How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee

CHAPTER 4

The Resurrection of Jesus

What We Cannot Know

I GIVE A LOT OF lectures around the country every year, not just at colleges and universities, but also for civic organizations, divinity schools, and churches. When I get invited to speak at a conservative evangelical school or church, it is almost always for a public debate, in which I am asked to engage with a conservative evangelical scholar on some topic of mutual interest, such as: “Can Historians Prove That Jesus Was Raised from the Dead?” or “Do We Have the Original Text of the New Testament?” or “Does the Bible Adequately Explain Why There Is Suffering?” For obvious reasons, these kinds of audiences tend to be less interested in hearing what I have to say than in seeing how a scholar of their own theological persuasion can respond to and refute my views. I understand that and actually enjoy these venues: the debates tend to be lively, and the audiences are almost always receptive and gracious, even if they think I’m a dangerous spokesperson for the dark side.

In more liberal churches and secular contexts I typically have free reign and more receptive audiences, who are eager to hear what scholars have to say about the history of the early Christian religion and about the New Testament from a historical perspective. I often speak, in those contexts, about the historical Jesus, laying out the view summarized in the previous chapter—that Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic prophet who was anticipating that God was soon to intervene in human affairs to overthrow the forces of evil and set up a good kingdom here on earth. As we have seen, this view was not unique to Jesus but could be found in the teachings of other apocalyptically minded Jews of his day.

When I deliver talks like this, I regularly and consistently get two questions from members of the audience. The first is, “If this is the view widely held among scholars, why have I never heard it before?” I’m afraid that this question has an easy but troubling answer. In most instances the view of Jesus that I have is similar to that taught—with variations here or there, of course—to ministerial candidates in the mainline denominational seminaries (Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian, and so on). So why have their parishioners never heard it before? Because their pastors haven’t told them. And why haven’t their pastors told them? I don’t know for sure, but from my conversations with former seminarians, I think that many pastors don’t want to make waves; or they don’t think their congregations are “ready” to hear what scholars are saying; or they don’t think that their congregations want to hear it. So they don’t tell them.

The second question is somewhat more intellectually challenging: “If other Jews in Jesus’s day taught this apocalyptic view, then . . . why Jesus? Why is it that Jesus started Christianity, the largest religion in the world, when other apocalyptic teachers are forgotten to history? Why did Jesus succeed where others failed?”

It’s a great question. Sometimes a person asking it thinks there is an obvious answer, namely, that Jesus must have been unique and completely unlike all the others who proclaimed this message. He was God, and they were humans, so of course he started a new religion and they didn’t. In this line of thinking, the only way to explain the enormous success of Christianity is to believe that God actually was behind it all.

The problem with this answer is that it ignores all the other great religions of the world. Do we want to say that all great and successful religions come from God himself and that their founders were “God”? Was Moses God? Mohammed? Buddha? Confucius? Moreover, the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the ancient Roman world is not necessarily an indication that God was on its side. Those who say so should think again about other religions of our world. Just as an example: the sociologist Rodney Stark has shown that during its first three hundred years, the Christian religion grew at a rate of 40 percent every decade. If Christianity started out as a relatively small group in the first century but had some three million followers by the early fourth century—that’s a 40 percent increase every ten years. What is striking to Stark is that this is the same growth rate of the Mormon church since it started in the nineteenth century. So these mainline Christians who think that God must have been behind Christianity or it would not have grown as quickly as it did—are they willing to say the same thing about the Mormon church (which they in fact tend not to support)?

And so we are left with our question: What is it that made Jesus so special? In fact, as we will see, it was not his message. That did not succeed much at all. Instead, it helped get him crucified—surely not a mark of spectacular success. No, what made Jesus different from all the others teaching a similar message was the claim that he had been raised from the dead. Belief in Jesus’s resurrection changed absolutely everything. Such a thing was not said of any of the other apocalyptic preachers of Jesus’s day, and the fact that it was said about Jesus made him unique. Without the belief in the resurrection, Jesus would have been a mere footnote in the annals of Jewish history. With the belief in the resurrection, we have the beginnings of the movement to promote Jesus to a superhuman plane. Belief in the resurrection is what eventually led his followers to claim that Jesus was God.

You will notice that I have worded the preceding sentences very carefully. I have not said that the resurrection is what made Jesus God. I have said that it was the belief in the resurrection that led some of his followers to claim he was God. This is because, as a historian, I do not think we can show—historically—that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead. To be clear, I am not saying the opposite either—that historians can use the historical disciplines in order to demonstrate that Jesus was not raised from the dead. I argue that when it comes to miracles such as the resurrection, historical sciences simply are of no help in establishing exactly what happened.

