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Verdict on the Empty Tomb by Val Grieve. Val Grieve is a law graduate of Oxford University. He has practiced as a lawyer in Manchester, England, for over twenty-five years. Before his conversion to Christianity at the age of eighteen he was an atheist and one of the main factors in his conversion was the evidence for the Christian faith. In his booklet he examines the evidence for and against the Resurrection and you are a member of the jury. But in the end, the verdict is yours.
The most important question in the world is whether Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is alive today. The Resurrection is the very heart of the Christian faith. If you read carefully through all the thirteen messages in the book of Acts, all these messages had one thing in common. Namely, that Jesus is alive and that He is changing people’s lives. The word Resurrection is mentioned more than one hundred times in the New Testament and nearly every book refers to it. Christianity is all about that Christ not only lived and died but on the third day He rose again from the dead. Without the Resurrection there is no gospel. ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile’ (1 Corinthians 15:17).
The Resurrection makes the Christianity unique. In no other religion we find its followers saying that its founder is God, that He rose from the dead and is alive today changing people’s lives.
The Resurrection is the answer to two great questions about life:
1. Is this universe just a closed system or is there an eternal being behind it all? The answer of the Christian faith to this is that, not only is there a God, but God came into this world in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus claimed this when He said ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ and ‘I and the Father are one’ (John 14:9 and 10:30). Also, Jesus prophesied that He would both die and then rise again on the third day. The Resurrection is the great proof that these claims of Jesus were true and that He was none other than God Himself. ‘He was declared with power to be the Son of God by His Resurrection from the dead’ (Romans 1:4).
2. Is there life after death? Job asked ‘If a man dies, will he live again?’ (Job 14:14). The statistics about death are very impressive. One out of one dies! Now, if Jesus really rose again from the dead, this age old question has once and for all been answered. There is a life after death because someone, namely Jesus, has come back from the dead and told us what life beyond the grave is like. Jesus claimed that all those who have faith in Him will live forever.
We must examine and make up our mind as to whether Jesus Christ rose from the dead. What are the facts about Christ? History tells us three things:
1. He lived nearly two thousand years ago.
2. He was crucified on a cross.
3. Three days later His body had disappeared from the tomb where it had been buried.
These facts are borne out by the eye-witness accounts contained in the New Testament. We cannot dismiss these accounts by saying that the writers were Christians. We also have the evidence of non-Christians. The first mention of Christ and the Christians is in the Police News of that day. Tacitus wrote in about AD 115 of the fire of Rome and Nero’s attempt to fasten the blame on the Christians. He tells us that Christ, from whom they took their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was Emperor. Also, the Jewish historian Josephus tells of ‘Jesus the so-called Christ.’
‘At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. And his conduct was good and he was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and from the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. And those who had become his disciple did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and he was alive’.
Lastly, there is evidence about Jesus from archaeology. In 1945 an Israeli professor discovered a sealed tomb in a suburb outside Jerusalem. In it were five bone caskets; from their style and a coin found there it is clear that the tomb was closed in approximately AD 50. On two of the bone caskets the name of Jesus appears clearly in prayers to Him. These prayers point to Jesus as the risen Son of God, who can raise from the dead.
The vital question is, ‘What happened to Jesus? How did His tomb become empty?’ There are only four possible answers –fraud, swoon, delusion and miracle.
The earliest explanation as to how the tomb of Jesus became empty we find in the gospel of Matthew. After Jesus was crucified, the Jews asked the permission of Pontius Pilate for a Roman guard to be mounted outside the tomb in case anything happened. According to this explanation the guard then fell asleep and the disciples came by night and stole the body of Jesus.
From Roman history we know a great deal about the Roman army and its military discipline.
A Roman guard was a sixteen man security unit. If one man in the guard failed in his duty, he was automatically executed along with the other fifteen.
In view of this, it seems incredible that the whole of the Roman guard fell asleep on duty at the same time.
If the disciples stole the body of Jesus, what was the point of leaving the grave clothes behind? Especially as time was at a premium with, according to this explanation, the Roman guard conveniently asleep outside!
Behind nearly every crime there is a motive. What was the motive here? Nearly every one of the early disciples died for their faith. Why did they do this? They had nothing to gain but everything to lose.
If the body was stolen, sooner or later someone would have told the truth and given the disciples away. This never happened, and there is no trace of any place in the vicinity being venerated as Christ’s actual grave.
This explanation is contrary to what we know about the disciples. Their number was down handful. They were depressed, afraid and leaderless. It seems inconceivable that they could have then suddenly became brave and daring enough to face the Roman guard at the tomb and steal the body of Jesus.
Jesus did not die on the cross, but fainted or swooned from exhaustion. After this He revived in the cool of the tomb, and when He emerged the disciples wrongly jumped to the conclusion that He had risen from the dead. This explanation has also been given a modern twist by Dr Hugh J Schonfield in his book ‘The Passover Plot. It says, when Jesus on the cross cried out, ‘I thirst’ He was drugged with wine. Again Jesus was thought to be dead, though this was not the case.
