The atheist or skeptic often has many questions for the Christian. On Resurrection Sunday, we turn the tables, and ask the unbeliever – how do you explain the empty tomb?
Indeed, if a bone of Jesus could be found, our entire faith would collapse. I’m sure the wheels of religion would continue to go on, but the true faith of Christianity with power would turn out to have been hallucinatory and the sham that the skeptics have called it all along. For Christianity rises and falls on this point – did Jesus rise from the dead?
If Jesus did not rise from the dead – then, quite simply, everything collapses. Firstly, Jesus is shown to be a liar, because He repeatedly spoke of the fact that He would rise from the dead. His followers are shown to be liars, for they proclaimed this very notion. The Bible is shown to be a fallacious book, filled with untrue accounts of the resurrection.
In fact, the very Gospel would turn out to be powerless. Salvation would be like a lifejacket with holes in it. We are more miserable than the unsaved man if the resurrection never happened, says Paul, because everything collapses.
If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ… And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
1 Corinthians 15:14-15, 17-19
But on the other hand, if the resurrection is true, then all opposition collapses. Christianity is right for worshipping Christ if He indeed rose from the dead. Christ is indeed God the Son, if He rose from the dead. There is indeed heaven and hell and eternal life, if He rose from the dead. The Bible is indeed the Word of God, if the resurrection took place. So you could consider what we remember on Easter Sunday as the very touchstone of the faith.
And so, today, we ask the skeptic, “How do you explain the empty tomb?” Let’s examine the scene that Sunday. The following facts are not in dispute: Jesus had died. He had been hastily embalmed and put in a buried tomb. A military guard had been placed around the tomb, and the entrance was sealed with the authority of Rome.
On Sunday morning though, this was the scene: The guard had fled. The seal was broken, and the stone rolled away. The grave clothes were still intact in the tomb. Most importantly, the body of Jesus was no longer in the tomb. It was gone. This fact was not disputed by those who opposed Jesus – the Pharisees and the other Jewish religious rulers. That’s extremely important.
If Jesus’ body was still in the tomb, the very tomb they secured with a military guard, then they could have simply opened the tomb, produced the body of Jesus, and squashed the religion of Christianity in its infancy. But they could not. The silence of His enemies speaks louder than words. All in Jerusalem knew that the body was no longer in the tomb. This causes us to suggest a few theories to explain these facts:
1. Perhaps the Jewish rulers stole the body
Perhaps the Jewish religious leaders came by night, told the guard to go, moved the stone, and stole the body. On Sunday, everyone thought the resurrection had taken place. This theory obviously has no hope. The leaders had no reason to steal the body. Moreover, if they had, they would have produced it to oppose Christianity, instead of keeping it to give strength to the teaching of Christ’s resurrection. This theory also cannot explain the reported appearances of Jesus.
2. Perhaps the Romans stole the body
This is hardly better than the last theory. The Romans had no incentive to promote the idea of Jesus having risen. They wanted no competition to their imposed religion of Emperor worship. And if indeed they had the body, surely the Roman empire, known for its vicious torturing of Christians, could have produced the body of Jesus for all to see.
3. Perhaps Joseph of Arimithea moved the body
Joseph was the owner of the tomb that Jesus was laid in. So perhaps Joseph, without telling anyone, went to the tomb and moved the body of Jesus to another secret location. Then, the women saw an empty tomb on Sunday, proclaimed the resurrection, and that is how it spread.
Well this theory can’t go very far either. Even though Joseph owned the tomb, he certainly had no control over the guard placed in front of the tomb. He could not have persuaded those soldiers to disobey orders. Nor could he have broken the Roman seal, placed across the tomb. Anyone breaking that seal was punished with death.
Furthermore, even if we assume Joseph somehow got the body from the tomb, once the resurrection theory started going, he surely would have stepped up to clear up the confusion. If we say he did it on purpose, are we really to believe that a man who was a disciple of Jesus would now hide His body away and allow the world’s greatest deception to descend upon the world, all the while knowing the truth?
Does this sound like a disciple of the teachings of Christ? Why would a man who wanted to at least honour Christ in His death with a tomb now ruin all that by fostering a wicked deception upon the world? It doesn’t add up, and it’s rather an improbable theory.
