Tales From the Empty Tomb

“Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?”

My vinyl of "Carman, Sunday's On The Way."  
You can listen to the song here.

I remember, at eight years old, listening to the Christian entertainer, Carman. I especially enjoyed his comical and inspirational "Sunday's On The Way" song in which Satan was worrying about Jesus rising from dead. The devil, "took his crooked finger, And he dialed the phone by his bed, To call an old friend, to see if he was still dead.

"Hey grave, what's going on, did my plan fail?"

Grave just laughed and said,"The dude's dead as nails."

At the end of the song, as predicted, Jesus wakes up and comes out of the grave alive again.

"Well the stone was rolled away and it bounced a time or two. An angel stepped inside and said, "I'm Gabriel, who are you? If you're looking for the Lord here, in this very hour, I tell you he's alive again, with resurrection power!""

 I'd heard many sermons retelling this story, focused on the "fact" of the empty tomb of Jesus as evidence for his resurrection. I would even preach, "Muhammad's still in his grave, every prophet, cult leader and Messiah remains in their graves with one notable exception: Jesus! He's alive and well!" Or so I was lead to believe. You could look up pictures of Jesus' empty tomb in the Bible Encyclopedia. I even worshiped at one of the "historic" tomb sites in Jerusalem in 1998. I trusted in what all the preachers and so-called "experts" had so confidently concluded was the actual empty tomb of Jesus as described in the gospels. They did the homework for us and I trusted these humble servants of Christ.

     If Jesus in fact had a tomb and it can be authenticated with evidence, then all of the people of the world ought to take the New Testament much more seriously. Tangible proof of an empty tomb would add more weight to the believers' claims. But there is just one little problem: There is no such place in existence!

     Let's take a look at the evidence we have for this tomb, starting with the gospel of Mark. We will start here since it is the earliest gospel that Matthew and Luke used as source material. The problem is that Mark has a very different account of the events following Jesus' death than his successors (Matthew, Luke and John) do. The four accounts contain numerous contradictions and problems that simply cannot be worked out without deleting contradictory information. If we take the gospels seriously, we are left with many questions like:

Unfortunately, finding Jesus' empty tomb
isn't as easy as reading this sign.

Who first went to the tomb?

How many women went to the tomb?

Did any male disciples go the tomb?

Did Peter go into the empty tomb or not?

Was there anyone at the tomb already?

How many men or angels were at the tomb?

Was Jesus at the tomb?

Was the tomb guarded?

Was the stone rolled away already or was it still there?

Did the women tell anyone what happened or not?

When did Jesus resurrect, before dawn or after?

Where were the disciples at the empty tomb instructed to go, to faraway Galilee or stay right there in Jerusalem?

And the answer to any of these questions is: it depends on which gospel you read! Each gospel tells contradictory, irreconcilable details about the resurrection of Jesus and the empty tomb.

The one size fits all answer to these questions that apologists give us is usually this: Each gospel author gave different eyewitness’ perspectives in their accounts. This is why the stories differ in various points. However, conceding such is likewise conceding that the gospels cannot be trusted as reliable sources of information about the historical Jesus. Either one gospel is accurate and the others aren't or they are all inaccurate.

Which brings us to the empty tomb. There are no historical references of the day stating that worshipers met at Jesus’ empty tomb or made pilgrimage to it. In fact, around 325 CE, Eusebius wrote that the early Christians did not enshrine any such site. Surely this site would have been venerated by the early church. The Jews venerated the tombs of the prophets and kings, Mat. 23:29. King David’s supposed tomb was in veneration at the time (Acts 2:29). Surely, Jesus’ tomb would have been the most sacred site in Christianity. But there has been absolutely no archaeological or historical evidence found identifying such a tomb.

"Ascension Rock," where Jesus supposedly
lifted off on his trip back up into heaven.

A visit to Israel would suggest otherwise in this case. Not only is Jesus’ tomb(s) available for a visit, but you can find every place from the exact spot where Jesus was born, the place where he fed the five thousand, the exact spot where he died and even the exact spot in the rock on the ground bearing Jesus’ footprint he made when he lifted off into heaven! Pretty much every story in the gospels has a site attached to it. There is and has been plenty of interest in any site somehow connected to Jesus or any other prophet, mostly to make profits. To suggest that there was no interest in an empty tomb in which the savior of the world raised from the dead would be a gross mistake and an exception to the rule.  

In Mark 16:1-3, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome brought spices to anoint Jesus’ body. They asked themselves, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” Now not only was it not customary to anoint an already buried body as John 19:20 states, but why should anyone be expected to be standing by, at a tomb, waiting to roll a stone away just in case anyone wanted inside a new tomb to get at a body?

Mat. 27:66 elaborates and says that the tomb was sealed shut with much wax, a Roman seal and posted guards. Mark suspiciously fails to mention any of this. I think it's obvious that Matthew is embellishing the story due to Mark’s pointed lack of details. Reading Mark alone would create many questions which Matthew, Luke and John tried answering in their respective gospels. Matthew begins his account by adding a great earthquake and an angel with an appearance like lightning descending from the sky and rolling away the stone. The Roman guards shake and pass out from fear. For some reason the women, two of them instead of three this time, aren't afraid or passing out like tjhe soldiers. After the angel tells them a longer explanation of what happened, he also tells them to go to Galilee and meet up with Jesus. And, unlike the fearful and silent women in Mark, the women in Matthew “departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” Mat. 28:8. They went from being afraid and keeping it a secret to being filled with great joy and telling everyone. Hmmm...