Religious faith and historical knowledge are two different ways of “knowing.” When I was at Moody Bible Institute, we affirmed wholeheartedly the words of Handel’s Messiah (taken from the book of Job in the Hebrew Bible): “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” But we “knew” this not because of historical investigation, but because of our faith. Whether Jesus is still alive today, because of his resurrection, or indeed whether any such great miracles have happened in the past, cannot be “known” by means of historical study, but only on the basis of faith. This is not because historians are required to adopt “unbelieving presuppositions” or “secular assumptions hostile to religion.” It is purely the result of the nature of historical inquiry itself—whether undertaken by believers or unbelievers—as I will try to explain later in this chapter.

At the same time, historians are able to talk about events that are not miraculous and that do not require faith in order to know about them, including the fact that some of the followers of Jesus (most of them? all of them?) came to believe that Jesus was physically raised from the dead. That belief is a historical fact. But other aspects of the accounts of Jesus’s death are historically problematic. In this chapter and the next I discuss both the facts we can know and the claims we cannot know, historically. We begin with what we are not able to say, either at all or with relative certainty, about the early Christian belief in the resurrection.

Why Historians Have Difficulty Discussing the Resurrection

I HAVE STRESSED THAT historians, in order to investigate the past, are necessarily restricted to doing so on the basis of surviving sources. There are sources that describe the events surrounding Jesus’s resurrection, and the first step to take in exploring the rise of the Christians’ early belief is to examine these sources. The most important ones are the Gospels of the New Testament, which are our earliest narratives of the discovery of Jesus’s empty tomb and of his appearances, after his crucifixion, to his disciples as the living Lord of life. Also critical to our exploration are the writings of Paul, who affirms with real fervor his belief that Jesus was actually, physically, raised from the dead.

The Resurrection Narratives of the Gospels

We have already seen why the Gospels are so problematic for historians who want to know what really happened. This is especially true for the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s resurrection. Are these the sorts of sources that historians would look for when examining a past event? Even apart from the fact that they were written forty to sixty-five years after the facts, by people who were not there to see these things happen, who were living in different parts of the world, at different times, and speaking different languages—apart from all this, they are filled with discrepancies, some of which cannot be reconciled. In fact, the Gospels disagree on nearly every detail in their resurrection narratives.

These narratives are found in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20–21. Read through the accounts and ask yourself some basic questions: Who was the first person to go to the tomb? Was it Mary Magdalene by herself (John)? or Mary along with another Mary (Matthew)? or Mary along with another Mary and Salome (Mark)? or Mary, Mary, Joanna, and a number of other women (Luke)? Was the stone already rolled away when they arrived at the tomb (Mark, Luke, and John), or explicitly not (Matthew)? Whom did they see there? An angel (Matthew), a man (Mark), or two men (Luke)? Did they immediately go and tell some of the disciples what they had seen (John), or not (Matthew, Mark, and Luke)? What did the person or people at the tomb tell the women to do? To tell the disciples that Jesus would meet them in Galilee (Matthew and Mark)? Or to remember what Jesus had told them earlier when he had been in Galilee (Luke)? Did the women then go tell the disciples what they were told to tell them (Matthew and Luke), or not (Mark)? Did the disciples see Jesus (Matthew, Luke, and John), or not (Mark)?¹ Where did they see him?—only in Galilee (Matthew), or only in Jerusalem (Luke)?

There are other discrepancies, but this is enough to get the point across. I should stress that some of these differences can scarcely be reconciled unless you do a lot of interpretive gymnastics when reading the texts. For example, what does one do with the fact that the women apparently meet different people at the tomb? In Mark, they meet one man; in Luke, two men; and in Matthew, one angel. The way this discrepancy is sometimes reconciled, by readers who can’t accept that there could be a genuine discrepancy in the text, is by saying that the women actually met two angels at the tomb. Matthew mentions only one of them but never denies there was a second one; moreover, the angels were in human guise, so Luke claims they were two men; Mark also mistakes the angels as men but mentions only one, not two, without denying there were two. And so the problem is easily solved! But it is solved in a very curious way indeed, for this solution is saying, in effect, that what really happened is what is not narrated by any of these Gospels: for none of them mentions two angels! This way of interpreting the texts does so by imagining a new text that is unlike any of the others, so as to reconcile the four to one another. Anyone is certainly free to construct their own Gospel if they want to, but that’s probably not the best way to interpret the Gospels that we already have.

