That Empty Tomb
For over 40 years, since the publication of the best-selling book The Passover Plot by Hugh Schonfield in 1965, I have been avidly reading “Jesus books,” i.e., books that attempt to offer an historical analysis of the central question–what do we really know about Jesus and how do we know it? Over the decades I have collected most of them and I often found myself with a new book in hand, flipping through it, and reading the final chapters first, anxious to see how the author would deal with what I found to be one of the most fascinating questions regarding the historical Jesus–the empty tomb.
Schonfield’s book really centered on that issue. He argued that Jesus “plotted” his crucifixion and his subsequent survival, and with the help of several loyal supporters was taken away to recover from his wounds, thus accounting for the tomb being empty. I well rememer the absolute stir of controversy Schonfield’s book caused. It was recently issued in a 40th anniversary edition and if any of you have never read it I would highly recommend it. I am not at all persuaded by his theory of the “Passover plot,” but the book is a thrill to read and contains much good history and lots of provocative ideas. Schonfield was a bit of a maverick scholar, but he was a trained academic and one always full of provocative ideas and new and creative interpretations of data. I corresponded with him over a period of a few years until his death in 1988. I might mention that although The Passover Plot was by far his most successful book, of the 40 or so works that he published, the one I would most highly recommend for its enduring value is the sequel titled Those Incredible Christians.
I should add here that Schonfield was a great admirer of Jesus and considered him a hero for representing and forwarding the advancement of Israel’s Messianic hopes and dreams. In fact, late in life, Schonfield was instrumental in forming a society, now called The World Trust Service, dedicated to a recovery of a “Messianic vision,” of a “Servant nation,” that would lead the world toward peace and justice. It is still in operation today.
I mention The Passover Plot because for me it was a kind of “coming of age.” It was an introduction, on a popular level, to some of the alternative approaches to the historical Jesus and Christian Origins to the rather fundamentalist version of things I had been exposed to as a child growing up, and through my undergraduate years in college.
But back to the empty tomb. What I appreciated about Schonfield is that he believed historians had to take seriously the “empty tomb.” By far most critical scholars have taken the position that the story in our earliest gospel, in Mark 16 (which forms the core upon which Matthew, Luke, and John are based), where women come to Jesus’ tomb early Sunday morning and find it empty of his body, has no historical basis and was concocted long after the events in order to bolster the preaching of Christians that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Thus to seriously discuss “how the tomb became empty” would be a worthless enterprise–since the whole thing was made up. Some have even argued that Jesus was not buried at all, but that his body was left on the cross to decay as a final shame inflicted by the Romans upon a potential rebel.
I have never found such arguments convincing. It seems to me that the fundamental core story of the early Sunday morning visit by the women followers of Jesus to his tomb has a ring of authenticity. I believe that Jesus was really dead, and that he was hastily put into that garden tomb nearby just as the sun was setting and Passover drew near. I am further convinced that the women who visited the tomb on Sunday morning, with the intention of completing the rites of Jewish burial and putting Jesus in a permanent resting place, were shocked to find the tomb empty. What I question are the stories of the extensive “appearances” of Jesus that day in Jerusalem to Peter, John, and the rest of his Disciples, and over the next few days, as reported by Luke and John.
Mark has the tomb empty, but no appearances or sightings of Jesus at all (the original ending is at 16:8). He does believe that Jesus is raised from the dead, but in his story the women are explicitly told that the Disciples will meet Jesus in Galilee. Matthew also lacks these stories of appearances in Jerusalem that day and over the next weeks. Instead he records a mountain top experience in Galilee, one that sounds very similar to the visionary experience of the Transfiguration, where some of the Eleven disciples were convinced, and others doubted–that they had really seen Jesus (Matthew 28:16).
What this tells me is that the earliest traditions about the empty tomb and the resurrection of Jesus had nothing about these Jerusalem appearances to Peter, John, James, and the Twelve. Instead their focus was on “seeing Jesus in Galilee.” These Jerusalem stories seem to come to us from Paul, who records them in 1 Corinthians 15. They are then expanded into narrative forms in Luke and John. I find it very hard to believe that Mark and Matthew knew such stories and simply left them out. They do not include them, if they have even heard them, because they do not consider them a part of the early and most authentic tradition. It is Luke, the great advocate of Paul and his mission and message, who first fleshes out for us a whole set of narratives about appearances to Peter, various other disciples, and the Twelve, in Jerusalem.
