Did the Apostle's Invent the Resurrection? Part 3:

The first articles in this series explored two challenges to Jesus’s resurrection: the claims that Jesus’s first disciples in Palestine spread a false resurrection story or that this story arose later outside Palestine as a result of pagan influence. But we have seen that neither of these scenarios is supported by the evidence.

Jesus’s empty tomb is a crucial part of the New Testament teaching that he did not merely experience some spiritual form of post-mortem existence but was physically raised from death. If anyone could have pointed to his corpse, his disciples in Jerusalem would certainly not have been able to make the startling claim that their leader had been resurrected. This leads to the next question in our investigation: if Jesus did not rise from death, what could have happened to his body?

Question 3: What happened to Jesus’s body?

We will consider the following possibilities:

A. Did someone remove Jesus’s body from the tomb?

B. Did Jesus merely lose consciousness on the cross?

C. Was Jesus’s body never placed in a tomb?

D. Could no one locate the tomb where Jesus’s body lay?

E. Was the story of the empty tomb a late fabrication?

Did someone remove Jesus’s body from the tomb?

This is an ancient claim. According to Matthew’s Gospel, antagonistic Jewish leaders accused Jesus’s disciples of stealing his body so they could falsely proclaim that he had risen (Matt 28:12–15).[1] And this accusation was still being made in the second century.[2] However, our previous investigation (“Did Jesus’s first followers in Palestine invent a false resurrection story?”) showed that there was no Jewish expectation of a dying-rising Messiah and it is highly unlikely that Jesus’s first disciples conspired to lie about his missing body. In the opinion of scholar Geza Vermes:

“The rumour that the apostles stole the body is most improbable. From the psychological point of view, they would have been too depressed and shaken to be capable of such a dangerous undertaking. But above all, since neither they nor anyone expected a resurrection, there would have been no purpose in faking one” (Jesus the Jew, 40).

But who else would have benefited from hiding Jesus’s body? Certainly, neither the Roman officials in Jerusalem nor the local Jewish leaders would have wanted Jesus’s followers to believe he was alive again. In general, the theory of a stolen body lacks a credible motive and supporting evidence.

Did Jesus merely lose consciousness on the cross?

Could Jesus have swooned on the cross, been mistaken for dead and later revived? This is difficult to accept for the following reasons.

● Jesus was proclaimed to be dead by Roman soldiers (Mark 15:39; John 19:33) who presumably would have had some experience in monitoring the crucifixion process.

● It is unlikely that anyone could have survived the combination of severe flogging (with flails tipped with bone and metal to strip flesh) and crucifixion, which leads to fluid in the lungs, shock, suffocation, and trauma-related failure of the blood to clot. It is sometimes pointed out that the Jewish writer Josephus knew of a man who had survived crucifixion. However, this story was very different from Jesus’s resurrection. Josephus wrote:

“I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery (sic); yet two of them died under the physician’s hands, while the third recovered” (Life 75 § 420–21).

In other words, the lucky survivor had to be taken down before the end of the crucifixion process and given medical treatment—he was certainly not mistaken for dead and interred. There is no precedent for the story of a man being buried after crucifixion and then returning to life.

● In addition to his flogging and crucifixion, Jesus was already weakened from sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane. Excretion of blood through the skin (hematidrosis) is caused when blood capillaries rupture into the sweat glands, often under extreme stress, leading to dehydration and low blood volume. In The Crucifixion of Jesus, forensic pathologist Frederick Zugibe describes the physical and emotional causes of this phenomenon, provides known cases, and supports its authenticity in Jesus’s case.

● If Jesus had survived crucifixion, he would have been critically wounded and in dire need of medical attention when his disciples saw him. In that case, they might have decided to safely conceal him, but why would they have believed that he had miraculously defeated death as the Prince of Life rather than merely being uniquely fortunate? Theories of miraculous healing herbs are unconvincing, and we again have to find a plausible motive for his followers to concoct a bizarre story about his incredible resurrection from death.

Was Jesus’s body never placed in a tomb?

It is sometimes suggested that because Jesus was an executed criminal, his body would not have been properly buried but would rather have been tossed into a shallow grave to decompose or be destroyed by animals. However, there is evidence that even victims of crucifixion were given a customary burial:

● The Jewish Josephus reported that proper burials did take place after crucifixions: “The Jews used to take so much care of the burial of men, that they took down those that were condemned and crucified, and buried them before the going down of the sun” (War of the Jews 4.5.2 §317).