Did Jesus really die on the cross? Was He drugged? The facts do not support this theory. The roman soldiers knew their job well. Pilate, would never have given permission for Joseph to bury the body of Jesus unless he was absolutely sure that he was dead. Also Dr Hugh J Schonfield ignores a very important detail. John in his gospel tells us that one of the Roman soldiers pierced the side of Jesus with a spear ‘bringing a sudden flow of blood and water’ (John 19:34). There can be bleeding after death. What is the explanation of the blood and water? Professor of Surgery at Bristol University states that:
As a result of the spiritual and physical agony endured by Christ, a condition of acute dilation of the stomach may have developed and the spear would draw watery fluid from the stomach, and blood from the heart and great vessels of the thorax. Needless to say such a wound would be instantly fatal if the victim was not already dead, as indeed he was.
If Jesus revived in the tomb He must have been in an extremely weak condition: He endured a Roman flogging, He was crucified and left to hang on the cross through the mounting heat of the day, He was without food or water for three days. Then He manage from inside to move a huge stone and escape from the guards outside? Then, how was it that in this extremely weak condition He was ever able to convince anyone that He was conqueror over death and the grave?
Jesus must have perpetrated a deliberate fraud by passing Himself off as one risen from the dead. The previous explanation leaves us with fraudulent disciples, but this one leaves us with a fraudulent Jesus. On grounds like these, swoon must be ruled out as a possibility.
Delusion often arise due to someone expecting something so much that eventually he believes it has happened. The disciples expected Jesus to rise from the dead. This expectation led to hallucination. The whole thing was wish fulfillment and it was ‘all in the mind’.
Its basic assumption is that the disciples expected Jesus to rise from the dead. But the reverse is the case. The Resurrection caught the disciples by surprise. They were unbelieving and incredulous. The truth is that it was not the disciples who convinced themselves that Jesus was alive – it was Jesus who had to convince them.
There are certain laws which psychiatrists say delusions must conform to:
-Only particular kinds of people such as the highly imaginative suffer from them. Here all types of people claim to have seen Christ.
-Delusions are very individualistic and extremely subjective. It is highly unlikely that two persons would have the same one at the same time. But here we find a group of over five hundred people who all saw Christ alive again at the same time! (1 Corinthians 15:6).
-Delusions usually increase in intensity and occur regularly over a long period. But here they stopped suddenly after only forty days and did nor occur again.
To maintain that the disciples were suffering from a delusion is completely to ignore the evidence. Above all, any explanation as to how the tomb of Jesus became empty must cover all the facts. This one does not. If the disciples were deluded, then all the Jews had to do was to produce the body of Jesus. They could not do this, for there was no body to produce. The tomb was empty! Our original question ‘What happened to Jesus?’ still stands.
This is the answer of the early Christians to our question, ‘What happened to Jesus?’ According to them, He rose from the dead leaving an empty tomb. He then appeared to them and changed their lives. A miracle took place. What are the facts then? What evidence is there for the miracle of the Resurrection of Christ from the dead? There is much more evidence than most people think. There are three types of evidence for the Resurrection.
The best direct evidence would be that of witnesses who actually saw Him after his Resurrection, and that is exactly what we have in the pages of the New Testament. It records no less than twelve appearances of the risen Christ to individuals. The evidence of all these witnesses is particularly impressive when we notice six things about it:
1. The number of witnesses involved, there must have been over 550 people who saw Christ after he had risen again from the dead.
2. Their accounts of the Resurrection are independent of each other. On a superficial reading of them, there may appear to be points of disagreement, but closer examination reveals that they are complementary and not contradictory. This is exactly what would be expect from independent witnesses. Any court would be suspicious of witnesses who agreed with each other word for word.
3. These witnesses either wrote as eye-witnesses of the Resurrection or recorded eye-witness accounts of it. On the whole their evidence was first hand and not hearsay.
4. The evidence of the witnesses is empirical, it is based on observation and experiment and not on theory. These early disciples tell us what they saw Christ for themselves, and, as already mentioned, on one occasion more than 550 people saw Him at once. They also heard Christ speak to them and, in fact, the two walking to Emmaus talked with Him for more than two hours, they actually touched Christ. Mary Magdalene and the others, ‘held him by the feet’ (Matthew 28:9). Their three highest senses –sight, hearing, and touch – were all involved.
5. The witnesses corroborate each other. The general rule in law is that the testimony of one witness is sufficient to prove the existence of a fact. However, corroboration, while not essential, is always desirable, as it can turn a probability into a certainty. This is what we have here. Each telling the same thing in his or her own way, the evidence of one backing up the evidence of others.
6. The witnesses for the Resurrection include men and woman of outstanding character, whose evidence would be accepted in any court of law. Sometimes it is said that these witnesses were simple men and women who believe anything. Also, it is said that Jesus only appeared to His disciples. This is simply not the case and one of the greatest witnesses for the Resurrection is the apostle, Paul. No one can possibly say that he was simple. After all, he was a lawyer! Also, it cannot be said that Paul was one of the early disciples. In fact, he was public enemy number one of the early Church.
