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12. "Did Jesus really rise from the dead?"

Jesus – the evidence – Wilson I (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1996)

‘Did Jesus really rise from the dead?' pages 139-153 © Jesus: the evidence, I Wilson, 1996, Weidenfeld and Nicholson

 

(Site editor's note: observe that the writer of this paper is clearly unsure of the end result, and is almost a reluctant believer. He has obviously never thought through what contradictions are or are not. Refer to www.rochfordcc.co.uk/rApologeticsContents and look at P.27 ‘Questions about Reconciling Contradictions')

 

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The Fact – he was buried

•  According to the gospels, Joseph of Arimathea laid Jesus in his own new, rock-cut tomb ‘in which no-one had yet been buried' (John 19:41).
•  This is described as having been in a garden, close to Golgotha (John 19:41-2), and with a ‘very big' stone rolled across the entrance-way (Matthew 27:60; Mark 15:46; 16:3- 4).

 

The authenticity of that

•  More than sixty examples of such rolling-stone tombs can still be seen in and around Jerusalem.
•  Their entrance boulders can weigh up to two tons, though if on level ground they can with a little effort be rolled aside by just one person.
•  Although the John gospel's information that ‘no-one had yet been buried' in the tomb might appear puzzling, in fact this is consistent with the evidence of Jewish rock-cut tombs from Jesus' time that have been excavated in recent years.
•  Thus, as was found, for instance, during the earlier-mentioned excavations at Giv'at ha-Mivtar, a single Jewish tomb might contain one or more benches or ‘laying-out' places, together with as many as eight or more chambers cut into the rock to accommodate ossuaries, the stone boxes in which the bones were gathered once the corpse had decomposed.
•  Since each tomb-chamber might contain two or three ossuaries, and each ossuary several sets of bones, a single tomb could be used for thirty or more people over a period of decades.
•  For a tomb to be one in which ‘ no-one had yet been buried' would therefore be at least worthy of comment.
•  It also provides an element of authentic Jewish detail bearing in mind that, for the Romans and other Gentiles of Jesus' time, cremation was the norm.

 

The supposed location of the tomb

•  But where was Jesus' tomb located in relation to present-day Jerusalem?
•  Today the traditional site is marked by the mainly Crusader-built Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a bewildering rabbit-warren of an edifice, always under repair and teeming with tourists, with in its midst a rather ugly, many times rebuilt edicule, or ‘little building', housing a carefully protected marble slab covering all that remains of the purported bench on which Jesus was laid out in death.
•  This location has been identified as Jesus' burial place at least since the time when Helena, mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, reputedly ‘discovered' it back in the fourth century AD.
•  As recounted by the near-contemporary church historian Socrates Scholasticus : Helena went to Jerusalem to find what had been that city as desolate as ‘a lodge in a garden of cucumbers'… after the Passion Christians paid great devotion to Christ's tomb, but those who hated Christianity covered the spot with a mound of earth, built a temple of Aphrodite on it, and set up her statue there, so that the place would not be forgotten. The device was successful for a long time — until, in fact, it became known to the Emperor's [i.e. Constantine the Great's] mother. She had the statue thrown down, the earth removed and the site cleared, and found three crosses in the tomb… With them was also found the titulum on which Pilate had written in various languages that the Christ crucified was the king of the Jews…
•  From one of those three crosses found by Helena came most of the pieces of the ‘True Cross' venerated in numerous churches and cathedrals throughout the world.
•  What purports to be the titulus can also still be seen in Rome's Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, a puzzling piece of work with an inscription just decipherable as ‘Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews', written in Aramaic, Greek and Latin (see John 19:19).
•  The authenticity of this has to be considered doubtful , likewise probably the pieces of the cross, though no-one can be sure.

    

Inside-Outside the Walls of Jerusalem

•  But in view of the early attested marking of the spot with the Temple of Aphrodite (known to have been built by the Emperor Hadrian), there is a more than reasonable case for accepting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as genuinely enshrining the one-time tomb in which Jesus' body was laid.
•  Although according to the gospels Jesus' tomb was located outside Jerusalem's walls, by Helena's time these walls had been rebuilt, the reputed tomb being found inside them.
•  There must, therefore, have been something very compelling about the location for Helena to have ignored the gospels' clear descriptions.
•  As archaeologist Dr Kathleen Kenyon discovered in the 1960s, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre site was outside the city walls of Jesus' time, and would seem to have been within a quarry then being used for burials.

