When the counter-explanations seem, well, rather lame

We spent much of today in quest of humpback whales.  And pretty successfully, too.  It’s difficult (for non-specialists, anyway) to distinguish individual whales, but we saw at least half a dozen of them off in the distance, and at least four (including at least one mother and a calf) up very close to our boat.  And we saw maybe two dozen Steller sea lions.  Beautiful, clear, crisp weather and a calm sea.  There are worse ways of spending several hours.

Among my purchases during our recent month in England were several very small volumes from a series entitled “Little Books of Guidance.”  I found them in a rural church that some of my wife’s ancestors had almost certainly once attended, in a village located not far from Cheltenham.

The one from which I’ll be drawing for this blog entry (in part, though not entirely) is James D. G. Dunn, Why believe in Jesus’ Resurrection? (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2016).  The author, James D. G. Dunn, who holds both a Ph.D. and a D.D. from the University of Cambridge, is Emeritus Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at the University of Durham and a Fellow of the British Academy.  He has been a prolific and important author on the New Testament over the course of a very distinguished career.  I begin with a direct quotation from him:

The earliest Christian testimony is straightforward and clear.  During the Passover celebrations in Jerusalem Jesus had been arrested, tried and condemned to be crucified (Mark 14-15).  All four Gospels agree that Joseph of Arimathea, a respected councillor, took the responsibility of asking the Roman Governor, Pilate, for his permission to bury the body of the crucified Jesus.  Permission granted, Joseph took Jesus’ body down from the cross, wrapped it in a linen shroud, and laid it in a tomb hewn in the rock which he had prepared for his own burial.  The entrance to the tomb was then covered by a great stone.  This is the basic story on which all four Evangelists agree, with varied details which simply indicate how varied was the retelling of the story and raise no questions as to the reliability of the primary detail.  Most striking is the fact that Joseph of Arimathea, an evidently respected figure, is not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament.  This probably increases the credibility of the account.  It was not the burial which was controversial, but what happened thereafter.  (26)

And what was it that happened thereafter?  Professor Dunn focuses particularly on the fact that, within somewhat less than forty-eight hours, the tomb of Jesus was found to be empty:

The key fact, that the tomb was empty, remains undisputed.  (29)

So, what are we to make of all this?  The first Christians, of course, were convinced that Jesus had been raised from the dead.  This quickly became one of their basic confessions: that God had raised Jesus from the dead on the third day.  This indeed was the central claim of the earliest Christian preaching, and it was acceptance of this claim and belief in/commitment to this risen Lord Jesus which was the principal bond binding Jew and Gentile alike in the formation of the earliest churches.  (30)

One explanation, and apparently the first, dates back right to the beginning.  According to the Gospel of Matthew (chapter 28), the Jewish authorities immediately began to claim that the disciples of Jesus had stolen his body from the tomb.

The problem with this explanation for the spread of the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead is obvious.  If Jesus’ disciples had removed Jesus’ dead body from Joseph’s tomb, they would have had to rebury it in another tomb.  They certainly would not have disposed of it by simply throwing it into some burial site for vagrants and criminals.  But if another tomb or burial site is to be considered, what one, and where?  Given that the Jesus movement began to ‘take off’ soon after, it is entirely unlikely that Jesus’ disciples would just ignore the site where his body lay.  On the contrary, and inevitably, the place or tomb of burial of such a revered teacher would have become a sacred site.  How could the first Christians have failed to want to honour the site where Jesus’ body lay?  But no other site has been identified.  It hardly makes sense to replace the incredibility of resurrection with the incredibility of another burial site which no one care enough to remember, mark or honour.  (32)

Note that the apparent Jewish explanation acknowledges that the tomb of Jesus was, in fact, empty by the morning of the third day.  Moreover, although Professor Dunn doesn’t raise this issue, it seems difficult to imagine a group of wily conspirators marching to brutal martyrdoms on behalf not only of a hoax, but on behalf of something that they knew full well to be a hoax because they themselves had perpetrated it.

But on, now to a second proposed explanation:

The puzzle, then — if not that tomb, then where and what burial or disposal place? — points more to the authenticity of the Gospels’ own empty tomb story than to any other explanation.  There is an alternative suggestion — that it was the wrong tomb to which the women came.  But that can hardly be fitted into the data which has come down to us.  There is a distinctiveness about the account of Joseph of Arimathea’s role which is hard to escape, and similarly the concern of the women to ensure that Jesus’ body was properly anointed.  And the question as to where Jesus’ body really was finally laid still poses an inescapable problem.  For if Jesus’ tomb was actually undisturbed, then it is hardly possible to credit that nobody pointed this out, that no agents of the high priests sought out Jesus actual burial site and exposed the falsehood of Jesus’ disciples’ claim.  So that alternative explanation seems to be even less credible than the former.  (33)

A third option seems to presume that the Romans, who were well experienced in the art of crucifying people, proved singularly incompetent in the case of Jesus:

And much the same verdict has to be given to a third explanation — that Jesus had not really died and had recovered sufficiently to escape from the tomb and to convince his disciples that he was alive (again).  But it is hardly more persuasive as an explanation of the earliest Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection.  That Jesus did in fact die on the cross makes best sense, given the horrific scourging and beatings to which he had been subjected.  The spear-thrust of the Roman soldier into the side of the crucified Jesus, according to John 19.34-35, would have hastened that death.  Even if he had recovered while lying in the tomb, it is scarcely credible that he could have freed himself from any burial wrappings or been able from the inside to roll back the stone covering the mouth of the tomb.  And would a half-dead Jesus have been able to persuade his followers that he had actually risen from the dead?  Nor should we forget that the same problem just discussed re-emerges here too.  For if Jesus had simply recovered from his scourging and crucifixion, then he would have had to die some time thereafter.  And we are back to the problem that no (other) tomb or resting place for Jesus’ body can be identified with any credibility.  (33-34)

Obviously, of course, one can simply dismiss the four Gospels and the authentic letters of the apostle Paul and announce that the whole thing is fiction.  Discarding the primary sources is a remarkably efficient way of doing history; it allows the liberated “historian” to claim absolutely anything with no fear of contradiction.  If the New Testament documents are treated seriously as historical sources, though — even if not necessarily as scriptural text, but simply the same way that one would weigh Tacitus or Suetonius or Flavius Josephus — they pose a problem to disbelievers:

So, on balance, it seems hard to contradict the Gospels’ accounts that the tomb where Jesus’ dead body was laid was subsequently (two days later) found to be empty.  Of course, the whole story could be dismissed as made up and untrue.  But if its testimony is taken seriously, then despite individual oddities, it is hard to escape the conclusion: that on the Sunday following Jesus’ crucifixion, the tomb in which his dead body had been laid was found to be empty.  (34)

For a tomb to be found empty, and only two days after a body had been placed in it, the most obvious answer to the puzzle would seem to be one of the three that have just been discussed.  It was empty because the body had been removed/stolen.  It was empty because it was the wrong tomb.  It was empty because Jesus had recovered sufficiently to escape from the tomb.  But if these explanations of the empty tomb lack credibility, [what then]?  (35)

 

Posted from Victoria, British Columbia