The British Columbia Parliament Buildings can be seen in the distance (with a green dome) in this view of the Inner Harbor Causeway in Victoria BC. Our lodgings are roughly a fifteen-minute walk to the right, out of this Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Among my purchases during our recent month in England were several very small volumes from a series entitled \u201cLittle Books of Guidance.\u201d\u00a0 I found them in a rural church that some of my wife\u2019s ancestors had almost certainly once attended, in a village located not far from Cheltenham.<\/p>\n
The one from which I\u2019ll be drawing for this blog entry (in part, though not entirely) is James D. G. Dunn, Why believe in Jesus\u2019 Resurrection?<\/em> (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2016).\u00a0 The author, James D. G. Dunn, who holds both a Ph.D. and a D.D. from the University of Cambridge, is Emeritus Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at the University of Durham and a Fellow of the British Academy.\u00a0 He has been a prolific and important author on the New Testament over the course of a very distinguished career.\u00a0 I begin with a direct quotation from him:<\/p>\nThe earliest Christian testimony is straightforward and clear.\u00a0 During the Passover celebrations in Jerusalem Jesus had been arrested, tried and condemned to be crucified (Mark 14-15).\u00a0 All four Gospels agree that Joseph of Arimathea, a respected councillor, took the responsibility of asking the Roman Governor, Pilate, for his permission to bury the body of the crucified Jesus.\u00a0 Permission granted, Joseph took Jesus\u2019 body down from the cross, wrapped it in a linen shroud, and laid it in a tomb hewn in the rock which he had prepared for his own burial.\u00a0 The entrance to the tomb was then covered by a great stone.\u00a0 This is the basic story on which all four Evangelists agree, with varied details which simply indicate how varied was the retelling of the story and raise no questions as to the reliability of the primary detail.\u00a0 Most striking is the fact that Joseph of Arimathea, an evidently respected figure, is not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament.\u00a0 This probably increases the credibility of the account.\u00a0 It was not the burial which was controversial, but what happened thereafter.\u00a0 (26)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And what was it that happened thereafter?\u00a0 Professor Dunn focuses particularly on the fact that, within somewhat less than forty-eight hours, the tomb of Jesus was found to be empty:<\/p>\n
The key fact, that the tomb was empty, remains undisputed.\u00a0 (29)<\/p>\n
So, what are we to make of all this?\u00a0 The first Christians, of course, were convinced that Jesus had been raised from the dead.\u00a0 This quickly became one of their basic confessions: that God had raised Jesus from the dead on the third day.\u00a0 This indeed was the central claim of the earliest Christian preaching, and it was acceptance of this claim and belief in\/commitment to this risen Lord Jesus which was the principal bond binding Jew and Gentile alike in the formation of the earliest churches.\u00a0 (30)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
One explanation, and apparently the first, dates back right to the beginning.\u00a0 According to the Gospel of Matthew (chapter 28), the Jewish authorities immediately began to claim that the disciples of Jesus had stolen his body from the tomb.<\/p>\n
The problem with this explanation for the spread of the belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead is obvious.\u00a0 If Jesus\u2019 disciples had removed Jesus\u2019 dead body from Joseph\u2019s tomb, they would have had to rebury it in another tomb.\u00a0 They certainly would not have disposed of it by simply throwing it into some burial site for vagrants and criminals.\u00a0 But if another tomb or burial site is to be considered, what one, and where?\u00a0 Given that the Jesus movement began to \u2018take off\u2019 soon after, it is entirely unlikely that Jesus\u2019 disciples would just ignore the site where his body lay.\u00a0 On the contrary, and inevitably, the place or tomb of burial of such a revered teacher would have become a sacred site.\u00a0 How could the first Christians have failed to want to honour the site where Jesus\u2019 body lay?\u00a0 But no other site has been identified.\u00a0 It hardly makes sense to replace the incredibility of resurrection with the incredibility of another burial site which no one care enough to remember, mark or honour.\u00a0 (32)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Note that the apparent Jewish explanation acknowledges<\/em> that the tomb of Jesus was, in fact, empty by the morning of the third day.\u00a0 Moreover, although Professor Dunn doesn\u2019t raise this issue, it seems difficult to imagine a group of wily conspirators marching to brutal martyrdoms on behalf not only of a hoax<\/em>, but on behalf of something that they knew full well<\/em> to be a hoax because they themselves had perpetrated<\/em> it.