Now that we’ve established that there is no reasonable way that Jesus could have survived the crucifixion, let’s move on to the next two points: His burial by Joseph of Arimathea and the discovery of the empty tomb on Sunday morning.This is relatively uncontroversial and seems accepted by most scholars. However, given that Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin, some have claimed that it is implausible that one of those who voted to condemn Jesus would have buried Him honourably in his own tomb, and this sounds reasonable on the surface. But the Apostle Luke foresaw this difficulty and his report of the burial records that Joseph did not “consented to their decision and action” (Luke 23: 50-53). Indeed, William Lane Craig claims that, according to John A. T. Robinson, late Cambridge University New Testament Scholar, the honourable burial of Jesus is one of the earliest (hence not open to legendary embellishment due to the passage of time) and best-attested facts about the historical Jesus (in Strobel, 1998, p283).
That leads us to the empty tomb. Craig goes on to list a series of arguments in favour of the empty tomb. In the interests of brevity I’ll only mention a couple, but all can be found in Strobel’s The Case for Christ. One of the most interesting to me is the discovery of the tomb by women. In the ancient world, women were poorly thought of, and it would have been embarrassing for the disciples to admit that it was women, not the disciples, who discovered the tomb, and this seems like one of those things that would have been altered or covered up if the account was legendary (in fact, this and other embarrassing details are often used to establish the authenticity of the Gospels). Also, the earliest Jewish writings confirm the historicity of the empty tomb. Nobody at the time was claiming that the tomb was not empty – what they did was posit different ideas about why. The guards fell asleep and the disciples stole the body is the answer given at the time (Matt 28:12-15). Another, more modern objection to the empty tomb that surfaced in 1907 is that the women went to the wrong tomb. However, if this was the case, don’t you think the Jewish authorities, who certainly knew where He was buried, would have simply pointed that out when the disciples began announcing His resurrection? The dialogue would have gone something like this: “Jesus is risen!”, “No he’s not. There’s his tomb!” Doesn’t seem to hold much explanatory power, does it?
More could be said on this topic, and the interested reader is again referred to Strobel’s book, as well as The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona for an extremely thorough review of these issues. Stay tuned for Part 4 of How Do We Know – the Post-Mortem Appearances!
