stuart shepherd

Who removed Jesus body from the empty tomb? [See Posts # 174 through # 178 on this thread]

So who else could have removed Jesus’ body from the tomb that first night?

Maybe Jesus’ family moved Jesus’ body to their own family tomb?

Or………

Maybe, after giving Joseph of Arimathaea permission to bury Jesus, Pontus Pilate had second thoughts about his decision. Abraham had been dead over two thousand years and his tomb at the cave of Machpelah, near Mamre at Hebron, is today a sacred shrine, and Pilate may have concluded he wanted to avoid having Jesus’ tomb turn into a shrine for his disciples. Pilate may have decided to have Jesus’ corpse moved and reburied in a place unknown to his followers. Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences kicked in and the Christians decided that the missing body meant Jesus was resurrected rather than someone moved the dead body.

I have offered several scenarios to account for the empty tomb. Everyone of them is reasonable and does not rely on supernatural intervention. However, the Christian theory of the empty tomb completely relies on the supernatural.

BUT……and this is a REALLY BIG BUT……
IMO, the whole empty tomb story is fiction. Joseph of Arimathaea is a fictional character. Jesus was not buried by Joseph of Arimathaea in his tomb. Jesus was buried by the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem along with the two men who were executed with him.
The book of Acts reveals that Jesus was buried by the Jewish rulers in Jerusalem and not by Joseph of Arimathaea………

Even the Apostle Paul, knew that Jesus was buried as a condemned man when he quoted from the Law in his letter to the Galatians.

Paul never mentions an empty tomb because there was no empty tomb.

The Gospels themselves reveal that the story about being buried in Joseph of Armathaea ‘s tomb is a fabrication. The writer of the first Gospel, the Gospel according to Mark, tried to influence his readers, that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures. He knew that in the famous Isaiah 53 passage it says……

In order to try and fulfill this Scripture in Isaiah, Mark, and the other Gospel writers who used Mark’s gospel as a template for their gospels, fabricated the story that Jesus was crucified with the wicked, and was buried with the rich in a rich man’s tomb, owned by Joseph of Arimathaea.

But if you read Isaiah 53:9a carefully you can see that the Gospel fabricators made a mistake that reveals their fabrication.
Isaiah says….””And he made his grave with the wicked””
But Jesus’ grave was with the rich. [Rich man Joseph of Arimathaea’s tomb]

And then Isaiah says…..””with the rich in his death””
But Jesus was with the wicked in his death. [The two thieves]

In order to properly fulfill Isaiah, the gospel writers should of crafted their story with Jesus being crucified with rich men in his death, and then being buried with the wicked.

[I am using the KJV, some of the newer translations, have realized this problem and “fudged’ the translation to conceal the problem]

You can see how the Gospel writers got confused. I found it confusing trying to explain it. But you can see that they screwed up and got it backwards.

Stuart Shepherd

FireBrandon

Today I sat in a Easter Resurrection message where the pastor drew caricatures of the theft hypothesis and the hallucination hypothesis and then courageously proceeded to shoot them down. It was sad to see so many heads nodding, voices shouting "AMEN", and people laughing at the caricatures drawn by the preacher of the "atheist's weak arguments" when they themselves know next to nothing about the subject but what the preacher tells them. I wish people would be more charitable to their opponents, but I guess souls need to be saved and the end justifies the means

Anyhow, the preacher said, "If the body was still in the tomb, then the Sanhedrin would have paraded it through the streets and the small little group of scared disciples would have been crushed...." I will give several reasons why this is not so.

1. The facial features would be unrecognizable after a few days and if we trust Acts it was 7 weeks before they began preaching the Resurrection in Jerusalem! So even if they did procure the body the disciples could have denied it was Jesus because of their strong beliefs. We must never doubt the power of belief to stand firm in the face of evidence.

2. It assumes that Jesus' body was in Joseph's family tomb, but it could have been moved by Joseph to the public criminal's graveyard, which is where Jewish law would require him to be buried. This is called the relocation hypothesis. Jesus' body was buried in the second grave after being stowed away in Joseph's tomb temporarily because of the hasty approach of the Sabbath. Note that the gospels all differ in their description of Joseph. Mark says he is just a prominent council member. Luke says he had not consented to the decision to crucify Jesus, but Matthew and John both go on to say he was a secret disciple. As a mere council member he would not have wanted to waste his private expensive tomb, namely a tomb only for family members, on a blaspheming convict. His fellow council members would not tolerate such honor being given to Jesus and it is probable that Joseph would not have taken such a risk. Instead he would have stored the body until he could move it on Saturday night after the Sabbath was over. Then the women would have come along on Sunday morning to anoint him and discovered that the stone was rolled away *gasp* Where have they taken him!!! Oh wait.... Jesus said he was going to be raised from the dead! OH my God! He's alive..... And the rumor spread like wildfire and everyone lived happily every after.

