How Can We Know That Jesus Christ Rose from the Dead?
The empty tomb of Jesus Christ is a stark and undeniable fact, even acknowledged by early critics. If Jesus had merely claimed to be the divine Son of God and the Savior of the world, we might have been able to dismiss His claim. But the remarkable testimony of His followers—and at least one former enemy, the Apostle Paul—is that Jesus physically rose from the grave.
If this is true, then Jesus’ claims have the strongest possible validation. Imagine meeting someone who claims to be the Son of God and to have come from heaven so that everyone may know His Father. Naturally, you would seek proof. Suppose He tells you that He will prove it by dying and rising again after three days. And then He actually does it! Wouldn’t that convince you?
You might say, “Okay, that would be very convincing. But we weren’t there. How can we know that Jesus Christ rose from the dead? Could there be another explanation?” There are two main lines of evidence: the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus after the resurrection. Here, we will focus on the former.
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The Mystery of the Empty Tomb
According to the Gospels, Jesus Christ was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin. The burial was done quickly to be completed before the Sabbath. The tomb was sealed with a large stone. Then, early on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and several other women went to the tomb to apply more spices and perfumes to the body.
They found the tomb empty and encountered an angel who told them that Jesus had risen. The women told Jesus’ male disciples, who also went to the tomb to confirm that it was empty (Luke 24:12, 24; John 20:3-8). Later, Jesus physically appeared to His disciples and spent forty days talking and eating with them on various occasions.
These are the records of the four Gospels. The question is whether they are true. When several facts are considered together, a strong case is made for the empty tomb.
Read more : Was Jesus Christ married? Why do some people believe he had a wife?
Jesus Christ Was Buried
The fact that Jesus Christ was given a formal burial is almost inevitable. Paul’s statement that Christ “was buried” is part of a confession that Paul received as part of the apostles’ teachings and passed on to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:3-4).
Given Paul’s meetings with Peter and other apostles, he must have received this confession from them at most three years after Jesus’ death (Galatians 1:18-21; 2:1; compared with Acts 9:30; 15:2). Even Gerd Lüdemann, a skeptical New Testament scholar who has written extensively against belief in the resurrection of Jesus, agrees; he dates this pre-Pauline confession to within two years of Jesus’ death. Of course, all four Gospels agree that Jesus was buried.
The evidence from Paul and the Gospels convinces nearly all biblical scholars that Jesus Christ was indeed buried. The few who doubt this have not explained how belief in Jesus Christ’s burial emerged so quickly.
Jesus Christ Was Buried in a Tomb
According to the four Gospels, Jesus Christ was buried in a rock-hewn tomb. They report that Joseph of Arimathea obtained permission to take Jesus’ body down from the cross. He then placed the body in the tomb, wrapped it in linen cloth, and rolled a stone in front of the tomb’s entrance. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all report that women who knew Jesus watched the burial of His body.
There are very good reasons to accept Jesus Christ’s burial in a tomb as a historical fact. This is confirmed in the four Gospels, and there are no alternative reports from the first century. The verbal differences between the four accounts suggest that we have two or three independent versions of the burial story. The differences between John and the other three Gospels are clear and show John’s independence from them.
A reasonable evaluation of the evidence suggests that the passion narrative, including the burial story, dates back to at least the 40s AD or even earlier.
The burial narratives are all brief, straightforward, and without any obvious theological or miraculous elements that critics might object to. The absence of such features puts the burden of proof on those who doubt their reliability.
Mark’s account, generally considered the earliest, does not appear to have been written to defend the claim of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. Of course, the other Gospels contain additional information that could be described as having apologetic importance. But even if all those sections are removed, the core of the original narrative remains.
Sixth, it is unlikely that the involvement of Joseph of Arimathea was fabricated. Given that all four Gospels attribute some responsibility for Jesus Christ’s execution to the Sanhedrin, it is doubtful that anyone would invent a story about a member of the Sanhedrin caring for Jesus’ burial.
Religious stories would have been expected to assign this loving duty to one of the apostles, another friend of Jesus, or a relative of John the Baptist—anyone but a member of the Sanhedrin! If, as it appears, the passion and burial narratives date back to the 40s or earlier, it is highly unlikely that anyone would fabricate a story about Jesus’ body being buried by a member of the Sanhedrin, as many people could have refuted such a story.
The most common objection to Jesus Christ’s burial in a tomb is that Paul never mentions a tomb anywhere in his letters. This objection is an argument from silence and therefore relatively weak. The Acts of the Apostles report that Paul mentioned the tomb in one of his evangelistic speeches (Acts 13:29). Of course, Luke knew that a member of the Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea, was responsible for burying Jesus, and he distinguishes this member from the rest of the Sanhedrin (Luke 23:50-51). The fact that Luke knows this detail but reports that Paul spoke more generally about Jesus being condemned and buried by the Sanhedrin suggests that Luke correctly reported what Paul said.