For that reason, it seems to me, our focus should really be on Galilee, since both Mark and Matthew, our earliest non-Pauline witnesses, know nothing other than this tradition. John also knows of this Galilee tradition, and yet it is only in his “appended” chapter 21–after he has basically closed out his story in 20:30-31, with its Jerusalem stories, that he mentions it. I think this is very important and most telling–particularly since that final chapter 21 of John has the disciples returning to their fishing businesses in Galilee, which makes no sense at all if they have been eating and hanging out with the risen Jesus in Jerusalem for weeks following the crucifixion. What we have in John is a precious bit of independent tradition, that goes well with Mark and Matthew, regarding the recovery of “faith” in Galilee.
But back to the empty tomb. I think the essential key to understanding why the tomb was empty is to realize that there is no evidence whatsoever that this tomb belonged to Joseph of Arimathea. It is amazing to me how strongly traditions can be built on a thread. Mark, our earliest Gospel does not mention this as Joseph’s tomb, though he has Joseph burying Jesus, nor does Luke or John! If Joseph was the owner it is inconcievable that they would leave this out. Only Matthew tries to make this connection, and it is clearly an addition of his to his Markan source. His interest is in showing prophecy fulfilled, namely that Joseph was a “rich man,” so that if Jesus is put in his tomb it would be a fulfillment of Isaiah 53 where the Suffering Servant is buried with a rich man. What John adds to the tradition sheds even further light on this matter. John is very good on geography, place, and location. He knows details that the Markan/Synoptic tradition simply lacks. John says that the tomb in which Jesus was hastily buried just before the Passover began was “in a garden, near the place of crucifixion.” In other words he makes clear that this was a burial of necessity, of opportunity. To imagine Joseph of Arimathea just “happening” to have a family tomb nearby is incredulous, and since we can clearly see how and why Matthew alone makes this connection, there is no reason to give it any veracity.
So what we are left with is quite interesting. What this means is that we would expect the tomb to be empty! Jesus was hastily put in this tomb with no time for carrying out full and proper burial rites just to hold things until after the Sabbath. It was not a tomb that belonged to anyone in the movement or the group. The core followers, after all, were from Galilee, not Jerusalem. They could hardly carry a corpse to a home or guesthouse, nor could they just leave it in the open. Since an unfinished tomb was nearby it makes good sense that Jesus’ body was put there and a stone was moved to block the entrance, keeping the corpse safe from jackels and other predators. So, the point is, this tomb was never intended to be a final resting place for Jesus, so we would expect his body to be moved in a relatively short period of time–as soon as arrangement could be made for permanent burial.
Whether Jesus was subsequently and permanently buried in the Jerusalem area, or as I think might be more likely, in the Galilee, where he was from, we will perhaps never know. What we can know, however, is that the entire Jerusalem tradition is likely late and based on Paul, and written by Luke and John in the last decades of the 1st century, when all those involved were dead. Mark, in contrast, can be dated around 65 AD, before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. That he knows nothing of these Jerusalem appearances to the apostles is most telling.
I realize that many of my critics, coming from an evangelical Christian persuasion, have asked–what about all the appearances, what about the sealing of the tomb, what about the earthquake, and the testimony of all those eyewitness? How can you simply reject that out of hand? The answer is a simple one–Mark, our earliest gospel, knows nothing of such things! They only come to us as late embellishments of the tradition, written in the 80s and 90s AD, when Christianity has begun to solidify into its Pauline contours. And further, the Galilee tradition is early and grounded in Mark, Matthew, and the addition to John. We should give it priority. We will never know what actually happened in Galilee but what we can be sure of is that the little discouraged and disheartened group, having returned to their homes and business, found a renewal of their faith in Jesus and his cause living on–despite his death. To insist that that faith depended upon the corpse of Jesus walking out of the tomb and making all sorts of appearances in Jerusalem, and then rising off the Mt. of Olives into the clouds and disappearing the the heavens–well that is clearly the stuff of legend and mythology.
When the group returned to Jerusalem for Shavuot or Pentecost, approximately seven weeks after the crucifixion, they apparently have reconstituted themselves, with James at their head, and a strong commitment to carry on the work of their beloved Teacher Jesus, whose spirit they surely felt as if he were still with them. I am convinced that this is the most credible historical explanation of the empty tomb, and it does the best job of accounting for the ways in which the movement survived, went on, and maintained its vitality. And because it is credible, in the end, for rational people, it can be more inspiring than stories of revived corpses and bodies ascending the heaven.