In Luke it’s more complicated yet. Joseph of Arimathea, a "Jewish town" (not a real place), suddenly gains an emergency audience with Pilate and gets permission to bury Jesus in his own tomb. Pilate graciously consents for some reason and Joseph runs back out of town to the crucifixion sight to get Jesus’ body in a matter of minutes. Then Jesus is wrapped in linen and buried right in front of the women.  They go and prepare spices for his body and wait a full day for the Sabbath to pass before returning to the tomb. They arrive to find now two angels instead of one man or one angel. The stone is already rolled away. This time they’re afraid of the angels instead of filled with joy. Salome is gone but Joanna is there in her place instead. The women then go and tell the rest of the male disciples but they aren't believed anyhow. The disciples always seemed to get everything to do with Jesus exactly wrong. 

Now John's gospel has a very different story. This time it’s only Mary Magdalene. She finds the tomb with the stone mysteriously rolled away. Rather than investigate inside the tomb, she goes and tells the disciples what happened. Peter and John run to the tomb. Then Peter goes inside alone to find the linen burial cloth folded up nice and neat. Jesus must have walked out of there naked. There's no thought of a stolen body or some other more likely explanation. So naturally, the men immediately go back home (I'm being facetious). After they leave, Mary Magdalene sees two angels inside the tomb. She’s not at all afraid of them and she just asks them where Jesus' body is. Then Jesus comes up from behind and greets her.

Notice how different each telling is. The disciples all had trouble believing in the resurrection in spite of the stories from the women and Jesus' numerous predictions of such. In Mark’s case the women kept the resurrection a secret and the story ended right there. The resurrection addendum in Mark 16:9-20 was added as an afterthought later on and contradicts Mark 16:8. Matthew, Luke and John's accounts appear to be ad hoc. This may be due to the fact that the empty tomb story was changed to explain how the story of the resurrection got started since Mark originally left that out.

The most important event in the Christian faith is also the most disagreed upon story told in the gospels. Not one single detail of the empty tomb account is agreed upon in any of the gospels other than that there was a tomb. They each contradict each other. They each progressively embellish and change the story from the previous renditions. Mark started off with an empty tomb and a mystery man. The tale then snowballed three different ways from there. And why? 



The Apostle who started it all: Paul, otherwise known as Sha'ul.

Enter: the Apostle Paul. Paul wrote the earliest portions of the New Testament, his seven "authenticated" letters. He is our best source of information regarding the historical Jesus, if there was one, because the gospels contain much evidence suggesting that they were heavily influenced by Paul's teaching found in his epistles. And this fact is very troubling if we want to find out much of anything about a historical Jesus. Paul lived far from where Jesus supposedly lived and he never even met him.

In his epistles, Paul regularly criticized his apostolic competitors as not preaching the true gospel that he was preaching, Gal. 1:6-24. In his seven epistles he never mentions an empty tomb as a part of his gospel message. Interestingly, he mentions Christ being buried, 1 Cor. 15:4. And being that Acts, which written by the same author as Luke's gospel (who was a follower of Paul), mentions nothing of the empty tomb, it seems the empty tomb tales are late additions to the gospels, written in response to the lack of a tomb in the original tale. Neither Luke, James, Peter nor Paul asked their audiences to explain away the empty tomb as evidence for Christ’s resurrection. Why not?


I believe the answer is twofold. First, the story was originally simply made up by Mark’s author. This is the most feasible explanation. No one knew where Jesus’ tomb was located if there was one at all, which is doubtful. Crucifixion victims were typically thrown into the burning garbage heap of Gehenna. Jesus’ body would have decomposed beyond recognition quickly leaving no recognizable evidence of his death behind. Jesus’ distraught and disillusioned disciples were experiencing extreme emotional trauma which may have stress induced “visions” of the resurrected Jesus, as has been thoroughly documented to be a common phenomenon. This would explain why all the stories differed so greatly, they were completely fictional. This would also explain why there was no empty tomb stories in circulation when Mark was penned.

"... We shall all be changed, in a moment.
in a twinkling of an eye." 1 Cor. 15:51-52.

Secondly, Paul's Jesus was not resurrected in a literal or physical sense, but a spiritual one. 1 Cor. 15 explains Paul's view of the resurrection. "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?...  It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being;” the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual." 1 Cor. 15:35, 44-46. Paul clearly marks a distinction between our current, physical bodies and our future, spiritual bodies. "I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." 1 Cor. 15:50.

