Open nearly any text in ancient history or Western civilization used widely in colleges and universities today and you will find a generally sympathetic, if compressed, version of Jesus’ life, which ends with some variation of the statement that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate and died as a result. No ranking historian anywhere in the world shares the ultimate criticism voiced by German philosopher Bruno Bauer in the last century that Jesus was a myth, that he never lived in fact. And no one denies that Jesus died from crucifixion, since thousands of Roman victims died that way.
So far, so good. It is what happened after the first Good Friday that is reported inconsistently in our secular histories. And for good reason: historians worship objectivity, their texts will be used by students of all faiths, and the secular scholar simply cannot report a preternatural event in the past as fact of history without mortal risk to his academic reputation. If a Christian, he may personally believe in the Easter triumph over death, but he usually tries to prevent this bias of faith from intruding into his works.
Most authors use one of two devices to cover the Easter phenomenon in their history books:
1. Silence. Some texts avoid any reference whatever to events “on the third day.” After Jesus dies, in these versions, there is an immediate shift to the growth of the early Church in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Even what the earliest church had to “grow on,” i.e., the Resurrection kerygma, is often missing in such accounts, leaving the unchurched reader to wonder what the fuss involving one Jesus of Nazareth was all about.
2. Qualifying the report. Other texts seem to begin as confessionally as one of the Gospels but then add the all-important qualifier. For example: “Jesus rose from the dead on Easter morning, so his followers confidently believed.” Or: “… according to claims made in the Gospels.” This approach is the more accurate way of conveying the early Christian proclamation, and is fairer to all concerned. Many church histories, too, make no greater claims for the first Easter than this sort of objective report.
Much Christian literature, similarly, refers to Jesus’ resurrection and the empty tomb as phenomena that can be approached only by faith, not through the discipline of history. This, however, is not necessarily true, especially in the case of the empty tomb. Nor is all evidence for the Easter phenomena confined to the New Testament, as so many, Christians and non-Christians alike, seem to assume.
The Resurrection
The actual moment of Jesus’ triumph over death, even according to the Gospels, was witnessed by no one, and the reports of his resurrection in the Gospels convey a claim for the supernatural that is either believed, doubted, or disbelieved today. Hence it is solely a matter of faith, so the argument runs, not of evidence or proof.
Admittedly, there is no “100-per-cent-airtight” logical, philosophical, or historical proof for the Resurrection; if there were, from a purely human vantage point every intelligent person who examined the evidence would be forced to believe. The science of history can, however, penetrate at least to the outer periphery of the events of the first Easter, and what it detects at these fringes is extraordinary.
Any ancient historian would have to admit that a profound religious explosion occurred in Jerusalem shortly after Christ’s crucifixion, since its repercussions shook distant Rome with incredible speed. A pagan Roman author who detested Christianity had to admit that only thirty-one years after the death of Jesus, “a great number” of his followers in the distant imperial capital believed so strongly in his resurrection that they gave up their lives in Nero’s great persecution of 64 A.D. (Tacitus, Annals xv, 44).
For a philosophy or teaching to spread that far that fast is absolutely unparalleled in the ancient world, and historians have not devoted enough attention to the implications here. The conversion claims at Pentecost (3,000, then 5,000 according to Acts 2 ff.) on the basis of a triumphant Easter faith take on a new credibility against such a background.
As the historian moves closer to Judea to sample other peripheral evidence for the Resurrection—apart from the core testimony of the Easter Gospels—he is impressed with the variety of what, in our atomic age, might be called the “fall-out” from the Easter explosion on those nearest to the event. The psychological change in the disciples is striking. What transformed Peter, the man who could be unhinged by questions from a servant girl, into so bold a spokesman for the faith that the whole Sanhedrin could not silence him? If the disciples had deceitfully tried to string a new faith on the world—motivated by some hazy wish-fulfillment—would they have gone on to give their very lives for this fraud? Cearly, they deemed themselves eyewitnesses of the risen Christ, for myths do not make martyrs.
The transformation of James the Just, Jesus’ doubting brother, and of Paul, a convinced enemy of the fledgling church, is even more striking, as is the conversion of the many Jerusalem priests cited in Acts 6:7.
One of the Jewish beliefs held with most tenacity is observance of the Sabbath, and yet Christian Jews transferred their worship from Saturday to Sunday, which they termed “the Lord’s Day.” Only some drastic consideration would have introduced this change: their weekly celebration of the Resurrection.
The birth and growth of the Christian Church itself, its survival and expansion across nineteen centuries, offer telling evidence for a mighty launching. Could it all have been rooted in a fraud, or did something happen that Sunday dawn that has snared the belief of almost 800 million people in the present generation alone?
Ordinarily, then, the peripheral evidence would suggest that the core evidence—the Resurrection claims of the Gospels—is justified. Yet secular historians will not stamp the term HISTORICAL FACT across the Resurrection. Why not? Simply because the Resurrection involves the supernatural. If it did not, historians long ago, using the same rules of their craft, would most probably have accorded Easter the same status of sober fact as, say, the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 B.C.
Regrettably, they demand that the more unlikely the story, the stronger the evidence required for it. So if something supernatural is claimed, the evidence needed to support it has to be of an overwhelming, categorical nature—indeed, direct eyewitness. But such absolute evidence for the Resurrection disappeared with the death of the last eyewitnesses nineteen centuries ago. Although such demands are clearly unfair to the seven ancient sources reporting the events of the first Easter—the four Gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul and Peter—this is the prevailing attitude among historians today.
