Mark 15:43there came Joseph of Arimathaea, a councillor of honorable estate, who also himself was looking for the kingdom of God; and he boldly went in unto Pilate, and asked for the body of Jesus. 44And Pilate marvelled if he were already dead: and calling unto him the centurion, he asked him whether he had been any while dead. 45And when he learned it of the centurion, he granted the corpse to Joseph. 46And he bought a linen cloth, and taking him down, wound him in the linen cloth, and laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of a rock; and he rolled a stone against the door of the tomb. 47And Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses beheld where he was laid.

Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. But historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the brush behind which skepticisms of various sorts have been hiding.

The climate of skepticism, has for the last two hundred years made it unfashionable and even embarrassing to suggest that Jesus’ resurrection really happened, was never and is not now a neutral position sociologically or politically.

The Enlightenment achieved a kind of intellectual overthrow of thought that convinced many people that we somehow now have new evidence for the fact that dead people do not rise, as though this was a modern discovery,

Looking at the evidence, the burial narratives of the New Testament Gospels deserve a fair reading. If their respective reports are coherent and if they accord with known literary and archaeological evidence, then they should be accepted.

The Gospels tell us that “Pilate … granted the body to Joseph … and laid it in a tomb” (Mark 15:42–46). According to Jewish law and custom, the executed criminal could not be buried in his family tomb. Instead, his body was to be placed in one of the burial vaults set aside for such persons ( Sanhedrin 6:5–6; Semahot 13.7). There it must remain, until the flesh has decomposed.

Because the Jewish Council (or Sanhedrin) delivered Jesus to the Roman authorities for execution, it was incumbent upon it to arrange for proper burial. This task fell to Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the council. The Gospel narrative is completely in step with Jewish practice.

The Gospels tell us that “Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid” (Mark 15:47). It was necessary for Jesus’ family and friends to observe the place where the body of Jesus was placed, for it was not placed in a tomb that belonged to his family or otherwise was under their control. The family and friends of Jesus anticipated recovering his skeletal remains, perhaps one year later, so that they “may be transferred from a wretched place to an honored place,” as the Jewish law allowed.

Jesus was placed in the tomb Friday afternoon. The first opportunity for anyone to visit the tomb, during daylight hours, was Sunday morning.

The Gospels tell us that “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb” (Mark 16:1b–2). The women’s intention to anoint the body of Jesus indicates their intention to mourn for their master in the tomb itself. In the cases of executed criminals, private mourning was allowed. The spices were to be used to perfume the corpse, in order to mask the unpleasant odor.

As the women approach the tomb, they ask, “Who will roll away the stone?” (Mark 16:3). Matthew says a guard was posted, to prevent the removal of Jesus’ body (Matt. 27:65–66). A custodian, whose placement in the vicinity of the tombs set aside for executed criminals was to see that burial laws were not violated. The most serious of
these laws was the prohibition against moving a body from a place of dishonor to a place of honor. The guard or custodian would also enforce the prohibition against public mourning for an executed criminal.

According to the Gospels, when the women arrived at the tomb of Jesus, “They saw that the stone … had already been rolled back” (Mark 16:4). Discovery of the opened and empty tomb would have dismayed the women, especially Mary, the mother of Jesus, when reported to her, for this would mean that the body of Jesus had apparently been relocated. Jesus had died on Friday, so Sunday was the third day of death. According to Jewish tradition, the face of the corpse was no longer recognizable on the fourth day.

Therefore, the women knew that if Jesus’ body was not found that day, then it probably would never be identified and therefore could not be claimed and transferred to his family tomb at some future date.

Their interpretation of what they saw that Sunday morning was informed by Jewish burial customs, not an expectation of Jesus’ resurrection.

When all pertinent data are taken into account, we have every reason to conclude that Jesus was properly buried the very day of his death. He was taken down from the cross before nightfall and was buried according to Jewish customs (Mark 15:42–16:4; 1 Cor. 15:4). Jesus was put to death as a criminal, and he was buried accordingly (Sanh. 6:5; Semahot 13.7).

