aa5874

The stolen body story only makes sense if Jesus did NOT resurrect.

Once Jesus was ALREADY raised from the dead and was APPEARING to PEOPLE all over Jerusalem it was MOST absurd for the soldiers to claim the body was stolen.

JESUS would have been SEEN in PERFECT HEALTH with all his PUNCTURED hands, feet and sides completely healed.

Now, examine the most HILARIOUS story in gMatthew. JESUS could not have resurrected and no Jew ever saw the body of Jesus after it was supposedly buried.

Matthew 28:11-15 - This story is just ridiculous.

The governor did not ever SEE Jesus after the burial or had heard that his body was missing up to the time the author of Matthew wrote his story.

Now, gMatthew was written perhaps over 40 years since the supposed body of Jesus had DISAPPEARED.

Jesus if he did exist did NOT resurrect his body CANNOT be Located.

James Brown

Oh, that's an easy one. Here's Richard Carrier's take:

That one's easy too. All it takes is for Joseph of Arimathea to get Jesus' body at first light on Easter Sunday (notice the rush job to get him buried--anywhere--on Friday evening before sundown of Passover begins) and then transport it to its final resting place elsewhere, a place unknown to the disciples and the women. Joseph exits stage right with the body, unaware of the disciples' incorrect conclusion that an empty tomb must mean a resurrected body. Guards at the tomb would certainly complicate this scenario, but since the oldest gospel source doesn't mention any guards, we can ignore them.

Doug Shaver

I'm not a historicist. However, if there was a real Jesus of Nazareth, then the crucifixion really happened. In that case . . .

IF he was was buried in a tomb (no matter who the tomb's real owner was), and

IF the tomb was found empty some few days afterward, and

IF the tomb had been left unguarded

THEN the stolen body theory becomes plausible.

Johnny Skeptic

Excellent arguments.

brianscott1977

The idea that Joseph of Arimathea moved the body, didn’t tell Jesus’ closest disciples and friends, and then “exits stage right” without every saying anything when people started to claim that Jesus was alive seems immensely unlikely. It requires him to do three improbable things in a row (particularly the idea of him leaving without ever being aware of the disciples mistake is an outlandish claim). And all of this is dependent on the story of the guards being false. By the way, Jewish law said that a body had to be buried before sundown.

As for grave robbers – sure it’s possible. Or it is possible that Pilate moved the body secretly. Or maybe aliens did it. All are possible options, but there is no reason to think any of these options are true.

As has already been pointed out, the disciples didn’t believe because the tomb was empty. They believed because they saw Jesus alive again after his death.

aa5874

1. If Jesus did exist Pilate may have moved his body.

2. The disciples may have moved the body.

3. Unknown persons may have moved the body.

4. The visitors looked in the wrong tomb.

5. Jesus was raised from the dead.

Of ALL the options, there is ONE that just COULD NOT be true and it is the resurrection.

Gawen

Let me add a bit to this for another take on it.

James Brown

More unlikely than a physical resurrection?

There's nothing to indicate that Joseph and the disciples moved in the same circles, and after he buries the body, he's not heard from again in all of the gospels or epistles of the New Testament. Surely Joseph was no key player in the early church, no intimate colleague of Peter and John. His very lack of presence in the story suggests a sort of deus ex machina, a convenient character brought in by the narrator to solve the problem of how to give an executed criminal an extraordinary and private burial, thus setting us up for a Locked Room mystery to enhance the wonder of it all.

So Joseph, a wealthy but politically savvy acolyte, buries Jesus in his final resting place, and goes on about his business. He doesn't make a big deal of it because worshiping a rabblerouser could be bad for business. Meanwhile, the poor illiterate disciples do their thing which initially would have been low-key and private. How exactly would they have made it known to the general populace that they saw a dead man resurrected--post flyers? make a press release? start a web site? Of course not. Remember that just days earlier these men hid from government authorities to prevent being put on trial themselves--it would take some time before they would stick a finger up to the political winds and start preaching openly on the streets, and even then there's no guarantee that Joseph would have heard about it. Perhaps by the time the disciples' message filtered up to the upper layers where Joseph resided, he had moved out of Jerusalem, or had died. Perhaps he didn't think the disciples' message would have any legs--do you have any idea how many religions flare up and fade away in a handful of years? Perhaps he misunderstood their message to mean they had seen a spiritual Jesus resurrected, never mind where the physical body was, and thus he privately agreed with their preaching. He certainly wouldn't be the only Christian to have believed such.

