Was Empty Tomb of Jesus a Legend?

Jesus was supposedly buried after his crucifixion in a tomb on Friday which was found empty on Sunday morning.

PAUL NEVER MENTIONED EMPTY TOMB

The earliest Christian writer and in many ways the main apostle of Jesus authorised to persuade people that Jesus was from God, Paul never mentioned the empty tomb despite his stress on the death and resurrection of Jesus. He said that we are buried in baptism and rise like Christ. But that could still be said if the new body takes only a few cells from the old leaving the dead one lying there. He stated in Romans that we are buried by baptism into Jesus’ death not his tomb. He said that flesh and blood cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven and that Jesus had a spiritual body since the resurrection which makes a liar of Luke’s story that Jesus ate fish after his resurrection. The only time Paul says that Jesus was buried is in 1 Corinthians 15. There buried is just an incidental detail for Paul’s real concern is saying that Jesus died and rose and was seen. So Paul may have just assumed that Jesus was buried for to him it is nothing important. The burial would not be necessary to our salvation and the salvific events are the ones Paul is concentrating on. It is also interesting that since Paul says Jesus was buried and rose on the third day he may mean that Jesus rose the third day after burial and could have just been a pile of bones by the time he was buried.

Paul taught the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as the heart of the Christian gospel and the truths on which all the Christian doctrines depend. Paul taught in scripture in Galatians 1 that even if he and the apostles and angels from Heaven changed the gospel in any way they were to be treated as anathema or accursed (shunned) plainly admitting that he was more concerned about dogma than anything and even God wasn’t allowed to contradict him! For Paul the resurrection was not important but believing in it was! Is he and the other apostles who tolerated this nonsense really worth believing when they said Jesus rose? All they cared about was the legend.

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HISTORY OR LEGEND?

Some scholars tend to believe that the empty tomb is historical for the following reasons.

REASON 1. When Joseph of Arimathea was named as responsible for the burial it must have happened for he was an important member of the Jewish religion and nobody could get away with lying about him.

ANSWER. The gospels were hidden. There is no evidence that anybody who would have known saw the gospels. We must remember that the Jesus generation was largely wiped out in the disasters that followed Jesus’ death. And there is no evidence contrary to the idea that Joseph was picked to be the mythical benefactor of Jesus simply because he vanished at that time and was out of the way so he could be lied about. The burial would have been secretive for only that would make sense in the situation if the gospels are true so even if Joseph had denied having buried Jesus he would not have been believed. What if he was telling the truth? It is likely that Joseph did vanish at the time for he had come out of the closet as a follower of Jesus and would have been lynched by those who would have thought him to be in infiltrator.

Joseph must have lied to the Jews for the gospel says he was a secret disciple.

REASON 2. The tomb would have been well-known.

ANSWER. This is pure speculation. There was no way Jesus could or would have been buried in a tomb that might attract scores of pilgrims. We have no evidence that the tomb was never treated as a shrine. Christians say it would have been had Jesus been buried in it but it would have been a better shrine if Jesus had risen there. It seems there were fifty graves in Palestine at that time that were visited as shrines.

REASON 3. The suggestion that Jesus had risen while his body lay in the tomb would have been preposterous to the Jews.

ANSWER. They knew to expect the unexpected with Jesus according to the gospels so that would have made many of them open. The reason implies that Jews were fanatically devoted to the idea that dead bodies had to come back to life. That is silly for most believers in God today do not hold to God that deeply. Paul certainly believed that the physical body did not need to be restored to life. He refutes the reason.

REASON 4. Mark saying the empty tomb was found on the first day of the week indicates an early origin of the story for the first day of the week was an early expression.

ANSWER. Ugh!

Mark ended abruptly after we read that the women were told by an angel that Jesus rose and he was to appear in Galilee. The gospel says the women told nothing to anyone. If it deliberately ends there on a note of suspense that means the gospeller discovered what had happened by revelation from God and not the women. If so, this was possibly the first time the empty tomb story appeared. If the women did not tell the apostles or disciples to go to Galilee then its possible that nobody ever saw the risen Jesus.