Obligations to bury the dead properly, before sundown, to avoid defiling their sacred land, were keenly felt by Jews of late antiquity.

The discovery of the opened tomb and the absence of Jesus’ body threw the women into confusion and set the stage for a surprising and completely unexpected experience.

We must examine what exactly happened on the first Easter day.

Some will at once contend, however, that historical inquiry about the resurrection is extremely puzzling.

Beliefs about life after death are notoriously one of the more conservative things in a culture.

People may change their minds about other aspects of what they believe, but what they believe about death (including what they believe about how you should do funerals) tend to be pretty conservative

The early Christian worldview at this time was seriously Jewish, rather than pagan.

The early Christians held firmly to a view of a future hope that focused on resurrection. The early Christians seldom actually speak about going to heaven when they die. For them, at that time, the focus is not where you will be instantly after death. The focus is on where you will be in God’s new world, in the new creation, in the new heavens and the new earth.

The early Christians held firmly, as did the Pharisaic Jews: first an interim waiting period, and second a new bodily existence in a newly remade world, there is nothing like this in paganism.

The contemporary assumption today is, that we moderns, since we live in a scientific age, know in a new way that dead people do not come back to bodily life again.

This is really nothing more than Enlightenment rhetoric.

Everybody in the ancient world knew that when people were dead, they stayed dead. Even those Jews who believed in resurrection did not expect it to happen earlier on.

Martha’s response to Jesus at the raising of Lazarus reflects this. She fully associates Lazarus’s rising with the resurrection on the last day, not now (John 11:24).

C. S. Lewis once remarked that the reason Joseph was worried about Mary’s pregnancy was not because he did not know where babies came from, but because he did.

The ancient world was not ignorant. Some like to make out that it was, but in fact they knew a whole lot back then. We must beware of a kind of chronological snobbery, an assumed superiority to our ancient forebears.

The early Christians articulated their belief in resurrection within this very Jewish system of belief, but not without some significant alterations or mutations.

The first mutation is that within early Christianity there is virtually no spectrum of belief about resurrection.

There are a few local variations: at the end of Revelation, we have a double resurrection, but it does not seem to be as developed as in some of the other early Christian writings.

The second modification is similar: resurrection is not as important a belief in Second Temple Judaism as it is in early Christianity, where it is central and vital.

When one goes to the Dead Sea Scrolls, that resurrection is not a big topic in Qumran.. Yet for the early Christians it is absolutely central.

The third early Christian alteration was concerning the Second Temple Jewish belief about resurrection is a much more detailed view of what precisely resurrection means. If you look at Second Temple Jewish texts, you can see some like 2 Maccabees 7, where it really appears as though resurrection is going to mean simply coming back into a body very much like this one. In early Christianity, by contrast, we have much more precision about what sort of a body the resurrection body will be. The answer is that it will be a transformed body.

Paul is the one who sets this out most clearly. Unfortunately, though, the passage in which he does this is one of the most misunderstood in all his writings. In 1 Corinthians 15, he speaks of the present body and the future body, and he describes them both in some detail.

You can see this very clearly in Romans 8:9–11,

The fourth alternation is that the resurrection, as an event, has split into two. Jews who believed in resurrection believed that it would occur on the last day when God made the new heavens and new earth. It would happen to everyone altogether. Nobody ever imagined that this final event would be anticipated in the case of one person in the present. No first-century Jew, prior to Easter, expected it to be anything other than that large-scale, last-minute, all people event.

The fifth modification from within the Jewish belief is that the early Christians developed a quite new metaphorical use of “resurrection.” Ever since Ezekiel 37 and the story of the valley of dry bones—a metaphor for the restoration of Israel, the return from exile, the new exodus.