Or hey, perhaps, as you suggest, Joseph did hear the disciples' claim of a physical resurrection and made steps to debunk the claim. What could he have done? Dig up an unrecognizable body and parade it through the streets? Not only would such a stunt not have convinced anyone, it would have been highly sacrilegious. Or may Joseph wrote his own gospel--how likely would have that survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD? Or centuries of editing by Orthodox Christians who would have vehemently disagreed with his heretical message? How likely would the poor underclass pay attention to one single wealthy elite when the disciples were promising the masses that any day now the wealthy elites will be overthrown and "the poor in spirit" will take over?

Well, since three out of the four gospels don't mention any guards, nor are they mentioned elsewhere in the Christian canon, I'm inclined to discount them. Matthew's guards are accompanied by other events that are missing from the other gospels, such as rock-shattering earthquakes and angels rolling stones away after the women arrive at the tomb. Matthew's account is significantly different from the others, and thus is unreliable.

Um, yes, that's the setup for the body switcheroo. Late on Friday afternoon, Joseph claims Jesus' body and buries it nearby before sundown to satisfy the law. Then early on Sunday morning, he reclaims the body and takes it to its final resting place. Had he had more time on Friday, then the temporary tomb wouldn't have been necessary.

Of course, all of this is speculation, but its speculation rooted in the physical world (except for aliens, of course.) We see these sorts of actions occur all the time in everyday occurrences. Thus, any one of these natural explanations is far more likely than a supernatural one. I'm quite sure that you would exhibit the same sort of speculation for every other religion's supernatural claim--what makes your religion exempt?

Not true. John 20:8 says that John believed when he saw the empty tomb. Matthew 28:17 says that some of the disciples looked the risen Jesus in the face and doubted that it was him--where are their eyewitness testimonies? And what's with all the cases of mistaken identity during the post-resurrection appearances? The disciples were hardly the monolithic group you suggest, all thinking and believing the same things at the same time. There's definitely something fishy going on here that prevents this from being the open-and-shut case that apologists need to justify their own commitment.

Johnny Skeptic

Better stated, from a Christian perspective, all of this is dependent on the story of the guards being true. You do not have multiple attestations that guards were posted at the tomb. Even if you did, it is well-known that Matthew and Luke copied or revised a good dead from Mark.

So what?

We can rule out aliens, and Pilate having the body moved secretly, both of which you know are absurd possibilities, but we cannot rule out graverobbers, as Richard Carrier said, and we cannot rule out that Joseph buried the body somewhere else so that Jesus' reputation would not have been discredited by his body being found in his (Joseph's) tomb.

Except for John.

Which means that the empty tomb arguments that Christians use are useless.

In your opinion, are there any good reasons for people to be suspicious about the claims that a global flood occured, that the Ten Plagues occured in Egypt, that God gave Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar as a compensation for his failure to defeat Tyre, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and the two apparently different versions of the death of Judas?

Consider the following claims.

1. The God of the Bible created the heavens and the earth.

2. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

3. Jesus was born of a virgin.

4. Jesus never sinned.

5. Jesus' shed blood and death atoned for the sins of mankind.

How do you recommend that people try to reasonably verify those claims?

John Kesler

John's Mary Magdalene not only seems ignorant of any guards at the tomb; she even posits that the body had been moved by the gardener(s).

Remember that in John's story, the tomb is never said to be Joseph's, and the reason Jesus was buried in a garden tomb is because of expediency.

This version of the burial undermines any apologetic value that Matthew's guards-at-the-tomb had, since one of Jesus' own followers didn't think that the "guards" precluded removal of the body.