4. Perhaps the women went to the wrong tomb
This theory says that the women who went early on Sunday morning to finish the embalming process (as they had to do in haste on the day of his crucifixion) somehow got lost. The very tomb they laid Him in, was somehow hid from their eyes, and they managed to end up at a completely different tomb that was so similar in outward and inward appearance that they were completely fooled. They went home and spread the story of the resurrection.
Now, even if we accept the highly unlikely scenario of the women going to the wrong tomb, it does not explain how those who opposed Christianity would have said nothing. They certainly did know where the right tomb was, and, once again, could simply have produced the body to counter these claims.
5. Perhaps Jesus did not really die
This theory is sometimes called the ‘swoon theory’ because it suggests that Jesus did not really die on the cross, He merely fainted or swooned. In other words, the Romans thought He was dead when He was merely unconscious. Later, this theory says, in the cool of the tomb, Jesus woke up, and presented Himself to His disciples as alive from the dead.
Now this theory has a huge amount of problems. Firstly, the Roman soldiers were experts in crucifixion. They knew when someone was dead:
Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs…
John 19:32-33
It was for this very reason that a soldier pierced Jesus’ side. They broke the legs of the other two thieves to bring about suffocation and death. But they did not do that to Jesus – because He was already dead. The blood and water which came out of His side was evidence of a condition known as cardiac rupture, where the heart literally bursts – certainly a sign of death.
Secondly, it’s hard to believe that when the women and Joseph of Arimethea began to embalm the body of Jesus, they would not have noticed that He was still breathing. Added to that, the actual embalming process used over 25 kilograms of aromatic spices and gum, wrapped tightly around the body and glued together. If He was not already dead, being so embalmed and placed in a fairly airtight tomb will surely bring about suffocation soon.
But that is not all we have to believe to hold to this theory. Remember, skeptics deny that Jesus is God, so this is what they must believe Jesus, a mere man, was capable of doing. They must believe that Jesus wakes up in the tomb, and somehow frees Himself from the extensive linen wrappings. Having done that, He single-handedly rolls away the stone, and manages to overcome the guards by Himself. He then gets around on pierced feet, and presents Himself to His disciples as live from the dead.
How Jesus managed to look like one risen from the dead less than 72 hours after a brutal crucifixion is anyone’s guess. Furthermore, to know He had not risen and to make out that He had, means that Jesus would be denying His own ministry by telling a lie. This makes Him either a liar or a lunatic. Added to this complication, we cannot explain why the Gospel records Him as appearing, disappearing, and ascending into heaven, if all He did was walk into the room on pierced feet.
Furthermore, what happened to Him? Did he hide away somewhere and die of old age while Christians were being persecuted and killed for worshipping Him as God? Of course, this theory is nonsense from the start. Jesus was dead. The Romans knew it. The women who buried Him knew it.
6. Perhaps accounts of the risen Jesus were hallucinations
Another theory suggests that the accounts of Jesus appearing alive were all simply hallucinations. After all, it had been such an emotionally draining time for His disciples, we could surely expect some mental overload in the form of hallucinations. They wanted Him to be alive again, and so their minds produced that for them?
Let’s assume for a moment this is true. Have you ever heard of 11 men simultaneously seeing the same hallucination, speaking, eating and drinking with this hallucination?
“Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” And when He had thus spoken, He shewed them His hands and His feet. And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, He said unto them, “Have ye here any meat?” And they gave him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb. And he took it, and did eat before them.”
Luke 24:39-43
The Gospels emphasise that He was not an apparition or a figment of their imagination. His risen appearance was a simultaneous, corporate shared experience which involved the tangible actions of touching, eating and drinking. Hallucinations are usually personal experiences, not shared visions. Paul speaks of Jesus appearing to 500 people simultaneously. Was this the largest mass hallucination ever?
And once again, we come back to the empty tomb. If the Christians were simply hallucinating, and declaring their hallucinations to be fact, then the opponents of Christianity could surely have rolled that stone away, presented the embalmed body of Jesus, and silenced them. The fact that they did not shows that the empty tomb was something based in reality – a fact which the enemies of Jesus could not refute.
