Gunning for God (33 page)

1. The Jewish authorities: the first witnesses to the fact of the empty tomb

According to the Gospel of Matthew, the first people to tell the world that the tomb of Jesus was empty were the Jewish authorities, and not the Christians at all! They started a story circulating in Jerusalem to the effect that the disciples had stolen the body while the guards slept:

Some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place. And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers and said, “Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day.
⁵⁷

The question arises: is Matthew’s story authentic? Some have suggested that it is a late myth, invented long after the event. But that explanation is unlikely. Matthew’s Gospel, in which the story is related, is by common consent the most characteristically Jewish Gospel in the New Testament. It bears every mark of having been written for circulation among Jews. It was probably published in the late
AD
60s. By that time the facts about the crucifixion and burial of Christ would have been widely circulated in Jewish synagogues in that part of the Middle East. If the story were a late invention concocted by Matthew, it would immediately have been seen as a recent fiction. Matthew certainly would not have risked telling such a story to Jewish communities.

There is, therefore, no reason to suppose that this story is not true. The question now arises: why would the Jewish authorities have put their money into circulating such a story? The only reason could have been to achieve a preemptive strike. They knew from the guards that the tomb was empty. They could see immediately that the Christians would publish this, and as an explanation they would say that Jesus was risen from the dead. So the authorities decided to strike first, tell the story that the tomb was empty, and then give their explanation of it to counter the force of the inevitable Christian explanation. However, the very fact that they circulated such a story is proof that the tomb was empty.

It must have been much to their embarrassment, therefore, when (contrary to their logical expectation) the Christians did not say anything publicly for another seven weeks.
⁵⁸
During those seven weeks of Christian silence, however, the rumour of the empty tomb would have been filling Jerusalem.

It is not hard to imagine that many in Jerusalem perceived how thin the guards’ story was. It was scarcely conceivable that the Jewish authorities would entrust such a highly sensitive mission to the kind of men who would fall asleep. In any case, if they were asleep, how did they know what had happened, let alone identify the disciples as the culprits? The story was evidently a product of bewilderment and desperation. As propaganda coming from the enemies of Christ, the circulation of this story is historical evidence of the highest quality that
the empty tomb of Jesus was a fact.

Furthermore, if the tomb had not been empty, the authorities would have had no difficulty in producing the body of Jesus, demonstrating conclusively that no resurrection had happened. When the apostles subsequently proclaimed that he had risen, they would have met with nothing but derision, and Christianity could never have got started.

Alternatively, if they had had the slightest evidence that the tomb was empty because the disciples had removed the body, then they had the authority and the forces to hunt down the disciples, arrest them, and charge them with tomb-robbing, which at the time was a very serious offence.

An interesting side light is thrown on all of this by an inscription, found in the nineteenth century, dating to
AD
30—40. It contains the so-called Edict of Nazareth, and warns that robbery from, or desecration of tombs was an offence carrying the death penalty. Historians think that something very unusual must have happened around that time to cause such a severe edict to be issued — the most likely thing being the circumstances surrounding Joseph’s empty tomb.
⁵⁹

2. The Christian disciples: their explanation of the empty tomb

We are now at the point in our investigation where we have an empty tomb to be explained. The disciples claimed that Jesus had risen, but could they have been deceived about that? What if somebody had stolen the body away without the disciples’ knowing, and now had deceived them into thinking that there had been a resurrection? But who would have been interested in doing that? In our discussion of the moral character of the disciples, we have seen why it could not have been any one of the friends of Christ; and the last thing the enemies of Christ wanted was for anything to happen that could lead people to believe in a resurrection. After all, it was for this very reason they had ensured that the tomb was guarded. The idea, then, that the disciples were deceived, has no explanatory power whatsoever; especially when it comes to the evidence that they advanced for positively believing that Jesus had risen; and this we must now consider.

3. The people involved

It is clear from the Gospel records that the events at the cross and tomb of Jesus involved several groups of women.

Matthew says: “There were also many women there, looking on from a distance, who had followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to him, among whom were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.”
⁶⁰

Mark says: “There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. When he was in Galilee, they followed him and ministered to him, and there were also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem.”
⁶¹

John specifically records that the mother of Jesus and three other women were standing by the cross — Jesus’ mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.
⁶²

It is natural to presume that the three women specially distinguished in the descriptions were the same in each case, having come to support Mary the mother of Jesus in her hour of acute distress. John Wenham, in his detailed study of the events surrounding the resurrection,
⁶³
points out that this would mean that Jesus’ mother’s sister was called Salome, and was the wife of Zebedee and mother of James and John (the author of the fourth Gospel). Mary the wife of Clopas was the mother of James the Younger and of Joses (or Joseph).
⁶⁴

From this we see that between these women there are family relationships, which become important for our purposes when we remember that it was Passover-time at Jerusalem. The city would be crowded with pilgrims, who would naturally lodge with relatives wherever possible. One very important detail here is the fact that, from the cross, Jesus explicitly instructed John to look after his mother, Mary; and we read that he took her at once to his own home.
⁶⁵
In all probability this was in Jerusalem, possibly not far from the house of the High Priest, Caiaphas. Presumably John’s mother, Salome, and her husband, Zebedee, were staying there also, along with Peter, who, as John records, accompanied John to the tomb on Easter morning.
⁶⁶

But clearly other women were involved as well; and in all probability one of them was Joanna,
⁶⁷
the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward.
⁶⁸
She was a wealthy woman who, as the wife of a very senior civil servant in Herod’s Court, would have been living in the Hasmonean Palace in Jerusalem, where Herod and his retinue stayed on their visits to the city. Joanna’s name is linked with that of Susanna;
⁶⁹
and it is possible that she, too, was one of the unnamed women in the crucifixion narrative.