 

Destruction and an Alternative

•  Frustratingly, however, Constantine the Great's engineers cut away the rock into which the tomb had been set, leaving it first free standing, and then before the end of the fourth century surrounded by a rotunda within a grandiose church.
•  This church and the tomb alike subsequently became subjected to sometimes exhaustive Moslem attacks so that today almost every vestige of how it looked if and when Jesus was laid in it has been lost.
•  This has prompted many Christian pilgrims to turn instead to the altogether more authentic-looking ‘ Garden Tomb', which General Gordon of Khartoum, on visiting Jerusalem in 1883, suggested might have been the true one used for Jesus.
•  Located just a short walk north of Old City Jerusalem's Damascus Gate, this is today beautifully maintained as an interdenominational place of prayer, though as even its guides admit there is very little evidence in favour of it having been the original.

 

What happened to the Body?

•  But the real question is: what happened to Jesus' body as laid in the true tomb, wherever this was, and whatever it looked like?
•  According to every available early source, Jesus died on the cross at the hands of the world's most efficient executioners, the Romans.
•  Before his body was taken down from the cross the Roman governor Pontius Pilate reportedly sent a senior officer to ensure that he was genuinely dead (Mark 15:45).
•  The author of the John gospel observed that in order to leave nothing to chance a lance was plunged into his chest, whereupon blood and a watery fluid oozed out (John 19:34).
•  According to the Matthew gospel's author, a guard was even mounted and official seals affixed to the entrance stone in order to prevent any possibility of trickery (Matthew 27:66).

 

Not so certain matters?

•  Because the Matthew gospel alone tells the story of the guard, also of a ‘violent earthquake' and of the ‘angel of the Lord' rolling away the entrance stone, it is probably safest to regard these as pious embroideries by an author demonstrably over-fond of the miraculous. (? anti-miracle author?)
•  It is equally impossible to know quite what to make of the differing accounts of the young man or men encountered at the tomb (Mark 16: 5; Luke 24: 4; see the parallel passages featured earlier on p.27), except that the bench on which Jesus' body would have been laid, as still to be seen in surviving rolling-stone tombs, certainly would have provided sufficient space for individuals to be seated at both head and foot.

 

Certain Issues?

•  But altogether more important is the agreement of all sources that just two days after Jesus had been laid in the tomb not only had his body mysteriously disappeared but people who had known him well began to have strange experiences of seeing him among them.
•  Sometimes, distrusting their own senses, they reported seeing him pass through locked doors, yet he was able to talk and eat with them (Luke 24:43).
•  Reportedly he even felt like a living person to the touch (John 20:27,28).
•  The convincingness of these encounters to those on the receiving end is powerfully conveyed by the speech attributed to Peter in the tenth chapter of Acts: Now I and those with me can witness to everything he did throughout the countryside of Judaea and in Jerusalem itself: and also to the fact that they killed him by hanging him on a tree, yet three days afterwards God raised him to life and allowed him to be seen, not by the whole people, but only by certain witnesses God had chosen beforehand. Now we are those witnesses — we have eaten and drunk with him after his resurrection from the dead ... (Acts 10:39-42)

 

Paul Convinced

•  As even ‘Jesus-did-not-exist' exponent Professor G. A. Wells has acknowledged, this powerful belief caught on very soon after the events described, at least one attestor to the resurrection, the apostle Paul, being readily dateable.
•  In Acts 18:12 Paul is said to have appeared before the Achaean proconsul Gallio while on his second mission, and since an inscription found at Delphi enables Gallio's administration to be accurately dated to 51-2AD, simple back-calculation establishes that Paul must have believed in Jesus' resurrection c.40AD, and according to some authorities, perhaps even as early as 36 AD.
•  So what had happened to account for the fact that Paul and others held this belief? In this ostensibly simple question lies the central mystery of the Christian religion, and one for which there remains no uncontested rational answer.

 

The women going to the tomb?