The Empty Tomb
Historians have long overlooked the other phenomenon of Easter morning, the empty tomb. Many theologians too have claimed that the proclamation of the early Church centered in a risen Christ, not an empty tomb, and that the latter was only a subsequent concern of the Church. This may be true, but only because of the relative significance of the two Easter phenomena, and the fact that the latter is quite obviously implicit in the former. Both the Gospels and the early Church affirm the “He is not here” immediately after the “He is risen,” with an additional thrust: “Behold the place where they laid him.”
The two concepts might have been divorced if Easter had taken place at Athens, not Jerusalem. In Greece, a Platonist might have affirmed the resurrection of Jesus’ spirit while his body lay moldering in an obviously occupied tomb. But for a Jew, there was no resurrection without a very physical and bodily resurrection of the flesh. The modern concept of a Christianity that would retain its validity even if the dead body of Jesus were discovered would have been philosophical nonsense to St. Paul and the early Church.
Aside from any theological considerations of Easter, however, there is extremely important historical evidence for the empty tomb, which has not received sufficient attention from either Christian or secular historians. Quite apart from the Easter Gospels and their (to the secular historian) supernatural bias, there is strong circumstantial evidence as well as some surprising hostile evidence for an empty tomb.
The circumstantial evidence may be familiar enough, but it is impressive. It deals with the question “Where did Christianity first begin?” To this the answer must be: “Only one spot on earth—the city of Jerusalem.” But this is the very last place it could have started if Jesus’ tomb had remained occupied, since anyone producing a dead Jesus would have driven a wooden stake through the heart of an incipient Christianity inflamed by his supposed resurrection. What happened in Jerusalem seven weeks after the first Easter could have taken place only if Jesus’ body were somehow missing from Joseph’s tomb, for otherwise the Temple establishment, in its imbroglio with the Apostles, would simply have aborted the movement by making a brief trip over to the sepulcher of Joseph of Arimathea and unveiling Exhibit A. They did not do this, because they knew the tomb was empty. Their official explanation for it—that the disciples had stolen the body—was an admission that the sepulcher was indeed vacant.
The objection will inevitably arise: But the supposed failure of the authorities to produce Jesus’ body rests only on New Testament sources biased in favor of Christianity. True, it rests on them, but not only on them. In my book First Easter I discuss some important, yet long overlooked, evidence deriving from purely Jewish and Roman sources and tradition, ranging from Josephus to the fifth-century compilation called the Toledoth Jeshu. What is important about these references, which also admit an empty tomb, is their standing as what historians term “positive evidence from a hostile source,” which is the strongest kind of historical evidence. In essence, this means that if a source admits a fact decidedly not in its favor, then that fact is genuine. Or, as the ancients might put it: “If Cicero, who despised Catiline, admitted that the wretch had one good quality among a host of bad ones—courage—then we must conclude that Catiline was at least courageous.”
Well, into the second century A.D., and long after Matthew recorded its first instance, the Jerusalem authorities continued to admit an empty tomb by ascribing it to the disciples’ stealing the body. In his Dialogue With Trypho, Justin Martyr, who came from neighboring Samaria, reported c. 150 A.D. that Judean authorities even sent specially commissioned men across the Mediterranean to counter Christian claims with this explanation of the Resurrection (108).
The appeal to church fathers often strikes one as an appeal to a remote and secondary source, centuries after a biblical event. Not so in the case of Justin, one of the earliest and most important of the Christian apologists. He lived close to New Testament Judea in both space and time. He was intimately enough acquainted with other details of the life of Christ that he could report that Jesus was born in a cave at Bethlehem, not the traditional stable (Dialogue, 78), and that he personally had seen some plows and yokes made by Joseph and Jesus in their carpenter shop up in Nazareth, which he thought of excellent, durable quality (88).
A Datum Of History?
Does any early source, friendly or hostile, claim that Jesus’ tomb was occupied after that Easter, i.e., that the sepulcher was not empty, that a body still reposed inside it? Such a claim would have been an obvious slash through the Gordian knot of Resurrection proclamations in the early Church. Yet no authority in any way close to the event in space or time makes this claim—to my knowledge—for at least the first four centuries after Christ, though I am still researching this point and might be mistaken. The hostile sources agree that the tomb was empty!
Accordingly, if all the evidence is weighed carefully and fairly, it is indeed justifiable, according to the canons of historical research, to conclude that the sepulcher of Joseph of Arimathea, in which Jesus was buried, was actually empty on the morning of the first Easter. And no shed of evidence has yet been discovered in literary sources, epigraphy, or archaeology that would disprove this statement.
Does this, then, prove the Resurrection? No, certainly not. An empty tomb does not prove a resurrection, although the reverse is true: a resurrection would require an empty tomb. Its occupancy, indeed, would have effectively disproved it.
As with “proofs” for his own existence, God evidently requires that “leap of faith” beyond the empirical evidence in the case of the Resurrection. But it may be time for our history books, secular or religious, to include another datum after the otherwise objectively reported Crucifixion: “On the Sunday morning following his Friday execution, the tomb in which Jesus of Nazareth was buried … stood empty.”