Paul never refers to a physical resurrection in the sense of a resuscitated body. And curiously enough, Mark's gospel doesn't either. The concept of a physical resurrection evolved after Mark was in circulation and then later Matthew, Luke and John were written. Mark may very well have been intended to be metaphorical, tragic drama as opposed to an accurate historical account of Christ. There are numerous allusions to Old Testament characters, stories and passages of the prophets in the stories and teachings of Jesus in Mark. This suggests that the stories were fictionalized scenarios designed to put both Paul's teachings into Jesus' life and teachings. Paul's specific teachings found in his epistles are alluded to over and over in Mark's gospel. 

Mark, Luke, John and especially Matthew each took a handful of passages in the Old Testament out of their contexts and applied them to Jesus as though they were prophetically foretelling Jesus' life. These passages were not originally intended to be predictions of anything at all. The Psalms were prayers and songs of praise to God, but they weren't prophetic predictions of a Messiah. This metaphorical method of interpreting a secret, below the surface meaning of scripture is called Midrash. Midrash seems to be the main way that Christians interpreted the Old Testament in order to get it to fit with their vision of Jesus, Col. 2:17. They reinterpreted the entire Old Testament in Midrashic form in order to make it appear that Jesus is the prophesied Messiah, the King of Israel. However, there is little to no evidence that any of the Jews were anticipating a suffering or dying messiah other than possibly the small sect of the Essenes.

Here is my rough synopsis of the origin of the gospel. Jesus was probably a real person who was believed to be a prophet of the apocalyptic end of the age. He was arrested and crucified for some alleged crime against Rome. After he died, his close followers tried to make sense of his death. Some of them had hallucinatory experiences, dreams and “visions” of a resurrected Jesus. But this resurrection was not a bodily resurrection; it was some kind of spiritual resurrection which is different, 1 Cor. 15:44.

Paul had some kind of experience, possibly a stress induced seizure or some kind of ecstatic charismatic experience which he interpreted as an encounter with the living resurrected Jesus. Paul then went and reinterpreted the Bible, which was the Old Testament alone, and saw Christ in its stories and teachings. This was the Jesus he preached.

Then, when he actually met Jesus’ close associates, Peter and James, a conflict erupted. The original apostles preached a different gospel than Paul and his resurrected living Christ. They disagreed and parted company. Then Paul began to preach against any other version of the gospel that he himself preached. One of his followers capitalized on the need for a work that collected the teachings of Paul about Jesus into a narrative that explained Paul’s gospel while at the same time making the original apostles of Christ appear to be very confused about Jesus' teachings and his death's meaning. Hence, the gospel of Mark was written for just such a need. Mark was not an historical account. The author had never met Jesus nor his apostles or even stepped foot in Judea. Then the authors of Matthew and Luke picked Mark up and elaborated and embellished his stories to answer more questions and develop the myth of Christ further, adding a virgin conception, more fantastic miracles and a resurrection complete with an ever growing number of postmortem appearances.

The reason that the gospels have such wildly conflicting reports of the resurrection and the empty tomb is because the entire story was written as a fictional medium for teaching Paul's concepts of the gospel. Paul never met Jesus in person. The gospels’ authors never met Jesus (The titles of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were added later in order to make the gospels appear to be eyewitness accounts of the apostles themselves). No one who had even met Jesus once wrote anything that is now the New Testament documents. And as shocking as it seems, no Christian or anyone alive since the first century has ever met the real Jesus. In fact, Paul said next to nothing about Jesus life and teachings as reported in the gospels. The gospels appear to be a dramatic medium for Paul's teachings. 

Is it feasible that Jesus’ followers and Paul may have had hallucinatory visions or dreams of a resurrected Jesus, making sense of his death as part of God’s end time plan to save gentiles as well as the faithful remnant of Israel? Such postmortem appearances of loved ones, sometimes even in groups has been thoroughly documented. It is entirely possible that such experiences inspired Paul to create his gospel teachings. As I mentioned in a previous post, I myself had such an experience at an early age. All my life I’d heard about how my family members had experiences with Jesus, angels and/or demons. Of course these were real, or so I thought as a child and young adult. But it turns out that such experiences are not that uncommon with people going through emotional stress coupled with faith in such things. You don't have to be schizophrenic to have a hallucinatory experience. How many stories have you heard of people having some strange experiences of a recently deceased family member somehow communicating with them from the grave? This is the stuff of ghost stories.

Another fictional tale is the Easter Bunny.

Let’s face it. The gospels aren't accurate accounts of the historical Jesus. They are fictional stories intended to bring a narrative to Paul’s gospel of Jesus Christ, the risen Lord of faith. Easter is just a tale no more historically accurate than it's modern counterpart of a bunny which lays pastel colored chocolate eggs. Jesus was actually killed in an unpredicted surprise and to the shock of his followers. He never taught that he was divine. He never predicted his death. He didn't rise from the dead. These are all concepts which evolved via something like the game of telephone and the snowball effect in the decades following his death.

It's safe to say that as a thinking adult, you can lay this story to rest and enjoy your Easter candy in peace. And for the record, the Easter bunny isn't real either. Nor is he concocted by Satan to be a distraction from Christ as I was taught. He's just a fun way to celebrate the coming of Spring again and adding some cuteness to a holiday otherwise noted by a naked Jew being nailed to a stick and then resurrecting three days later. Bunnies and candy are so much more enjoyable  than that. Happy Easter!