<\/p>\nBut on, now to a second<\/em> proposed explanation:<\/p>\nThe puzzle, then \u2014 if not that tomb, then where and what burial or disposal place? \u2014 points more to the authenticity of the Gospels\u2019 own empty tomb story than to any other explanation.\u00a0 There is an alternative suggestion \u2014 that it was the wrong tomb to which the women came.\u00a0 But that can hardly be fitted into the data which has come down to us.\u00a0 There is a distinctiveness about the account of Joseph of Arimathea\u2019s role which is hard to escape, and similarly the concern of the women to ensure that Jesus\u2019 body was properly anointed.\u00a0 And the question as to where Jesus\u2019 body really was finally laid still poses an inescapable problem.\u00a0 For if Jesus\u2019 tomb was actually undisturbed, then it is hardly possible to credit that nobody pointed this out, that no agents of the high priests sought out Jesus actual burial site and exposed the falsehood of Jesus\u2019 disciples\u2019 claim.\u00a0 So that alternative explanation seems to be even less credible than the former.\u00a0 (33)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A third option seems to presume that the Romans, who were well experienced in the art of crucifying people, proved singularly incompetent in the case of Jesus:<\/p>\n
And much the same verdict has to be given to a third explanation \u2014 that Jesus had not really died and had recovered sufficiently to escape from the tomb and to convince his disciples that he was alive (again).\u00a0 But it is hardly more persuasive as an explanation of the earliest Christian belief in Jesus\u2019 resurrection.\u00a0 That Jesus did in fact die on the cross makes best sense, given the horrific scourging and beatings to which he had been subjected.\u00a0 The spear-thrust of the Roman soldier into the side of the crucified Jesus, according to John 19.34-35, would have hastened that death.\u00a0 Even if he had recovered while lying in the tomb, it is scarcely credible that he could have freed himself from any burial wrappings or been able from the inside to roll back the stone covering the mouth of the tomb.\u00a0 And would a half-dead Jesus have been able to persuade his followers that he had actually risen from the dead?\u00a0 Nor should we forget that the same problem just discussed re-emerges here too.\u00a0 For if Jesus had simply recovered from his scourging and crucifixion, then he would have had to die some time thereafter.\u00a0 And we are back to the problem that no (other) tomb or resting place for Jesus\u2019 body can be identified with any credibility.\u00a0 (33-34)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Obviously, of course, one can simply dismiss the four Gospels and the authentic letters of the apostle Paul and announce that the whole thing is fiction.\u00a0 Discarding the primary sources is a remarkably efficient way of doing history; it allows the liberated \u201chistorian\u201d to claim absolutely anything with no fear of contradiction.\u00a0 If the New Testament documents are treated seriously as historical sources, though \u2014 even if not necessarily as scriptural text, but simply the same way that one would weigh Tacitus or Suetonius or Flavius Josephus \u2014 they pose a problem to disbelievers:<\/p>\n
So, on balance, it seems hard to contradict the Gospels\u2019 accounts that the tomb where Jesus\u2019 dead body was laid was subsequently (two days later) found to be empty.\u00a0 Of course, the whole story could be dismissed as made up and untrue.\u00a0 But if its testimony is taken seriously, then despite individual oddities, it is hard to escape the conclusion: that on the Sunday following Jesus\u2019 crucifixion, the tomb in which his dead body had been laid was found to be empty.\u00a0 (34)<\/p>\n
For a tomb to be found empty, and only two days after a body had been placed in it, the most obvious answer to the puzzle would seem to be one of the three that have just been discussed.\u00a0 It was empty because the body had been removed\/stolen.\u00a0 It was empty because it was the wrong tomb.\u00a0 It was empty because Jesus had recovered sufficiently to escape from the tomb.\u00a0 But if these explanations of the empty tomb lack credibility, [what then]?\u00a0 (35)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Posted from Victoria, British Columbia<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 We spent much of today in quest of humpback whales.\u00a0 And pretty successfully, too.\u00a0 It\u2019s difficult (for non-specialists, anyway) to distinguish individual whales, but we saw at least half a dozen of them off in the distance, and at least four (including at least one mother and a calf) up very close to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":63280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1356,4753,2851,35418,1369,1366],"class_list":["post-100961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christ","tag-crucifixion","tag-empty-tomb","tag-james-dunn","tag-jesus","tag-resurrection"],"yoast_head":"\n
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