other than the disciples took the body: grave robbers, Joseph of Arimathea relocating it, or the authorities.: Grave robbers took valuables, not corpses, and would not have left the linen behind. Joseph moving the body is possible, but it would have been easily corrected once the disciples began preaching in Jerusalem a few weeks later. The authorities had the strongest motive of anyone to produce the body and never did; the earliest Jewish response instead accused the disciples of stealing it, which admits the tomb was empty. And none of these theories touches the appearances or the conversions of Paul and James.

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