Or take a second example—one that is even more glaring. Matthew is explicit when he says that the disciples are told to go to Galilee since that is where they will meet Jesus (28:7). They do so (28:16), and that is where Jesus meets them and gives them his final commands (28:17–20). This is both clear-cut and completely at odds with what happens in Luke. There, the disciples are not told to go to Galilee. The women are informed at the empty tomb, by the two men, that when Jesus had earlier been in Galilee, he had announced that he would be raised. Since the disciples are not told to go to Galilee, they do not do so. They stay in Jerusalem, in the land of Judea. And it is there that Jesus meets them “that very day” (24:13). Jesus speaks with them and emphatically instructs them not to leave the city until they receive the power of the Spirit, which happens more than forty days later, according to Acts 1–2 (that is, they are not to go to Galilee; 24:49). He leads them right outside Jerusalem, to nearby Bethany, and gives them his last instructions and departs from them (24:50–51). And we learn they did as he commanded: they stayed in the city, worshiping in the temple (24:53). In the book of Acts, written by the same author as the book of Luke, we find out that they stayed in Jerusalem for more than a month, until the day of Pentecost (Acts 1–2).

There is clearly a discrepancy here. In one Gospel the disciples immediately go to Galilee, and in the other they never go there. As New Testament scholar Raymond Brown—himself a Roman Catholic priest—has emphasized: “Thus we must reject the thesis that the Gospels can be harmonized through a rearrangement whereby Jesus appears several times to the Twelve, first in Jerusalem, then in Galilee. . . . The different Gospel accounts are narrativing, so far as substance is concerned, the same basic appearance to the Twelve, whether they locate it in Jerusalem or in Galilee.”²

Later we will explore further how this discrepancy matters for reconstructing the actual course of events. For now it is enough to note that the earliest Gospels say that when Jesus was arrested, his disciples fled the scene (Mark 14; Matt. 24:46). And the earliest accounts also suggest that it was in Galilee that they had visions of Jesus alive after the crucifixion (intimated in Mark 14:28; stated in Matthew 24). The most plausible explanation is that when the disciples fled the scene for fear of arrest, they left Jerusalem and went home, to Galilee. And it was there that they—or at least one or more of them—claimed to see Jesus alive again.

Some people have argued that if Jesus really was raised from the dead, it would have been such a spectacular event that of course in their excitement the eyewitnesses would have gotten a few details muddled. But my points in the discussion so far are rather simple. First, we are not dealing with eyewitnesses. We are dealing with authors living decades later in different lands speaking different languages and basing their tales on stories that had been in oral circulation during all the intervening years. Second, these accounts do not simply have minor discrepancies in a couple of details; they are clearly at odds with one another on point after point. They are not the kinds of sources that historians would hope for in determining what actually happened in the past. What about the witness of Paul?

The Writings of the Apostle Paul

Paul speaks of the resurrection of Jesus constantly throughout the seven letters that scholars agree he actually wrote.³ No passage states Paul’s views more clearly or forcefully than 1 Corinthians 15, the so-called resurrection chapter. In this chapter Paul is not intent on “proving” that Jesus was raised from the dead, as it is sometimes misread. Instead, he is assuming, with his readers, that Jesus really was raised; and he is using that assumption to make his bigger point, which is this: since Jesus was raised bodily from the dead, it is clear that his followers—despite what Paul’s Christian opponents are saying—have not yet experienced the future resurrection. The resurrection for Paul is not a spiritual matter unrelated to the body, as it was for some of his opponents. It is precisely the body that will be raised immortal on the last day, when Jesus returns in triumph from heaven. The Christians in Corinth therefore are not experiencing, in the here and now, the glories of the resurrected life. That is yet to come, when their bodies will be raised.

Paul begins his discussion of the resurrection of Jesus, and the future resurrection of believers, by citing a standard Christian confession, or creed (i.e., a statement of faith), that was already known to his readers (as he himself indicates):

³For I handed over to you among the most important things what I also had received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, ⁴and that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; ⁵and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve; ⁶then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, many of whom survive until now, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles; ⁸and last of all he appeared even to me, as to one untimely born. (1 Cor. 15:3–8)

Paul’s letters are the first Christian writings that we have from antiquity; he was writing, for the most part, in the 50s of the Common Era, so some ten or fifteen years before our earliest surviving Gospel, Mark. It is hard to know exactly when 1 Corinthians was written; if we place it in the middle of Paul’s letter-writing period, we could put it around 55 CE or so—some twenty-five years after Jesus’s death.