Direct evidence deals with the fact in issue, namely, ‘Did Christ rise from the dead?’ Circumstantial evidence is different, this deals with other facts from which the fact in issue may be inferred. There are four things which cannot be explained unless the miracle of the resurrection took place:
1. The life of Jesus.
It is extremely difficult to believe that an ordinary person could rise from the dead. But Jesus Christ is certainly no ordinary person. Even unbelievers have admitted this and have paid tribute to his teaching and character.
Atheist and philosopher Bertrand Russell said:
‘There are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do!’
Albert Einstein a Jewish scientist, said:
‘No man can deny the fact that Jesus existed, nor that his sayings are beautiful. No man can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. I am a Jew but am enthralled by the luminous figure if the Nazarene.’
Somehow, whilst each of them may be hostile to the Church, they are friendly towards Jesus Christ. Even in these days Jesus is considered unique by common consent; the greatest man who ever lived. This being so, it is not so difficult to believe another unique thing about him; namely that He rose from the dead. Christ’s teaching and life demand the miracle of his Resurrection.
2. Change in the disciples.
Jesus’ crucifixion was shattering to his disciples. It left them stunned, leaderless and in complete despair. All their hopes were ended. Suddenly these same disciples were utterly changed and became completely different. Peter denied on three occasions that he ever knew Jesus, some fifty days later on the day of Pentecost this same Peter risked his life by boldly telling the whole of Jerusalem that he had seen Jesus risen from the dead. Thomas, always questioning and looking for proof, he was incredulous and unbelieving. One week later Thomas saw Jesus and cried out, ‘My Lord and my God.’ The change in his life was certainly not wish-fulfillment. Thomas never expected to see the risen Christ, and yet he did. Something tremendous must have happened to transform lives in this way. The change in the disciples demonstrates the miracle of Christ’s Resurrection.
3. The existence of Christianity.
The existence of Christianity is a historical fact which demands an explanation. Any such explanation must deal with four basic facts about the early Church:
-Its origin: Within seven weeks of the death of Jesus, they began their mission to the very city that crucified Him. Immediately upon hearing about Jesus being alive, over three thousand became Christians. Shortly after a further five thousand men believed, as well as a large number of the priests. Something phenomenal must have happened for such an impact to be made. Without the Resurrection, Christianity would never have got off the ground.
-Its members: We hear much today about racial prejudice, but this is nothing new. In fact, at the time of Christ, the prejudice of the Jews against the Gentiles was much worse than anything we have. Yet we find that the members of the early Church were both Jews and Gentiles. They were one in their experience of the power of the living Christ. How could this come about without the miracle of the Resurrection?
-Its worship: The Jews kept the seventh day, Saturday, as their day of worship, but from an early date the Christians kept the Sunday. This change was remarkable, especially as the early Church was made up mainly of converted Jews, who were fanatical observers of the Sabbath.. What, then, lay behind this sudden change? The answer is found in an early second-century document known as the Epistle of Barnabas: ‘Therefore we keep the eight day with joyfulness, the day on which Jesus rose from the dead’. Only the Resurrection can explain the keeping of Sunday as a day of worship.
-Its growth: Christianity is one of the greatest movements in the world’s history. It can only be accounted for by an initial impact of colossal drive and power. The existence of the Christianity requires the miracle of the Resurrection of Christ.
4. The experience of Christians
From the first Easter Sunday until today there is an unbroken succession of millions who can witness that their lives have been revolutionized by contact with the living Christ. Rich and poor, educated and uneducated, people of different backgrounds, nationalities, cultures and temperaments unite in uniform testimony to the Resurrection. Real Christianity is not ancient history but current events. Jesus is still alive today changing people’s lives and the experience of Christians all down the ages confirms this.
The direct evidence of the disciples that they saw Christ, coupled with the strong chain of circumstantial evidence we have just examined, amount to extremely strong evidence in favour of the miracle of the Resurrection. We can also add real evidence. What is the real evidence for the Resurrection of Christ? The most real evidence for the Resurrection must be Christ Himself. If Christ rose from the dead, this means that He is living today and that we can experience His power in our lives. This is the greatest proof of all. Direct and circumstantial evidence prove that it is reasonable to believe in the miracle of the Resurrection. An encounter with the living Christ takes the matter a stage further. If He really rose from the dead, then we can meet Him for ourselves and know beyond a shadow of doubt that He is alive and God Himself. We can move from the realm of reason to the realm of experience and know Jesus for ourselves.
As we saw in the beginning, a member of a jury has two duties. The first is to be unbiased and the second is to give a verdict. We cannot be neutral. It is either the greatest fact in the world’s history or the greatest deception of all time. There is no middle ground. The most important question in the world is, ‘Did Christ rise from the dead?’ Our original question, ‘What happened to Jesus?’ still stands. Fraud, swoon and delusion seem to have been ruled out. The only reasonable answer is that the miracle of the Resurrection took place. In fact, the evidence for this is so overwhelming that a former Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Darling, once said:
‘No intelligent jury in the world can fail to bring in a verdict that the Resurrection story is true’.