In early Christianity that particular metaphorical use has disappeared virtually without trace, with only one little line (in Rom. 11:15) that might conceivably be seen as an echo of it.

The sixth modification of the Jewish resurrection belief was its association with messiahship. At that time, nobody expected that the Messiah would be raised from the dead, for the simple reason that nobody expected that the Messiah would be killed in the first place.

Everybody knows that it is the job of the Messiah to defeat the pagan enemy, to rebuild the temple, and to bring God’s justice to the world.

You see, after Jesus of Nazareth had been executed, anybody two days, three days, three weeks, or three years after that would never have said he was the Messiah, unless something extraordinary had happened to convince them that God had vindicated him—something grander than simply going to heaven in some glorious exalted state.

Because of the early Christian belief in Jesus as Messiah, we find the development of the very early belief that Jesus is Lord—and therefore that Caesar is not. As early as Paul, the resurrection of Jesus—and the future resurrection of all his people—is the foundation of Christian allegiance to a different king, a different Lord. Resurrection was not, and is not, a soft way of talking about death itself. Resurrection is a way of saying that death is overthrown, and with that overthrow, the power of those who depend on it has gone

Resurrection means making the public claim about Jesus that challenges other public constructs of reality, other political as well as spiritual powers.

The seventh modification within the Jewish belief in resurrection is called “collaborative eschatology.” With the resurrection of Jesus, the early Christians believed not only that God had begun the long-awaited new creation, but that he had enlisted them, through the spirit of Jesus, as helpers within that project.

After Easter, new creation isn’t simply something the Christians waited for. It is something in which they were called to help.

STRANGE FEATURES OF THE RESURRECTION

First, as we read the Easter stories, we note the strange absence of Scripture in them.
These stories, though written down later, actually reflect the very, very early, prereflective eyewitness accounts in which people had not even begun to wonder whether or not this strange set of events fulfilled certain Scriptures.

The second strange feature of the resurrection stories is the presence of women as the primary witnesses. Whether we like it or not, women were simply not regarded as credible witnesses in the ancient world. When it came to public apologetics, in that world, it would have been very embarrassing to think that your main witnesses to this extraordinary event were women, not least someone with the extraordinary reputation of Mary Magdalene.

The third strange feature, which goes with the third modification of the Jewish resurrection belief, is the portrait of Jesus himself. This kind of account is without precedent. No biblical text predicts that the resurrection will involve this kind of body.

The event is interpreted in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it has a very “this-worldly” meaning, relating to what is happening here and now. “Jesus is raised,” they say, “therefore he is the Messiah; he is the true Lord of the whole world; therefore we, his followers, have a job to do: we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world.” “Jesus is raised, therefore God’s new world has begun, and therefore we, you, and everybody else are invited to be not only beneficiaries of that new world but participants in making it happen.”

SO WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AND HOW CAN WE KNOW IT?

The only way we can explain the phenomena we have been observing is by hypothesizing two things: first, that Jesus’ tomb was really empty; second, that the disciples really did encounter him in a way which convinced them that he was not simply a ghost or a hallucination

Many who doubt the truth of the Gospels have this twentieth-century disease called cognitive dissonance, where they make up stories about something glorious that has happened in order to try to come to terms with their grief.

Thus, what happens in the real world actually matters. If somebody came off the street and accused the church treasurer of running off with the money, it would not do to say, “Did you mean that in some metaphorical sense The “truth” of the crucifixion story would be totally undermined if it could be proved that Jesus died of pneumonia in Galilee, even though of course the crucifixion sets off all kinds of metaphorical resonances in the minds of people ancient and modern. And the “truth” of the resurrection story is like that too. If it didn’t happen, it isn’t true.

All this brings us, then, face to face with the ultimate question. The empty tomb and the meetings with Jesus are, I believe, solidly established as historical data. They are the only possible explanation for those Easter stories, and for those modifications in the Jewish beliefs that grew up so quickly.