What is striking is that Paul indicates that this statement of faith is something he already had taught the Christians in Corinth, presumably when he converted them. And so it must go back to the founding of the community, possibly four or five years earlier. Moreover—and this is the important part—Paul indicates that he did not devise this statement himself but that he “received” it from others. Paul uses this kind of language elsewhere in 1 Corinthians (see 11:22–25), and it is believed far and wide among New Testament specialists that Paul is indicating that this is a tradition already widespread in the Christian church, handed over to him by Christian teachers, possibly even the earlier apostles themselves. In other words, this is what New Testament scholars call a pre-Pauline tradition—one that was in circulation before Paul wrote it and even before he gave it to the Corinthians when he first persuaded them to become followers of Jesus. So this is a very ancient tradition about Jesus. Does it go back even to before the time when Paul himself joined the movement around the year 33 CE, some three years after Jesus had died?⁴ If so, it would be very ancient indeed!

There is evidence in the passage itself that it, or part of it, is pre-Pauline, and it is possible to determine just which parts were the original formulation. As we will see more fully in Chapter 6, there are a number of “preliterary” traditions in Paul’s writings and in the book of Acts—that is, quotations of statements of faith, poems, possibly even hymns that were in circulation before being cited in our surviving literary texts. Scholars have devised a number of ways to detect these preliterary traditions. For one thing, they tend to be tightly constructed, with terse statements that contain words not otherwise attested by the author in question—in this case Paul—and to use grammatical formulations that are otherwise foreign to the author. This is what we find here in this passage. For example, the phrase “in accordance with the scriptures” is found nowhere else in Paul’s writings; nor is the verb “he appeared”; nor is any reference to “the Twelve.”

This passage almost certainly contains a pre-Pauline confession, or creed, of some kind. But is the entire thing, all of vv.3–8, part of that creed? The second half of v.6 (“many of whom survive . . .”) and all of v. 8 (“last of all he appeared even to me . . .”) are Paul’s comments on the tradition, so they could not have originally been part of the creed. There are very good reasons, in fact, for thinking that the original form of the creed was simply vv. 3–5, to which Paul has added some comments of his own based on what he knew. One reason for restricting the original pre-Pauline creed to just these three verses is that doing so produces a very tightly formulated creedal statement that is brilliantly structured. It contains two major sections of four statements each that closely parallel one another (in other words, the first statement of section one corresponds to the first statement of section two, and so on). In its original form, then, the creed would have read like this:

1a Christ died

2a For our sins

3a In accordance with the scriptures

4a And he was buried.

1b Christ was raised

2b On the third day

3b In accordance with the scriptures

4b And he appeared to Cephas.

The first section is all about Jesus’s death, and the second is all about his resurrection. The parallel statements work like this: first there is a statement of “fact” (1a: Christ died; 1b: Christ was raised); then there is a theological interpretation of the fact (2a: he died for our sins; 2b: he was raised on the third day), followed by a statement, in each section, that it was “in accordance with the scriptures” (3a and 3b, worded identically in the Greek); and finally a kind of proof is given by means of the physical evidence for the claim (4a: he was buried—showing that he really was dead; 4b: he appeared to Cephas [that is, the disciple Peter]—showing that he really was raised).

This then was the very ancient pre-Pauline tradition that Paul cites in 1 Corinthians 15 and that he expands, at the end, by giving even more “witnesses” to the resurrection—including himself, the last to see Jesus alive afterward (some two or three years after Jesus’s death). Some scholars have argued that this terse statement of faith originated in Aramaic, meaning that it might go all the way back to the Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus in Palestine during the early years after his death; other scholars are not so sure about this. In either case, it is a powerful, concise, and cleverly constructed creedal statement.

If this reconstruction of the original form of this statement is correct, several interesting and important observations can be made. First, if it is right that the second statement of each section is a “theological interpretation” of the statement of “fact” that precedes it, then the idea that Jesus was raised on the third day is not necessarily a historical recollection of when the resurrection happened, but a theological claim of its significance. I should point out that the Gospels do not indicate on which day Jesus was raised. The women go to the tomb on the third day, and they find it empty. But none of the Gospels indicates that Jesus arose that morning before the women showed up. He could just as well have arisen the day before or even the day before that—just an hour, say, after he had been buried. The Gospels simply don’t say.