•  The various accounts of the scene at the empty tomb on the first Easter morning are so full of inconsistencies that it is easy for sceptics to deride them.
•  The writer of the John gospel describes Mary Magdalen arriving at the tomb alone, discovering the tomb to be empty and imparting the news to Peter and an unnamed ‘other disciple, the one Jesus loved' (John 20: 2), generally identified as John.
•  The Matthew author relates that Mary Magdalen was accompanied by ‘Mary the mother of James and Joseph'.
•  Mark adds a further companion, a woman called Salome, referred to in the Thomas gospel.
•  Luke, who knows nothing of any Salome, speaks only of one ‘Joanna' (presumably royal treasurer Chuza's wife — see p.87) together with other women who go off to tell the disciples what they have seen, though according to Mark, the women, ‘frightened out of their wits… said nothing to a soul, for they were afraid' (Mark 16: 8).

 

At the tomb?

•  Similar discrepancies occur in the reports of what was seen at the empty tomb.
•  John's Mary Magdalen saw first two angels sitting in the tomb and then Jesus, whom she was not allowed to touch.
•  Matthew's two Marys saw one seated angel, and then Jesus.
•  Mark's three women saw a young man in a white robe, and Mary Magdalen alone saw Jesus.
•  Luke's group of women saw two men in brilliant clothes who suddenly appeared at their side, but not Jesus himself, who was seen only by two disciples on the road to Emmaus.

 

After the tomb

•  All four gospels describe Jesus subsequently appearing to the full group of disciples,
•  Matthew and Mark set these appearances in Galilee,
•  Luke and John gospels suggest that the setting was Jerusalem.
•  Luke also indirectly mentions an earlier appearance of Jesus to Simon Peter, one which seems to have gone unnoticed elsewhere in the gospels.
•  But it is one of Paul's letters which gives the fullest information of all: … he [Jesus] appeared first to Cephas [Peter] and secondly to the Twelve. Next he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died; then he appeared to James and then to all the apostles; and last of all he appeared to me too … (1 Corinthians 15:5-8)

 

Apparent Confusions

•  The documentation is an almost hopeless jumble of confusion, scarcely helped by the fact that the ever enigmatic Mary Magdalen, the only witness mentioned in every account except Paul's — for whom women didn't count — was obviously so unbalanced that she had needed to be cured by Jesus of ‘seven devils'.
•  The lack of a proper ending to the Mark gospel, as revealed by the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus manuscripts, merely adds to the problem.
•  Yet had someone wholly invented the resurrection story one might have expected them to do so more convincingly than, for instance, representing women as the prime witnesses, when women's testimony carried a particularly low weight in Jewish Law.
•  And in their own way the garblings and inconsistencies have the same quality as the memories of witnesses after a road accident, which are, after all, personal and often highly confused versions of the same true story.

 

Possibilities

•  Any number of theories have been advanced in an attempt to explain what really happened, but all may be reduced to permutations of six basic hypotheses:

•  The women went to the wrong tomb.
•  Unknown to the disciples, some independent person removed the body.
•  The disciples themselves removed the body and invented the whole story.
•  The disciples saw not the real Jesus, but hallucinations.
•  Jesus did not actually die on the cross, but was resuscitated, or in some other way survived.
•  Jesus really did rise from the grave.

    

Gospel Anticipation of 1-4

•  Although it is impossible within a single chapter to do justice to these different hypotheses, what is quite clear is that the disciples and gospel writers anticipated that the first four theories would be proposed to explain the mystery.
•  All the synoptic writers (1) emphasize, for instance, how the women had carefully taken note of where Jesus was laid (Matthew 27:61; Mark 15:47; Luke 23:55).
•  The John gospel (2) puts into the mind of Mary Magdalen the idea that the man she mistook for a gardener (in reality Jesus, as yet unrecognized) had for some reason taken the body away (John 20:15).
•  The writer of Matthew (3) acknowledged that in his time there was a story in circulation that the disciples had stolen the body.
•  He accused ‘the Jews' of having bribed the guards posted at Jesus' tomb to say this.
•  With regard to the possibility of hallucination (4), both the Luke and the John gospels emphasize the disciples' own incredulity at the solidity of what they were seeing, the Luke author, for instance, wonderingly reporting ‘… they offered him a piece of fish which he took and ate before their eyes' (Luke 24:43).
•  The John author noted the disciple Thomas' insistence that he was not prepared to believe unless he was able to put his fingers into the wound in Jesus' side, and recorded that Thomas was specifically allowed to do this.