What about the other apostles? Where were they? Just before the Feast of Passover they had been staying in Bethany.
⁷⁰
This was a village just over the Mount of Olives, about 3 km from Jerusalem and therefore within walking distance. The arrest of Christ took place in a garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives: a garden that may well have belonged to the family of John Mark, the author of the second Gospel. We read that, after the arrest of Christ, all the disciples forsook Him and fled.
⁷¹
The most likely place for them to flee to was back over the Mount of Olives to the comparative safety of Bethany. As far as we know, John and Peter were the only two to remain in the city.

We see, therefore, that there were different groups of people staying in a variety of locations: some in Jerusalem, and some outside the city. These facts assume great importance when we come to study the events of Easter morning, as detailed in the Gospel narratives. The narratives are often compressed; and one might be tempted to think that they contain contradictory elements, if unaware of the complexities of the situation, and the fact that there were different groups of people going to and coming from the tomb of Christ, not only from different directions and by different routes, but also at different times. Matthew’s brief account has telescoped these features, as we shall later see.

4. Physical evidence found at the tomb: the grave-cloths of Christ

The Gospel accounts tell us that a number of women disciples of Christ came early to the tomb, to embalm his body more thoroughly than Joseph and Nicodemus had done.
⁷²
Incidentally, their intention shows again that resurrection was the last thing they were expecting.
⁷³

According to Mark, Mary Magdalene, the mother of James the Younger and Joseph (the “other Mary”, see Matthew 27:61, 28:1), and Salome, had bought spices the previous evening at sundown (
after the Sabbath was past
).
⁷⁴
Wenham makes the very plausible suggestion
⁷⁵
that Mark’s account is told from the perspective of these three women; whereas Luke’s account, which records how certain women returned from the burial and prepared spices and ointments and then rested on the Sabbath, is most likely to have been written from the perspective of Joanna, the wife of Herod’s Steward. As a wealthy Jewess she would have had her own store of spices and ointments, and so would not have had to wait, as the other groups of women did, until the Sabbath ended, for the shops to open to enable her to buy them.

As Wenham says, it is likely that these two groups of women arrived at the tomb separately. The first group — Mary Magdalene, the “other Mary”, and Salome — arrived at the tomb first. To their astonishment, they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, and the tomb empty! One of them, Mary (perhaps without entering the tomb), ran at once to tell the apostles Peter and John. Mary did not speak of a resurrection, but simply presumed that the body of Jesus had been removed.
⁷⁶
Archaeologists point out that tomb-robbing was a very common activity in the ancient world — in ancient Egypt, for example. Thieves would show particular interest in the tombs of the wealthy, as the cloths in which the corpse was wrapped and the spices used for embalming were valuable, re-sellable items; to say nothing of the jewellery and other possessions that might accompany the corpse. Now Jesus was not wealthy, but Joseph was; so Mary may have thought that tomb-robbers had been active.

Peter and John ran to the tomb. John got there first, stooped, and looked inside. Immediately he noticed something strange: the linen grave-cloths that had been wrapped around the body of Jesus were still there. Stranger still, they were lying just as they had been when his body was in them, but the body had gone. Peter caught up with John, who must therefore have been the faster runner (one of those little details that give the narrative the ring of eyewitness writing). Both of them went into the tomb and saw what was possibly the strangest sight of all: the cloths which had been wrapped around Jesus’ head were lying on the slightly elevated part of the ledge within the tomb; and, though his head was no longer in them, they were still wrapped round as if it had been, except that they had probably collapsed flat. The effect on John was powerful:
he saw and believed
.
⁷⁷
This does not merely mean that he now believed what Mary had said: from his first glimpse into the tomb it was obvious that the body was missing. Now he believed that something very mysterious indeed must have happened. It looked as if in some way the body of Jesus had come right through the grave-cloths and left them exactly where they were when the body was inside. John had no doubt that he was seeing the evidence of a miracle!

What was it about the grave-cloths that carried such convincing power? The obvious question for him, or for anyone else, to ask is, how did they get to be like that? Tomb-robbers would not have taken the corpse, and left the valuable linen and spices. And even if, for some unfathomable reason, they had wanted only the corpse, they would have had no reason whatever for wrapping all the cloths round again as if they were still round a body, except, perhaps, to give the impression that the tomb had not been disturbed. But if they wanted to give that impression they would surely have done better to roll the stone back into its place! But here we meet another matter: how could any tomb-robber have removed the stone when the guard was there? The noise would have been considerable. The rolled-away stone was a complete give away that the tomb had been disturbed. It was an open invitation to come and have a look inside.