If Paul’s statement is indeed a theological interpretation rather than a historical claim, one needs to figure out what it means. It is important to stress that this “third day” is said to have been in accordance with the testimony of scripture, which for any early Christian author would not have been the New Testament (which had not yet been written) but the Hebrew Bible. There is a widespread view among scholars that the author of this statement is indicating that in his resurrection on the third day Jesus is thought to have fulfilled the saying of the Hebrew prophet Hosea: “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him” (Hos. 6:2). Other scholars—a minority of them, although I find myself attracted to this view—think that the reference is to the book of Jonah, where Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights before being released and, in a kind of symbolic sense, brought back from the dead (see Jonah 2). Jesus himself is recorded in the Gospels as likening his upcoming death and resurrection to “the sign of Jonah” (Matt. 12:39–41). Whether the reference is to Hosea or Jonah, why would it be necessary to say that the resurrection happened on the third day? Because that is what was predicted in scripture. This is a theological claim that Jesus’s death and resurrection happened according to plan. This will be an important point for us later when we consider what we can say about when the earliest followers of Jesus first came to think he was raised from the dead—and on what grounds.

Second, it is important to realize that all the statements of the two sections of the creed are tightly parallel to one another in every respect—except one. The second section contains a name as part of the tangible proof for the statement that Jesus was raised: “He appeared to [literally: “he was seen by”] Cephas.” The fourth statement of the first section does not name any authorizing party. There we are told simply that “he was buried”—not that he was buried by anyone in particular. Given the effort that the author of this creed has taken to make every statement of the first section correspond to the parallel statement of the second section, and vice versa, this should give us pause. It would have been very easy indeed to make the parallel precise, simply by saying “he was buried by Joseph [of Arimathea].” Why didn’t the author make this precise parallel? My hunch is that it is because he knew nothing about a burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. I should point out that nowhere else does Paul ever say anything about Joseph of Arimathea, or the way in which Jesus was buried—not in this creed, not in the rest of 1 Corinthians, and not in any of his other letters. The tradition that there was a specific, known person who buried Jesus appears to have been a later one. Below, I will show why there are reasons to doubt that the tradition is historically accurate.

One other frequently noted feature of this creed—and its expansion by Paul in vv. 5–8—is that Paul seems to be giving an exhaustive account of the people to whom Jesus appeared after being raised. The reason for thinking this is that after listing all the others who saw Jesus, Paul indicates that he was the “last of all.” This is frequently understood, rightly I think, to mean that he is giving the fullest list he can. But then the list is striking indeed, in no small measure because Paul doesn’t mention any women. In the Gospels it is women who discover the empty tomb, and in two of the Gospels—Matthew and John—it is women who first see Jesus alive afterward. But Paul never says anything about anyone discovering an empty tomb, and he doesn’t mention any resurrection appearances to women—either here or in any other passage of his writings.

On the first point, for many years scholars have considered it highly significant that Paul, our earliest “witness” to the resurrection, says nothing about the discovery of an empty tomb. Our earliest account of Jesus’s resurrection (1 Cor. 15:3–5) discusses the appearances without mentioning an empty tomb, while our earliest Gospel, Mark, narrates the discovery of the empty tomb without discussing any of the appearances (Mark 16:1–8). This has led some scholars, such as New Testament expert Daniel Smith, to suggest that these two sets of tradition—the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus after his death—probably originated independently of one another and were put together as a single tradition only later—for example, in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.⁵ If this is the case, then the stories of Jesus’s resurrection were indeed being expanded, embellished, modified, and possibly even invented in the long process of their being told and retold over the years.

But what lies at the foundation of these stories? What, if anything, can we say historically about the resurrection event? At this point I need to pause to explain why historians—insofar as and as long as they are working as historians—are unable to use knowledge derived from the historical disciplines to affirm that Jesus really was, physically, raised from the dead, even if they personally believe it happened. The view I stake out here is that if historians, or anyone else, do believe this, it is because of their faith, not because of their historical inquiry. I should stress that unbelievers (like me) cannot disprove the resurrection either, on historical grounds. This is because belief or unbelief in Jesus’s resurrection is a matter of faith, not of historical knowledge.

The Resurrection and the Historian

The reason historians cannot prove or disprove whether God has performed a miracle in the past—such as raising Jesus from the dead—is not that historians are required to be secular humanists with an anti-supernaturalist bias. I want to stress this point because conservative Christian apologists, in order to score debating points, often claim that this is the case. In their view, if historians did not have anti-supernaturalist biases or assumptions, they would be able to affirm the historical “evidence” that Jesus was raised from the dead. I should point out that these Christian apologists almost never consider the “evidence” for other miracles from the past that have comparable—or even better—evidence to support them: for example, dozens of Roman senators claimed that King Romulus was snatched up into heaven from their midst; and many thousands of committed Roman Catholics can attest that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to them, alive—a claim that fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians roundly discount, even though the “evidence” for it is very extensive. It’s always easy to scream “anti-supernatural bias” when someone does not think that the miracles of one’s own tradition can be historically established; it’s much harder to admit that miracles of other traditions are just as readily demonstrated.