REASON 5. The Church says that women were said to have found the tomb empty and seen the risen Jesus and since women were not regarded as valid witnesses their story must be true and the gospels didn’t make their testimony up.

ANSWER. If you invent the story of an empty tomb among the first century Jews, you have to invent women to discover the tomb. The fact that John says Jesus was laid in the tomb according to Jewish tradition which means he would have been anointed already and the women coming to anoint him on Sunday morning according to the other gospels show that the women were up to no good for they lied about what they were doing at the tomb. Or maybe it is just one of the inconsistencies that emerge when stories are lies and cannot be put straight. You could say the women were invented because the anointing wasn’t needed.

The story of the women would have had to have been invented because if it had been men people would be more likely to believe that the men stole the body. It was a thing that men would have been expected to do.

The women were reportedly the only ones present at the empty tomb and who might have been the only witnesses the Matthew gospeller could have had any confidence in for he did not trust the guards. Christians reject stories of visions as enough for most Christians reject the visions of Medjugorje so it follows that the real evidence for the resurrection must come from the women being able to prove that a physical miracle of a body coming back to life happened. The apostles came by later and so cannot count as witnesses of this – and yet the religion insanely claims that they are THE AUTHORITIVE witnesses and that is why they are special. Christianity then has to fall back on the testimony of women who are never even said to have been reliable. So Christianity is just superstition for how do we know that the women did not see Jesus being stolen from the tomb but tried to cover it up with a resurrection story or the story that Jesus vanished in the tomb for the destruction of his body by God was the prelude to his spiritual resurrection? If the gospellers believed that women were unreliable witnesses and nevertheless made witnesses of them then were they trying to get it across to the Church that the whole story was a pile of nonsense? Christians argue that the absurdity of men who rejected female testimony using these women proves the story true. In other words, the more incredible a story is the more likely it is to be true! We will believe anything if we follow that principle.

The John Gospel says that the Samaritan woman was regarded as a valid witness for Jesus among the Samaritans who were just as sexist as the Jews (John 4:39). The Mishna says women can be witnesses under certain circumstances like when there are no men ones (Yebamoth 16:17; Ketuboth 2:5; Eduyoth 3:6). The Old Testament speaks of women like Deborah and Ruth and Esther who were valid and trusted witnesses so only heretical Jews comprising a minority among the Sadducees who regarded the Torah alone as scripture could have disparaged female testimony. It is simply a lie that the anomaly of women being witnesses means the story is true. Moreover, the story does not present them as legal witnesses at all and it was the tradition law that had reservations about women but not all agreed. Jesus himself said that women are forbidden to divorce their husbands indicating that they were considered to be valid witnesses by many and he was certainly saying a woman’s testimony was valid here. The laws that are supposed to ban female witnesses are really against women being used as witnesses when male witnesses would do but with male witnesses they are okay.

If women were no good as witnesses if men saw the empty tomb then the women are a strong indication that no man saw the tomb empty and that the story of the disciples seeing the tomb was made up. The women were included as witnesses implying that the gospels rejected any tradition that women could not testify which makes any argument that since women were made the first witnesses though women were not considered to be any good as witnesses therefore women must have really seen what they said, to be wholly tripe.

We know that John’s claim that the disciples actually went into the tomb is untrue for Roman law would have crushed them for that. (Unless you want to believe that they had obtained authorisation from Pilate which was why even if they stole the body nobody could do a thing about it for it was technically not stealing. This would explain why we do not hear of anybody being framed and punished for the theft. The Christians like to keep people from thinking that the body could have been legally stolen and all their apologetics centre around the notion that to take Jesus had to be theft.)

There is no evidence whatsoever apart from testimony, that is refuted by Paul who did not need the empty tomb in his system but who in listing the evidence for the resurrection denied the testimony of the women by omitting them, that there was an empty tomb.