 

Easy Answers

•  In fact, quite aside from the gospel writers' evident anticipation of them, the first four hypotheses bear little serious scrutiny.
•  Had there simply been a mistake over the location of the tomb, it would have been an easy matter for any sceptic to go to the right location, show the body still there and set the whole matter at rest.
•  Had Jesus' body been taken away either by a person unknown or by the disciples, we might surely have expected someone, sometime, to produce it.
•  Such a hypothesis also fails to account for the repeated attestations of Jesus being seen alive and well.
•  With regard to the possibility of hallucinations, it might of course be possible to envisage some bizarre mass post-hypnotic suggestion that made Jesus seem to appear to those so hypnotized, to seem to eat with them, and even to feel solid to their touch.
•  But this still totally fails to account for the reportedly very real emptiness of Jesus' tomb.

 

Speculative Swoon Theory

•  Perhaps because the gospel writers do not take account of it, the fifth hypothesis, that Jesus did not die on the cross, has been particularly favoured by sceptics and sensationalists in recent years.
•  In his The Passover Plot the late Hugh J. Schonfield advanced the ingenious theory that the sponge offered to Jesus on the cross (John 19:29,30) was soaked not in vinegar but in a drug to induce the appearance of death.
•  This was so that he could be taken to the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea and there resuscitated, the lance thrust into Jesus' side being the unexpected eventuality that caused the plot to misfire.
•  According to Schonfield, the man seen by Mary Magdalen was simply someone who had been deputed to help revive Jesus, and the ‘resurrection' was therefore nothing more than a case of mistaken identity, Jesus' body having been quietly buried elsewhere.

 

Other Moderns

•  Both before and after Schonfield all sorts of variants to this theory have been offered.
•  In D.H. Lawrence's short story ‘The Man who Died', Jesus was taken down too early from the cross, revived in the tomb, petrified his followers, who assumed he was dead, ‘resurrected', and then slipped away to Egypt to enjoy conjugal relations with a priestess of Isis.
•  The supposedly factual The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln represents Jesus' paramour as Mary Magdalen and their place of refuge as the south of France, but it follows essentially the same plot, with Jesus even going on to father a family.
•  Within the last few years Dr Barbara Thiering of the University of Sydney has resurrected the same idea in her Jesus: The Man , as have the German writers Holger Kersten and Elmar Gruber with their The Jesus Conspiracy .
•  Thiering has based her arguments on the idea that the gospels were all written in a code, so that virtually everything in them has to be re-interpreted in the light of that code.
•  Kersten and Gruber have contended that the Vatican conspired with radiocarbon dating scientists to ensure that the Turin Shroud was dated to the Middle Ages so that its purported ‘big secret', that it ‘proves' that Jesus was still alive when laid inside it, should not be allowed to destroy the Christian faith.
•  Despite the ingeniousness of such arguments, they merit scant serious scrutiny.
•  The problem for all hypotheses of this kind, certainly those postulating some form of resuscitation, was outlined more than a hundred years ago by the controversial Tübingen lecturer David Strauss, one of those nineteenth-century German theologians who in so many ways cast doubts on the gospel story.
•  As Strauss wrote in his New Life of Jesus, published in 1865: It is impossible that a being who had stolen half dead out of the sepulchre, who crept about weak and ill, wanting medical treatment, who required bandaging, strengthening and indulgence… could have given the disciples the impression that he was a Conqueror over death and the grave, the Prince of Life, an impression which lay at the bottom of their future ministry. Such a resuscitation… could by no possibility have changed their sorrow into enthusiasm, have elevated their reverence into worship!