7. Perhaps it was all a legend
Perhaps, says this theory, the early church never taught any such thing as the resurrection. It was a teaching tacked on to Christianity years later. As time went by, the church continued to deify Jesus to the point where they claimed He had risen from the dead. The resurrection then became written into the Bible, even though it is just a legend.
Well, this theory is omitting a lot of facts – like the fact that the early church staked its very existence on the resurrection. New Testament Greek manuscripts go back as far as the early second century. Is it plausible that the legend of the resurrection had been developed and believed in just 70 or so years?
To illustrate, could someone today begin teaching that Albert Einstein died and rose again, without there being enough living eyewitnesses and historical data to completely squash such a lie? The same was true then. There were too many eyewitnesses in Jerusalem for such a myth to have developed. The resurrection appears as a taught idea far too close to the event in question for it to have been a steadily developed story. Letters and documents talking about it were circulated within 20 years of the event.
If Jesus did not rise from the dead, what was all the fuss about? Why were the Christians being eaten by lions and tortured? What were those Christians willing to die for if their leader was Himself dead? Where did the greeting of the first and second-century Christians come from? (They would say: “Christ is risen” to which the other Christian would reply, “Christ is risen indeed.”)
No, this theory omits historical facts – the birth of the church, its persecution, and the institutions of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. It omits the fact that the first-century church believed Christ would return soon. You don’t expect the return of someone who is dead, do you? It omits the fact that we have historical documents from the Romans and from the Jewish historian Josephus, which at the very least testify to the fact that the Christians claimed Jesus had risen again. No, the legend theory does not hold water.
Our final theory is still the one most referred to as the explanation for the empty tomb.
8. Perhaps the disciples stole the body
This theory was suggested by the very ones who knew that it had taken place:
Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into the city, and showed unto the chief priests all the things that were done. And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, “Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept. And if this come to the governor’s ears, we will persuade him, and secure you.” So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day.
Matthew 28:11-15
The guards themselves saw the angel of the Lord descend, and it frightened them half to death. They report the matter to the Jewish leaders, who bribe them and tell them to say that the disciples stole the body while they slept. One must ask how sleeping men would know what happened while they slept, but nevertheless, that was the story they were supposed to tell.
But let us take this theory apart. To believe this, we must believe a number of things:
Firstly, we must believe that the disciples, who just a few days earlier fled in the Garden of Gethsemane, had suddenly undergone a complete change of heart. They now received courage from who knows where, and decide to steal the body of Jesus. Let’s just stop and ask why they would do that. What could be their possible motive?
Their leader had died. They had hoped he would restore Israel politically. What possible gain could there be from stealing His body and then claiming He was risen? These are the sort of men who gravitated back to fishing, back to a simple life. These were not political zealots.
However, let us assume they did have some motive that drove them to it. We now have to assume much to believe in the success of their mission. We must believe that these Jewish peasants, who were only able to get two swords on the night of Christ’s betrayal, now were armed and prepared to take on the guard around the tomb. If it was a Roman guard, it could have been up to 100 armed soldiers. Roman soldiers were by far the best armed, armoured and trained soldiers in the world at that time. To take them on would be a tall order.
We have to assume these Jewish peasants somehow overcame them. They did not kill them, for that would have caused a whole other twist to the story. The Jews would have presented the dead bodies of the soldiers, to prove how the body of Jesus had been taken by force. But they did not do that, because no soldiers were killed. So somehow, these disciples managed to frighten off a group of armed guards. Extremely unlikely.
Well, perhaps, as the Jewish leaders suggested, they managed to get the body while the guards were sleeping. What you must understand is that Roman guards did not sleep on duty. It was one of many offences punishable by death in the Roman army. Moreover, it was unnecessary. They watched in shifts, giving time for the others to sleep with permission. They would never have all been asleep at the same time.
Even if we imagine a scenario where they had been, would they have stayed asleep during the rolling away of a stone so large in size that the women puzzled over how they would move it the next day? Do you really think that rolling away an object so massive could be done so quietly as to not rouse the sleeping soldiers? How deeply would such men have to be sleeping?