But the view I map out here is that none of these divine miracles, or any others, can be established historically. Conservative evangelical Christian apologists are right to say that this is because of the presuppositions of the investigators. But not for the reason they think or say.

The first thing to stress is that everyone has presuppositions, and it is impossible to live life, think deep thoughts, have religious experiences, or engage in historical inquiry without having presuppositions. The life of the mind cannot proceed without presuppositions. The question, though, is always this: What are the appropriate presuppositions for the task at hand? The presuppositions that the Roman Catholic believer brings to his experience of the mass will be different from the presuppositions that the scientist brings to her exploration of the Big Bang theory and different from the presuppositions that historians bring to their study of the Inquisition. So let me stress that historians, working as historians, do indeed have presuppositions. It is important, therefore, to know something about the kind of presuppositions historians have when they are engaged in the act of reconstructing what happened in the past.

Most historians would agree that they necessarily presuppose that the past did happen. We can’t actually prove it, of course, the way we can prove a scientific experiment. We can repeat scientific experiments, and by doing so we can establish predictive probabilities that can show us what almost certainly will happen the next time we do the experiment. Historians can’t do this with past events because they can’t repeat the past. And so historians have different ways of proceeding. They don’t use scientific “proofs” but look for other kinds of evidence for what has happened before now. The basic operating assumption though, which itself cannot be proved, is that something did in fact happen before now.

Moreover, historians presuppose that it is possible for us to establish, with some degree of probability, what has happened in the past. We can decide whether it is probably the case, or not, that the Holocaust happened (yes it did), that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon (yes he did), and that Jesus of Nazareth actually existed (yes he did). Historians maintain that some of the things in the past (almost) certainly happened, other things very probably happened, others somewhat probably happened, others possibly happened, others probably did not happen, others almost certainly did not happen, and so on. It is (virtually) certain that the University of North Carolina basketball team, the Tar Heels, won the national championship in 2009. It is also (virtually) certain that they got knocked out of the NCAA tournament in 2013 by Kansas. (It is absolutely certain that this was an enormous tragedy, but that’s a value judgment, not a historical claim.)

Related to the presupposition that it is possible to establish with degrees of probability what has happened in the past (some things more probable than others) is the assumption that “evidence” for past events exists, so reconstructing the past is not a matter of pure guesswork. And historians presuppose that some evidence is better than other evidence. Eyewitness reports are, as a rule, superior to hearsay from years, decades, or centuries later. Extensive corroboration among multiple sources that show no evidence of collaborating with one another is far better than either collaboration or noncorroboration. A source who provides disinterested off-the-cuff comments about a person or event is better than a source who makes interested claims about a person or event in order to score an ideologically driven point. What historians want, in short, are lots of witnesses, close to the time of the events, who are not biased toward their subject matter and who corroborate one another’s points without showing signs of collaboration. Would that we had such sources for all significant historical events!

These then are among the kinds of presuppositions that historians tend to share. On the other hand, some presuppositions are decidedly not at all appropriate for historians who want to establish what happened in the past. It is not appropriate, for example, for a historian to presuppose her conclusions and to try to locate only the evidence that supports those presupposed conclusions. The investigation needs to be conducted without prejudice as to its outcome, simply to see what really happened. Similarly, it is not appropriate for a historian to treat evidence as irrelevant when it does not happen to be convenient to his personal views.

Moreover—and here is where the rubber meets the road—it is not appropriate for a historian to presuppose a perspective or worldview that is not generally held. “Historians” who try to explain the founding of the United States or the outcome of the First World War by invoking the visitation of Martians as a major factor of causality will not get a wide hearing from other historians—and will not, in fact, be considered to be engaging in serious historiography. Such a view presupposes notions that are not generally held—that there are advanced life-forms outside our experience, that some of them live on another planet within our solar system, that these other beings have sometimes visited the earth, and that their visitation is what determined the outcome of significant historical events. All these presuppositions may in fact be true—there is no way for historians to know one way or the other, using the historical approach to establishing what happened in the past. But since they are presuppositions that the vast majority of us do not share, historical reconstruction cannot be based on them. Anyone who has these presuppositions has to silence them, sit on them, or otherwise squelch them when engaging in their historical investigations.