● The ancient bones of a crucified man have also been found, with an iron spike still embedded in his heels and both legs broken, presumably to speed up death on the cross. (See Tzaferis, “Crucifixion: The Archaeological Evidence.”) This man’s bones were reverently gathered together after burial according to tradition and placed in an ossuary (a chest for bones, used from the first century BC to the first century AD).

We are told that Joseph of Arimathea was a Sanhedrin member who had not supported the condemnation of Jesus (Luke 23:51), and all four gospels report that Joseph took care of Jesus’s body, supervising its wrapping and its entombment. The later church would not have invented this particular detail at a time of increasing hostility with Judaism, so there is no reason to question the tradition. It is also interesting that according to the Jewish Talmud, criminals convicted by the Sanhedrin were buried in specially designated tombs until their bones were clean enough to be reburied (m. Sanhedrin 6.5–6; b. Sanhedrin 47b). As the Sanhedrin had condemned Jesus for blasphemy (Matt 26:66, Mark 14:64; Luke 23:13–15), perhaps Joseph took on the responsibility for this official interment of Jesus’s body, motivated by secret admiration.

Could no one locate the tomb where Jesus’s body lay?

Is it possible that the women who discovered the empty tomb simply went to the wrong burial place and mistakenly concluded that Jesus’s body had disappeared? But why would these adoring followers have simply given up trying to find the correct burial place? Why did other disciples enter same empty tomb and also conclude that Jesus’s body was missing? Why would this error have led to the unprecedented claim that Jesus had physically risen from death? And if it was merely a case of mistaken location, why did Jesus’s opponents not go to the correct tomb and display his body to quash the dangerous rumors of his resurrection, particularly if the Sanhedrin member Joseph knew where his body had been placed? The “wrong tomb” claim raises questions that are difficult to answer.

It has been suggested that because of the urgency to bury Jesus before the onset of the Sabbath, his body might have been placed in a temporarily tomb near the crucifixion site and later moved to a more permanent burial place. But again, why did not one of Jesus’s followers or opponents know the new location of the body? This leads back to unsatisfactory conspiracy theories.

Was the story of the empty tomb a late fabrication?

It is often claimed that Jesus’s empty tomb was a late tradition that was developed outside Palestine. However, there are problems with this proposal:

● Mark’s Gospel records that the women went to the tomb on “the first day of the week” (Mark 16:2). This is a Semitic description for Sunday, which strongly indicates a Palestinian tradition for the finding of the empty tomb. The later Hellenised churches were not likely to have used this phrase if they had created a new story about Jesus’s body.

● If the tale was fabricated later by enthusiastic Christians, we would expect the empty tomb to be discovered by well-known and revered figures such as the disciples Peter and John. Instead, the disappearance of Jesus’s body is first reported by Mary Magdalene, who was said to have been possessed by demons. Why would the inventors of the story randomly choose a once-crazy woman to carry the astounding news that Jesus’s body was missing?

● Late traditions also usually develop different versions, but there are no stories that contradict the empty tomb. Even the many later non-canonical gospels (which include some highly creative details) do not contain any contradictory narrative, such as the disciples making regular pilgrimage to the tomb or ritually gathering Jesus’s bones from his burial place. Every tradition affirms the same belief: that Jesus’s body was no longer in the tomb and was never located.

● The Apostle Paul’s Epistles, written within a few decades of Jesus’s death, confirm that there was a very early belief in Jesus’s death, burial, and bodily resurrection. By his own admission, Paul had been a fervent persecutor of Jesus’s early followers, and we would expect that after his own dramatic encounter with the risen Jesus he would have investigated whether the body of the executed teacher was still interred. He visited Jerusalem at least twice, meeting with some of Jesus’s first apostles (Gal 1:18-2; Acts 9:26-30), and he confidently claimed: “We have testified of God that He raised Christ from the dead” (1 Cor 15:15), and “He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies” (Rom 8:11b). Paul’s letters consistently referred to Jesus’s resurrection as an accepted fact among all the early churches, and although he did not explicitly write about the empty tomb, he also did not mention where Jesus was still buried or where his bones had been gathered and kept. Nowhere does Paul’s writing suggest that he imagined Jesus’s body to be decomposing in some grave.

Conclusion

If Jesus’s body was still in the tomb, his Jerusalem disciples could not have proclaimed that he had risen. But there is no evidence that anyone in Jerusalem ever claimed his corpse was still entombed somewhere: instead, Jesus’s opponents tried to explain away the missing body by accusing the disciples of conspiracy. Therefore, even the early adversaries of the new faith bore witness to the fact of the empty tomb. So what did happen to Jesus’s body? There is little support for alternative suggestions, and the simplest explanation still seems to be the most convincing: Jesus did rise bodily from the grave.