Now, let us even imagine they succeeded. Now we must believe that these men went on to hide His body, and proceeded to foist the worst deceit the world has ever seen. They presented Him as a risen Lord, and proceeded to start a whole religion based on something they knew to be a lie. Worse, they wrote epistles and letters instructing their followers to be honest and truthful. This amounts to the worst hypocrisy ever.
But here is why that is unlikely. Men of such galling hypocrisy, of such brazen deceitfulness, might do so for an ulterior motive. To get rich, to gain power, to gain prestige. These men, however, staked their very lives on this idea. They were willing to suffer, lose everything, and eventually be martyred for this fact.
Now, men will die for what they believe to be true, even if it isn’t. But no man dies for what he knows is not true. No man gives up his life for what he knows is false. We cannot explain the martyrdom of the apostles if they had in fact hidden His body away.
So, here are the facts again:
- Jesus had truly died and been buried.
- A guard had been placed at the tomb, and the tomb sealed with the authority of Rome.
- On Sunday, Jesus’ tomb was empty.
- The stone was rolled away.
- The seal was broken.
- The guard had fled.
- The grave clothes were there and intact.
None of Jesus’ enemies denied these facts, for they could not. The Jewish leaders did not steal the body. The Romans did not steal the body. Joseph of Arimithea did not steal the body or move it. The women did not go to the wrong tomb. It was not a mass hallucination. Jesus was truly dead, He did not swoon and then revive and roll the stone away Himself. The empty tomb was not a legend, but a known fact in Jerusalem, and finally, the disciples did not steal the body.
What are we left with?
Well, let’s try one last theory, and see how it fits with established facts: Jesus truly died on the cross. But, early on Sunday morning, He rose from the dead.
This explains the grave clothes that were still unwound, the sight of which caused John the apostle to believe. The descent of the angel of the Lord frightened off the guards, and the angel rolled the stone away. The angel did not roll it away to let Jesus out, but to allow the humans in!
The empty tomb and absence of the body is now solved. So is the fact that the disciples suddenly have a huge change of heart fifty days later. The very one denying Jesus three times now stands and boldly preaches Him at the Temple! They take beatings and do so with joy. How do we explain this radical heart change? How do we explain the power with which this new religion spread? Only if the resurrection was a fact testified to by eyewitnesses.
What about the new observance of baptism and the Lord’s Supper? These ordinances only make sense if there was a resurrection. There’s something else:
And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them, ready to depart on the morrow; and continued his speech until midnight.
Acts 20:7
The first day of the week? Why was the church meeting on the first day of the week? This was no isolated incident. Listen to Paul’s instruction in 1 Corinthians 16:2: “Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I come.”
Clearly, something had brought about a situation where the church was gathering on a Sunday: the first day of their week. Again, the explanation is that Jesus rose from the dead on the Sunday.
You may listen to this and agree that the evidence lies in favour of Jesus having risen from the dead. But a mere mental agreement with these facts will not help you. You need to consider what the fact of Christ’s resurrection really means, and how it impacts you. It means:
- The Bible is God’s Word
It means that the Bible is not the fallacious book that skeptics want it to be. For if Jesus rose from the dead, and Jesus called the Bible truth, then it is truth. Jesus said in John 17:17, “Thy word is truth.” The empty tomb speaks of the truth of the Word. - Jesus is Who He said He was
Jesus staked His very credentials on the resurrection. He said that the main sign of His identity would be the sign of the prophet Jonah – who was in the great fish three days and three nights – a picture of His resurrection. Who did Jesus say He was? He said, “I and the Father are one.” - Jesus claimed to be God the Son, and proved it by being able to take up His own life again. You cannot kill God. Jesus willingly gave up His life, and took it up again. You want physical evidence that Jesus is God – it is in Jerusalem. It is the absence of the body of the One we called Jesus Christ.
- It means you must decide about Jesus
If Jesus is not merely a legend, and if the resurrection took place, then you cannot ignore Him. You cannot merely say that Jesus was a good historical man. He did not claim to be that. He claimed to be God. Anyone who claims to be God is not a good man. He is either a liar or a lunatic. Unless, He is God. - In which case, you must either bow the knee before Him and receive Him as the only way of salvation, or reject Him wholesale. He Himself said in John 14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”