For all these reasons, we can confidently say that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus Christ in a tomb.
The Empty Tomb
With this confirmation that Jesus Christ was buried in a tomb, it becomes difficult to deny the Gospel accounts that the tomb was found empty a few days later. Again, several pieces of evidence support this conclusion.
As with the burial story, all four Gospels report that the tomb was empty. John’s account of the discovery of the empty tomb differs significantly from the other three Gospels. Critics often argue that these accounts are not credible because it seems almost impossible to harmonize them with certain details. But just as discrepancies in eyewitness reports of a car accident cannot prove that the accident did not happen but prove that their reports were not rehearsed, so too the problems of harmonizing the Gospels’ accounts of the empty tomb confirm the central fact to which all these accounts testify.
Mark’s account of the discovery of the empty tomb lacks defensive material and is almost devoid of miraculous or theological elements. Again, the later Gospel accounts contain additional material, some of which may be theologically or defensively significant (without pre-judging their true nature). However, the core narrative seen in Mark has no elements that a critic could reasonably use as a basis for considering the story a fabricated religious tale.
Matthew’s account of the guard at the tomb (Matthew 28:11-15), even if viewed skeptically as a religious defense story, confirms that the tomb was empty. Matthew’s account reflects a first-century dispute between Jews and Christians in which both sides agreed that the tomb was empty and guarded. The Jews claimed that the guard was asleep; Matthew says that the chief priests bribed the guards to say this. However, note that, in any case, both sides agreed that Jesus Christ had been buried in a tomb, which was guarded and then found empty. Indeed, the Jewish claim that Jesus’ disciples stole His body is the earliest recorded non-Christian explanation for the empty tomb.
In Paris, there is a white marble plaque from Nazareth bearing an edict from Caesar dating to around 45–50 AD, ordering that tombs “must remain undisturbed forever,” and that anyone who removes bodies from such tombs will be subject to the death penalty. Claudius, who was Caesar from 41 to 54 AD, associated tomb robbery with the unrest in Rome between Jews and Christians during his reign.
In 49 AD, he expelled all Jews from Rome because of this unrest, which the Roman writer Suetonius attributed to “Chrestus,” meaning Christ. The edict on the plaque may have been issued due to rumors of the body being stolen by Jesus Christ’s disciples. If this is correct, as it seems, the rumor of the body being stolen by the disciples began as early as the 40s when most Jewish leaders who presided over Jesus’ condemnation were still alive. This is another early piece of evidence for the empty tomb.
The Gospels agree that the first to discover the empty tomb were Jesus Christ’s female followers, not His male apostles. It is highly unlikely that male writers would invent such a story since a woman’s testimony had little or no value.
The Mystery of the Missing Body
We have seen that Jesus Christ’s body was buried in a tomb and that a few days later, the tomb was found empty. Jesus’ body was not there. The Gospel’s explanation is well-known: God raised Jesus from the dead. However, some skeptics, while accepting the empty tomb, have tried to explain it differently.
We have already mentioned the first explanation, which came from some Jewish opponents of Christianity—that the disciples stole the body. For the sake of argument, let’s forget about the guard (although the same opponents admitted that the guard was there).
Even if the disciples wanted to steal the body, how could they have done so? They had fled in fear when Jesus was arrested, and Peter denied knowing Him. But, according to the New Testament, the apostles all went to their deaths defending their belief that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. How is this possible unless they sincerely believed what they said? If they had stolen the body, how could they have been willing to die for what they knew was a lie? The “stolen body” theory has few followers today.
Another explanation is the “wrong tomb” theory: the women went to the wrong tomb, which was empty, and this convinced them that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. But the theory does not explain why the Jewish opponents of Christianity did not immediately take them to the right tomb. If the women had mistakenly gone to the wrong tomb, the right tomb, with the body still in it, would still be known to the Jewish leaders. This theory is so weak that few scholars defend it.
Finally, some scholars argue that Jesus was not buried in a tomb but in a trench, and His body was probably eaten by wild dogs. But this theory is easily refuted. As we have already seen, Jesus Christ was buried, almost certainly in a tomb. This is the reason why the theory has so few defenders.
The weight of the evidence overwhelmingly favors the conclusion that Jesus Christ was buried in a tomb and that His tomb was empty a few days later.
So we know that Jesus Christ’s tomb was empty a few days after He was buried. The question is, “What happened to Jesus Christ’s body?” I hope to answer this question in a future article. For now, however, we have shown that the empty tomb of Jesus Christ is a strong historical fact. What this fact implies is a question that each of us must seriously consider.