Anyhow, at this point the Jews would have been unable to find Jesus' body and so they may have used the polemic recorded by Matthew that the disciples stole the body from the second tomb. But, why trust Matthew's report of the bribery of the guards? Was Matthew there? Did he hear the conversation? Or is he just passing on hearsay? Why didn't Mark record any guards?

3. This point also assumes that the disciples preached a physical resurrection from day one. Carrier has a lengthy treatise on the concept of spiritual resurrection where Christ was given a brand new body or returned to his state prior to the Incarnation. The later gospels, namely Luke and John, fight against other Christians (the Gnostics) with their extremely physical descriptions of Jesus' resurrected body to prove that he is "not a spirit." If the disciples preached a resurrection of Jesus where he left his old body and got a new one (thus why the disciples couldn't recognize him in some of the appearances) then the empty tomb was a piece of late legend used to show the physicality of Christ's resurrection when in fact the location of the tomb had been lost in the scramble of the Jewish Roman war.

4. People get goose bumps visiting Jerusalem to see the city of David. Christians throughout the ages have cherished geographical locations where "the Lord" once walked. They lovingly caress the stones of the old city and walk the trails where Jesus once walked. It is shocking that there would be zero veneration of the tomb, that Paul would not mention a visit to an empty tomb even though he was in Jerusalem visiting Peter and James. Paul would surely want to see the place where the Lord shot out of the grave! Or he didn't know that legend...

Well, that's enough for starters. Any comments/rebuttals?

Steven Carr

Some people claimed Jesus had risen from the grave and ascended to Heaven.

What was controversial about that?

Why would that claim be any more controversial than the claim that Jesus was John the Baptist resurrected?

I wonder why nobody paraded the dead body of Elvis through the state of Tennessee to prove that Elvis really was dead.

Because reality and church sermons have very little to do with each other.

Anybody who think that parading a corpse around the streets was realistic is a nutcase.

FireBrandon

Good point. Superstition abounded in most ancient cultures. The Bible is not any different, although anyone who trusts that it was written by God must call for special pleading. How did the gospel writers know that angels stir pools for people to get healed? Did the angel talk to them about it? OR was it just hearsay and superstition? Alchemy and magic! Angels and Demons! Teleportation! The demonology of the gospels is quite intense when you consider the silence of the Jewish Scriptures (O.T.) The demonology reeks of Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic influence.

But it's not just superstitious interpretation that's the problem. It's the transmission of oral tradition and stories. John's gospel ends by saying that all the things Jesus did or said could not be written down in all the books of the world, so any new story that came up by an eyewitness (the guy standing way at the back of one of Jesus' "healings") got into the gospel if the author liked the story and it fit his concept of this teacher's divine origin.

The church spread out quite rapidly through Asia Minor if we believe the epistles are true. If Luke visited Israel 30-40 years after to write his gospel and Acts, how can we be sure the stories were not embellished by that time or entirely new stories were added to the tradition? I myself am guilty of the typical "fish stories" where my own heroics are exaggerated and my faults downplayed. I try to make myself look like a hero in all my stories and I rarely tell the embarrassing ones except if I'm trying to get a good laugh. It's human nature to display ourselves in a good light and to write biographies of our heroes.

At this point a Christian might say, "well look how the gospels portray the disciples as dumb and slow to believe. No disciple would have written that about himself."
Matthew: Says nothing bad about himself. Instead the Twelve are going to rule on twelve thrones with Jesus. (Mt. 19:28) Not that bad of a deal for them aye!
Mark: Study the Petrine-James power struggle hypothesis in the early church. Carrier touches on it a little in his essay on the spiritual resurrection (Empty Tomb. Prometheus Books). It's definitely a valid and highly probable event. Mark, although allegedly the scribe of Peter, casts him in a dim light. Maybe Mark was mad at Peter and joined James? Maybe Mark found out about Peter's faults from some of the other disciples? But he still paints Peter as the rock on which Christ will build his church, so maybe this is still a pro-Peter writing.
Luke: Not a disciple, so he suffers no personal loss if he mentions the disciples' slowness a few times to illustrate a point in his narrative.
John: Nothing negative here: He is the disciple whom Jesus loves, that is of course if John actually wrote it.
But even if some think I'm wrong about that, then they must concede that the gospels do indeed portray Jesus as flawless, writing such a good biography of him that makes men admire him. To plead no exaggeration in these stories is absurd when one considers the human nature and the difficulty/foreignness of accurate journalism back in the day! Modern hoaxes and myths in our day like UFOs, Elvis not dead, etc. should be a wakening call to the traditional Bible thumper.