This is also true of all religious and theological beliefs that a historian happens to have: these beliefs cannot determine the outcome of a historical investigation, because they are not generally shared. This means that a historian cannot establish that the angel Moroni made revelations to Joseph Smith, as in the Mormon tradition. Such views presuppose that angels exist, that Moroni is one of them, and that Joseph Smith was particularly chosen to receive a revelation from on high. These are theological beliefs; they are not based on historical evidence. Maybe there is an angel Moroni and maybe he did reveal secret truths to Joseph Smith, but there is no way for historians to establish any of that: to do so would require accepting certain theological views that are not held by the majority of other historians—for example, those who are Roman Catholics, Reformed Jews, Buddhists, and nonreligious hard-core atheists. Historical evidence has to be open to examination by everyone of every religious belief.

The belief that a Christian miracle—any Christian miracle—happened in the past is rooted in a particular set of theological beliefs (the same is true of Jewish miracles, Muslim miracles, Hindu miracles, and so on). Without such beliefs, miracles cannot be established as having happened. Since historians cannot assume these beliefs, they cannot demonstrate historically that such miracles happened.

At the same time, in some cases in which a past miracle is narrated, elements of the episode may be subject to historical inquiry even if the overarching claim that God has done something miraculous cannot possibly be accepted on the basis of historical evidence (since historical evidence precludes any particular set of religious beliefs).

Let me illustrate. My grandmother firmly believed that the Pentecostal evangelist Oral Roberts could heal the sick, the diseased, and the disabled by praying over them and touching them. Now, in theory it would be possible for a historian to examine a case in which a person had symptoms of a disease before having an encounter with Oral Roberts and that they disappeared after the encounter. The historian could report that yes, apparently the person was sick before and was not sick afterward. But what the historian cannot report—if she is acting as a historian—is that Oral Roberts healed the person through the power of God. Other explanations are possible that are open to examination by scholars without any theological presuppositions required for the “divine solution”—for example, that it was a kind of psychosomatic healing (that is, the person believed so thoroughly that he would be healed that the mind healed the ailment); or that the person was only apparently healed (the next day he was again sick as a dog); or that he was not really sick in the first place; or that it was a hoax, or, well, lots of other explanations. These other “explanations” can explain the same data. The supernatural explanation, on the other hand, cannot be appealed to as a historical response because (1) historians have no access to the supernatural realm, and (2) it requires a set of theological beliefs that are not generally held by all historians doing this kind of investigation.

So too with the resurrection of Jesus. Historians can, in theory, examine aspects of the tradition. In theory, for example, a historian could look into the question of whether Jesus really was buried in a known tomb and whether three days later that same tomb was found to be empty, with no body in it. What the historian cannot conclude, as a historian, is that God therefore must have raised the body and taken it up to heaven. The historian has no access to information like that, and that conclusion requires a set of theological presuppositions that not all historians share. Moreover, it is possible to come up with perfectly sensible other solutions as to why a once-occupied tomb may have become empty: someone stole the body; someone innocently decided to move the body to another tomb; the whole story was in fact a legend, that is, the burial and discovery of an empty tomb were tales that later Christians invented to persuade others that the resurrection indeed happened.

So too the historian can look into the question of whether the disciples really had visions of Jesus after his death. People have visions all the time. Sometimes they see things that are there, and sometimes they see things that are not there. (I’ll discuss this more fully in the next chapter.) What historians cannot conclude, however, as historians, is that the disciples had visions of Jesus after he was really, actually dead and that it was because Jesus really, actually appeared to them alive after God had raised him from the dead. This conclusion would be rooted in theological presuppositions not generally held by all historians.

To press the point further, it is in theory possible even to say that Jesus was crucified, and buried, and then he was seen alive, bodily, afterward. A historian could, in theory, argue this point without appealing to divine causality—that is, without saying that God raised Jesus from the dead. This is because we do have (numerous) instances within our own world of near-death experiences, when someone apparently (or really?) dies and then wakes up again to tell the tale. Recognizing that people have such experiences does not require a belief in the supernatural. Of course, it would be a different matter if a person was dead for ninety-five years and then came back. But that never happens in near-death experiences. Instead, a person is dead, or apparently dead (however we define “dead”), for a brief time and then somehow comes back to life. Did Jesus have that kind of experience? I doubt it, but it is at least a plausible historical conclusion. What is not a plausible historical conclusion is that God raised Jesus into an immortal body and took him up to heaven where he sits on a throne at his right hand. That conclusion is rooted in all sorts of theological views that are not widely shared among historians, and so is a matter of faith, not historical knowledge.