 

Peter affirms that Jesus rose

•  In support of this, and in full favour of the hypothesis that Jesus genuinely rose from the grave, is the sheer confidence about this that became exhibited by the previously denying and demoralized disciple Simon Peter.
•  This is evident from his first post-crucifixion public speech to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and their fellow-Judaeans reported in the book of Acts: Men of Israel… Jesus the Nazarene was a man commended to you by God… This man… you took and had crucified by men outside the Law. You killed him, but God raised him to life… and all of us are witnesses to that. (Acts 2:22-4,32)
•  Peter went on to speak with similar passion on subsequently addressing non-Jews in Caesarea: Now I, and those with me, can witness to everything he [Jesus] did throughout the countryside of Judaea and in Jerusalem itself; and also to the fact that they killed him by hanging him on a tree, yet three days afterwards God raised him to life and allowed him to be seen, not by the whole people, but by certain witnesses God had chosen beforehand. Now we are those witnesses — we have eaten and drunk with him after his resurrection from the dead … (Acts 10:39-42)

 

Others support it

•  Likewise meriting considerable weight as evidence is St Paul's clear and unequivocal statement in his letter to the Corinthians that the resurrected Jesus had been seen not only by himself, by Simon Peter, by the other disciples and by James but also by more than five hundred people at one time, most of whom he claimed to be still alive when he was setting his pen to papyrus.
•  As pointed out by Dr Edwin M. Yamauchi, Associate Professor of History at Oxford, Ohio: What gives a special authority to… [Paul's] list as historical evidence is the reference to most of the five hundred brethren being still alive . St Paul says in effect, ‘If you do not believe me, you can ask them.' Such a statement in an admitted genuine letter written within thirty years of the event is almost as strong evidence as one could hope to get for something that happened nearly two thousand years ago .
•  Overall then, while there are undeniable reporting flaws regarding Jesus' claimed resurrection, and at a time distance of nearly two thousand years knowledge of exactly what happened is beyond us, the evidence that something like it actually happened is rather better than sceptics care to admit.
•  And quite incontrovertibly, belief in it spread like wildfire very soon after the crucifixion.

 

The testimony of Stephen

•  Thus the book of Acts mentions as one of the first new believers a Hellenistic Jew called Stephen.
•  Although their ancestry and religion was Jewish, Hellenistic Jews lived in the fashionable Graeco-Roman style, and spoke the Greek language.
•  From Josephus' information that Jesus' teaching ‘attracted many Jews and many of the Greeks', Stephen's adherence need not be considered out of the ordinary.
•  But whatever his background, he chose, just like Jesus had, to attack the material vanity of the Jerusalem Temple, harking back to the Isaiah text: With heaven my throne and earth my footstool, what house could you build me, what place could you make for my rest? Was not all this made by my hand ? (Isaiah 66: 1, 2)
•  Stephen then went on fearlessly to accuse the Jerusalem Temple authorities of having, in executing Jesus, murdered the great prophet foretold by Moses.
•  That same Jesus, he impassionedly declared, he could see there and then ‘ standing at God's right hand' .
•  Without in this instance even pausing to refer their prisoner to the Roman governor, those whom Stephen had attacked peremptorily stoned him to death.
•  Stephen was but the first of many who would take up this same cause — including, as we shall see, previously reticent members of Jesus' own family.

 

The power of the many

•  They would firmly profess Jesus as the Messiah or Christ predicted in the Jewish scriptures, and emphatically attest that he had come back to life again after having suffered the most public of deaths.
•  What cannot be emphasized enough is that those who made such claims had absolutely no expectation of any material gain for their outspokenness.
•  Their reward instead, as the following decades and centuries would demonstrate, was all too frequently to be faced with some form of violent death, from being stoned, to being torn to pieces by wild animals in a Roman arena, to being crucified in some yet more grotesque and painful manner.
•  The really unnerving feature is that time after time they accepted such terrors with an astonishing cheerfulness, totally confident that what they professed was truth, that death had been conquered, and that their eventual reward far outweighed whatever tortures ordinary mortals might try to inflict upon them in the meantime.
•  And few of the men and women who took up this challenge would have counted themselves natural martyrs, or anything out of the ordinary.
•  Although some were high-born, most were from every stratum of society, whether Jewish or Graeco-Roman.

 

Author's uncertainty

•  We can only conclude, therefore, that whether these were among the first five hundred-plus direct witnesses, or whether they had merely come to know one or more of those witnesses at first or second hand, something very powerful had fired into them such resoluteness of belief.
•  So, given such attestation, can the resurrection of Jesus be accepted as a real historical event?
•  And was the one-time flesh-and-blood Jesus genuinely rather more than just an ordinary man?
•  Whatever the answer, already born was a faith in such matters powerful enough to survive not only the early years of persecution, but even through to our own time.