May we ever gallantly confront credulity, superstition, and embellishments wherever we find them.

John Kesler

Each gospel is internally consistent regarding the anointing of Jesus' body with spices, as is easily demonstrated below.




At first it might seem that Matthew's lack of an anointing scene, either before or after burial, destroys the theory that the gospels are internally consistent in this area. It doesn't. Matthew has intentionally changed to purpose of the women's visit from anointing to simply "seeing the tomb," because he alone records the guards-at-the-tomb pericope, which would obviously preclude the women's ability to anoint Jesus' body.

Also, Matthew retained the woman-with-ointment incident in which Jesus states that he has already been anointed (cf. Mark 14:3 ff; Luke7:36 ff; John 12:1 ff):

This layout should make clear that each gospel writer gives an accordant internal account. It is when they are "harmonized" with each other--resulting in claims that spices were acquired twice or that women attempted to anoint the body even after observing Joseph and Nicodemus use "about a hundred pounds" of spices to anoint the body--that inconsistencies and incongruities arise.

FireBrandon

Good post John. I wish Christians would see the inconsistencies in their own holy book like they do so easily in things like the Book of Mormon.

biblethumping

I would just like to point out an empty tomb is not needed for Jesus to resurrect himself, it's far more probable when Jesus died on the cross he was instantaneously resurrected so that he may live his eternal life at the right hand of God, ruling the heavens from above and commanding our love for his ultimate sacrifice to save the human race from sin born of evil from Satan himself with which Jesus alone has to endure from then onto eternity. It's reasonable to assume that time stops completely within eternity otherwise eternity could not stretch to forever and would not have any interval of time so that very second Jesus sacrificed himself he was frozen in heaven only to burn back into this world for a brief period of time to help spread the word to his followers. An empty tomb only signifies that Jesus knew the thief in Luke 23:43, his friend and cohort in Paradise, would steal the now cold corpse of Jesus Christ and most likely use it for some diabolical scheme to open the gates of Hell and let loose a flood of Satan's deamons onto the worldly earth before the Bible could be inspired some 120 odd years later and inspire millions of souls to join Jesus in his frozen but eternal second in heaven.

spamandham

If there weren't so many people who actually believe this sort of nonsense, I would think your post was a parody.

madmax2976

My Verdict: Sean won this debate hands down. Of course I'm biased being a non-believer and all.

Even so, all that PFC offered was essentially "William Lang Craig" arguments that never come close to reasonably demonstrating that anyone has ever been raised from the dead. While I'm sure these arguments work fairly well at keeping the already converted secure in their pews, there's not much chance such pitiful evidence would convince an experienced, educated non-believer.

The fact is that most people living today, if told by their very best friends or family members that someone who had recently died had been resurrected and that they had seen the person alive, still wouldn't believe it. That's because assertions, even by more than one person, are not sufficient to validate such an astonishing claim. Contrast this with the evidences offered for the supposed resurrection of Jesus:

- A story told by a person (or persons) 2000 years removed from us of whom we know next to nothing about

- Assumptions about what was or wasn't "embarrassing" to people living 2000 years ago

- claims of "independent attestation" that are nothing more than claims that advocates can't support

- Assumptions of an "empty tomb" based on stories written decades after the supposed event, which no one then, much less now, could ever validate

- A very dubious, some might even say, dishonest "reading in" of statements/meaning into earlier ancient manuscripts

- Supposed martyrdoms by first believers, none of which can be substantiated via anything more powerful than mere legend


No, there could exist a video tape of a resurrection and most people would conclude it was a hoax and not believe it. That's because we have experience with charlatans, liars, and frauds. We know the extent to which some of these folks can and will go, particularly if it's the name of religion. We also know that people do not rise from the dead; it conflicts with all our experiences, with our scientific and medical knowledge and understanding of how the world works, and thus the bar is extremely high for such claims, and rightly so.

The list of evidence offered by believers barely gets off the ground, much less meets such a high bar of support. This issue is almost entirely one of faith, not evidences, and I think that believers do us and themselves a disservice by pretending otherwise.

ElectEngr

I have always been partial to Hugh J. Schonfield's Passover Plot (or via: amazon.co.uk) myself
I read it a frew "decades" ago.

Just my opinion

Later,
ElectEngr