The testimony of women then was considered to be better than Christians would have you think (Historical Evidence and the Empty Tomb Story, A Reply to William Lane Craig, Jeffrey Jay Lowder). The fact that the gospels were written for Jews in a Gentile culture that regarded women highly and even as potential goddesses and of course for the Gentiles means that nobody would have had a problem inventing women witnesses

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THERE WAS NO TOMB

Jesus could not have been buried in a fancy tomb. The Gospels lie that he was buried in a new tomb belonging to the rich. Criminals were dumped in a common grave. Sometimes Jewish rulers did let friends of the deceased take the corpses but only after a year on the dump. Then the bones were allowed to be buried in the family tomb (page 105, The Womb and the Tomb). It is thought that Jesus was a different case because it was Pilate that had condemned him to death and not the Jews. But this overlooks the fact that it was Jews who asked for Jesus’ body. They had to obey the Jewish leaders and would not have been permitted to bury Jesus in a tomb. Pilate might have permitted them to have the body but he did not command anything. The rest of it was up to the Jews and they would have wanted Jesus in the dump.

The Romans dumped the people they put to death. This was the law. The Jews feared not being buried above anything else so leaving criminals unburied proved a good deterrent to Jewish rebels against Rome which was to Rome’s advantage.

Mark says that Pilate permitted Joseph of Arimathea to take the body of Christ. That would have been admitting to the world that he and his men had executed a man they believed to be innocent. It would have been scandalous and a booster to those who wanted to overthrow Rome by fomenting hatred and trouble and they would think that Rome was starting to be scared of them so it would be a good time to attack. If the gospels are correct to say that the Jews forced Pilate to destroy Jesus then there was no way Pilate could have let Jesus have a proper burial.

Paul unmistakably did not believe either that there was an empty tomb or that the resurrection was the reason it was empty. He said that Jesus was buried but he had a very spiritual concept of the resurrection so Jesus could have risen in a semi-material body made from some elements of the old one that would not be missed. He had to deal with Christian disbelievers in the resurrection. He argues that the resurrection visions are real because if they are not we are lost and our faith is good for nothing in 1 Corinthians (15:14). He would not use such an emotional argument devoid of logic and evidence unless he was desperately stuck and there was nothing else. He does not say that the visions are real because of the empty tomb which he would have had to do for his argument for the reality of the visions is illogical and silly. He lists the evidence for the resurrection and leaves it out. He is either saying Jesus rose leaving the body behind or that somebody stole the body.

He says that the body is the seed of the resurrection body so he does not care about what became of Jesus’ crucified body.

Perhaps Paul knew that an empty tomb has nothing to do with proving the resurrection or making it probable but only makes it possible.

It would appear that there must have been a tomb for if it had been made up, stories about how Jesus was seen leaving it would have been invented. But since the Christians would have been suspected of stealing the body why should we expect such stories? But in any case they would have been told and we just can’t hear about it now.

There is no evidence that tombs had round stones that could be rolled back like the tomb of Jesus had. Only the tombs of the extremely rich had these. The rolling stones came in after 70 AD (Craig’s Empty Tomb and Habermas on the Post-Resurrection Appearances of Jesus). There is no evidence for the objection made by Christians that the word for rolled in gospel may simply denote moved (ibid).

Second Peter states that the apostles did not give out cleverly devised myths when they revealed to the world the power and the coming of the Lord Jesus but were eyewitnesses to a visionary event, the transfiguration, that revealed the majesty of Jesus (1:16). In other words, a vision verified the power and coming of Jesus. It doesn't hint that it means the second coming of Christ. It just says coming. The vision he recounts said nothing or indicated nothing about a second coming. Second Peter is plainly saying that Jesus' power and coming had to be revealed to the apostles in a vision. He was not heard of before. This supports the idea that there was no Jesus known of until some people claimed to be having visions of this being who claimed to have been crucified and died and rose again. The empty tomb then was unknown.

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Conclusion

The account of the empty tomb of Jesus is impossible to believe. It is pure legend. It is too much tripe to be anything different.

