Jon Curry

Christian apologists claim that 75% of scholars, including critical scholars, accept the fact of the empty tomb. And by "empty tomb" I assume Christians mean that Jesus was buried in aparticular tomb and on the Sunday following the burial that tomb was found empty.

Apparently this claim is based upon research done by Gary Habermas from papers and works published from 1975 to the present time. I find this claim to be highly dubious. Does anybody have any insights on the validity of this claim? I haven't read a lot of skeptical literature and I'm curious if this is the impression well read people have of the beliefs of critical scholars. I assume the Jesus Seminar fellows would for the most part disagree, but perhaps someone here can tell me otherwise.

Alethias

I don't know if it's valid or not. To Quote from Gary Habermas,

Of these scholars, approximately 75% favor one or more of these arguments for the empty tomb, while approximately 25% think that one or more arguments oppose it. Thus, while far from being unanimously held by critical scholars, it may surprise some that those who embrace the empty tomb as a historical fact still comprise a fairly strong majority.

I think The Abrahamic Scripture: Criticism & History forum would be a better place for this, since the topic has to do with the Historicity of Jesus and the Historicity of the Bible, so I'm shipping it there.

Alethias,
GRD Moderator

moonwatcher

From footnote 1 in Peter Kirby's The Historicity of The Empty Tomb Evaluated:

The whole introduction can be found here.

There certainly seem to be quite a few scholars who question its historicity. Whether they make up more or less that 25% I don't know.

motorhead

Who are these scholars where 75% believe this and how many are in this pool? I guess it might in the article Alethias linked to. Let's say it's 100 atheist historians and 75% believe in an empty tomb and 25% don't, big deal. What does that prove? I think you'd have to ask, "okay, if you believe in an empty tomb, then what do you think happened to the body of Jesus?" Are we supposed to say "well, if the tomb was empty, then he must have been resurrected from the dead?"

Another way to look at this is what's the evidence for Jesus being buried in a tomb? Because the canonical Gospels claim it? Why should we take their word for it?

Malachi151

The case against the empty tomb is pretty darn solid.

1) Paul never mentioned it.
2) Its not in any pre-gospel Christian writings
3) Early Church fathers didn't mention it.
4) There is no indication that any group of Christians ever venerated any tomb or burial site (this is a big one to me)
5) And most of all, Mark, the origin of the claim, is completely unbelievable, showing that his work is an allegory composed of Old Testament clippings, not any kind of eyewitness accounts.

Asha'man

I'm confident that the Tomb was indeed empty.

Why? Because there never was a Jesus to bury in the tomb in the first place.

Doug Shaver

It doesn't mean a thing until we know where Habermas went looking for those papers and works.

We know what the sample consisted of. We don't know what population he sampled, though.

Jon Curry

Thanks, moonwatcher. That's probably as good a response as can be gotten without personally going through every piece of literature from every NT scholar.

This argument may be technically fallacious, but I think it still might be reasonable to in some cases accept opinions based upon nothing more than expert testimony. Suppose you're just a lay person that isn't sophisticated enough to study all of the arguments, but you're considering Christianty. You might conclude that it is reasonable to accept that the empty tomb is a historical reality based upon the opinions of the majority of experts.

Of course this doesn't prove that the resurrection occurred, and the Christian apologist doesn't claim otherwise. He establishes this as one fact that we can know and uses that to make a cumulative case argument. What makes the best sense of the facts that we know? The facts that he says the experts agree on is 1-the fact that Jesus did exist and was crucified, 2-the fact that he was buried in the tomb of a person by the name of Joseph of Arimethea, 3-the fact that on the Sunday following the death that tomb was found to be empty, and 4-the fact that following the finding of the empty tomb the disciples and others had experiences where they thought they had seen the resurrected Jesus. The Christian will say that an actual resurrection makes the most sense of these 4 facts.

I just find this 75% figure to be very suspicious, and I think it would be great to see some names or something like that. When I was a Christian I often debated with Roman Catholics, and they would make a similar numerical claim that sounded dubious to me. They'd claim that Protestantism doesn't work because the result of it has been the creation of 28,000 different denominations, as opposed to the unity of the Catholic church. This claim sounded very suspicious to me, but I had no idea how to evaluate the claim, and they didn't even seem to know where it came from. Ultimately a Protestant apologist by the name of Eric Svendsen found their source for this claim and showed that the way this guy was defining a denomination was different from the way it is commonly understood, and per his definition in fact there were 8000 Roman Catholic denominations, so this argument didn't really work for the Catholic.

Draconis

How does it follow that if the tomb was empty, therefore something magic happened?

Jon Curry

That doesn't follow and nobody claims that it does. It's simply one of several facts that an apologist will try to establish, then once granted the apologist will attempt to show that a resurrection besed accounts for all of the facts.