FURTHER READING

Christianity for the Tough-Minded, Ed John Warwick Montgomery, Bethany Fellowship Inc, Minneapolis, 1973

Conspiracies and the Cross, Timothy Paul Jones, Front Line, A Strang Company, Florida, 2008

Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol 1, Josh McDowell, Alpha, Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1995

He Walked Among Us, Josh McDowell and Bill Wilson, Alpha, Cumbria, 2000

Jesus: The Evidence, Ian Wilson, Pan, London, 1985

The First Easter, What Really Happened? HJ Richards, Collins/Fount Glasgow, 1980

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Corgi, London, 1982

The Jesus Event, Martin R Tripole SJ, Alba House, New York, 1980

The Jesus Inquest, Charles Foster, Monarch Books, Oxford, 2006

The Passover Plot, Hugh Schonfield, Element, Dorset, 1996

The Resurrection Factor, Josh McDowell, Alpha, Scripture Press Foundation, Bucks, 1993

The Resurrection of Jesus, Pinchas Lapide, SPCK, London, 1984

The Unauthorised Version, Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992

The Second Messiah, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, Arrow, London, 1998

The Turin Shroud is Genuine, Rodney Hoare, Souvenir Press, London, 1998HoarHo

The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press, New York, 1973

The Womb and the Tomb, Hugh Montifiore, Fount – HarperCollins, London, 1992

Verdict on the Empty Tomb, Val Grieve Falcon, London, 1976

Who Moved the Stone? Frank Morison, OM Publishing, Cumbria, 1997

THE WWW

Still Standing on Sinking Sand, Farrell Till,

www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1997/1/1sink97.html

Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection Story by Richard Carrier

www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/index.shtml

A Naturalistic Account of the Resurrection, Brian Marston

http://www.phlab.missouri.edu/~c570529/PhilosoStop/resurrection.html

This site argues that somebody unknown stole the body to stop the apostles stealing it or venerating it and lost it and argues that the witnesses of the risen Jesus were lying because no effort was made by them to preserve first hand reports of what was seen and how and when. It argues that since the apostles had followed Jesus at great personal sacrifice and now he was dead they invented the resurrection to save face. Also the inclination of people at the time to believe in dying and rising gods may have overwhelmed them and made them lie to themselves that Jesus had risen. He answers the objection that a lie like that would need a large-scale conspiracy for lots of lies start off with a small group of people and if the lies are attractive other people will believe them. Plus he says that Jesus could have rigged events to make sure he would fulfil Old Testament prophecy so the Christians should not be saying the gospel story is true for it fits old prophecy. I would add that owing to the total absence of evidence that Jesus was nailed to the cross and the fact that the gospels never say any of his friends were close to the cross that Jesus might have been tied to it and the Christians later assumed he was nailed because the psalm seemed to say so.

The Case For Christianity Examined: Truth or Lies?

www.askwhy.co.uk/awstruth/ChristianCase.html

Historical Evidence and the Empty Tomb Story, A Reply to William Lane Craig by Jeffrey Jay Lowder

www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/empty.html

The Resurrection, Steven Carr

www.bowness.demon/co.uk/resr.htm

Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? Dan Barker versus Mike Horner

www.ffrf.org/debates/barker_horner.html

Craig’s Empty Tomb and Habermas on the Post-Resurrection Appearances of Jesus

www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/indef/4e.html

Did a Rolling Stone Close Jesus’ Tomb by Amos Kloner

www.bib-arch.org/barso99/roll1.html

Who Moved the Stone? Review by Steven Carr,

www.bowness.demon.co.uk/stone.htm This tells us that if you assume that two contradictory books are true in all they say and try to make them fit you will manage it but the result will be contrived. You are really still assuming they are true and have no proof for it. This observation should be a warning to the fundamentalist Christians who say there are no contradictions in the Bible. They have no faith in the Bible at all for they are only assuming it is right. If they really believed, they would not need to work out and produce laughable far-fetched ways of reconciling Bible contradictions. They wouldn’t do that with anything else but the Bible.

Morison claims that Peter’s clever and unbiased mind was behind the first Gospel, that of Mark. But Morison only assumes this for there is no evidence that the gospel is clever and unbiased or that Peter had much if anything at all to do with it. Morison then tries to make out that the claim of Luke that the apostles waited seven weeks before saying Jesus had risen from the dead is too detrimental to the evidence for the resurrection to be true. In other words, the evidence for the resurrection is right and any evidence against it is wrong! That is bias if I ever seen it. He then makes out that these things which undermine the pro-resurrection evidence prove it happened. So the evidence against the resurrection makes the evidence for it stronger! How ridiculous.

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