At this stage it is important to stress a fundamental point. History, for historians, is not the same as “the past.” The past is everything that has happened before; history is what we can establish as having happened before, using historical forms of evidence. Historical evidence is not and cannot be based on religious and theological assumptions that some, but not all, of us share. There are lots and lots of things from the past that we cannot establish as having happened. Sometimes, this is because our sources are so paltry. (And so, for example, it is impossible to establish what my grandfather had for lunch on May 15, 1954.) Other times, it is because history, as established by historians, is based only on shared presuppositions. And among these shared presuppositions are not the sorts of religious and theological views that make it possible to conclude that Jesus was exalted to heaven after he died and allowed to sit at God’s right hand, never to die again. This is the traditional Christian belief, but people do not hold it on the basis of historical evidence but because they accept it by faith. For the same reason, historians cannot conclude that the thief crucified with Jesus was exalted and was the first human to enter heaven upon his death, as claimed by a Gospel known as the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea; or that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to thousands of her followers, as numerous eyewitnesses attest; or that Apollonius of Tyana came to one of his followers after he ascended to heaven, as we have on the basis of eyewitness testimony reported later. All of these claims presuppose religious beliefs that cannot be part of the arsenal of historical presuppositions.

With all this in mind, what can we say—historically—about the traditions of Jesus’s resurrection? If we can’t know, historically, whether God actually raised him from the dead, what can we know? And what else can we not know? As we will see, one thing we can know with relative certainty is that the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead is the key to understanding why Christians eventually began to think of him as God. But first, what we cannot know.

The Resurrection: What We Cannot Know

IN ADDITION TO THE resurrection itself—the act of God by which he raised Jesus from the dead—a number of other traditions are subject to historical doubt. The two I mention here will come as a surprise to many readers. In my judgment, we cannot know that Jesus received a decent burial and that his tomb was later discovered to be empty.

These two traditions obviously stand hand-in-hand, in that the second makes no sense unless the first is historically true. No one could have discovered that Jesus was no longer in his tomb if he had never been buried in a tomb in the first place (although the reverse does not necessarily follow: in theory Jesus could have been decently buried, and the tomb was never discovered empty). And so in many respects the second claim depends on the first. Therefore, I devote more discussion to it, explaining why we cannot know on historical grounds whether Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, as the Gospels claim he did.

Did Jesus Receive a Decent Burial?

According to our earliest account, the Gospel of Mark, Jesus was buried by a previous unnamed and unknown figure, Joseph of Arimathea, “a respected member of the council” (Mark 15:43)—that is, a Jewish aristocrat who belonged to the Sanhedrin, which was the ruling body made up of “chief priests, elders, and scribes” (14:53). According to Mark 15:43, Joseph summoned up his courage and asked Pilate for Jesus’s body. Pilate granted Joseph his wish, and Joseph took the body from the cross, wrapped it in a linen shroud, “laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock,” and then rolled a stone in front of it (15:44–47). Mary Magdalene and another woman named Mary saw where this happened (15:48).

Let me stress that all of this—or something very much like it—needs to happen within Mark’s narrative in order for what happens next to make sense, namely, that on the day after the Sabbath, Mary Magdalene and two other women go to the tomb and find it empty. If there were no tomb for Jesus, or if no one knew where the tomb was, the bodily resurrection could not be proclaimed. You have to have a known tomb.

But was there one? Did Joseph of Arimathea really bury Jesus?

General Considerations

There are numerous reasons for doubting the tradition of Jesus’s burial by Joseph. For one thing, it is hard to make historical sense of this tradition just within the context of Mark’s narrative. Joseph’s identification as a respected member of the Sanhedrin should immediately raise questions. Mark himself said that at Jesus’s trial, which took place the previous evening, the “whole council” of the Sanhedrin (not just some or most of them—but all of them) tried to find evidence “against Jesus to put him to death” (14:55). At the end of this trial, because of Jesus’s statement that he was the Son of God (14:62), “they all condemned him as deserving death” (14:64). In other words, according to Mark, this unknown person, Joseph, was one of the people who had called for Jesus’s death just the night before he was crucified. Why, after Jesus is dead, is he suddenly risking himself (as implied by the fact that he had to gather up his courage) and seeking to do an act of mercy by arranging for a decent burial for Jesus’s corpse? Mark gives us no clue.⁶ My hunch is that the trial narrative and the burial narrative come from different sets of traditions inherited by Mark. Or did Mark simply invent one of the two traditions himself and overlook the apparent discrepancy?

In any event, a burial by Joseph is clearly a historical problem in light of other passages just within the New Testament. I pointed out earlier that Paul shows no evidence of knowing anything about a Joseph of Arimathea or Jesus’s burial by a “respected member of the council.” This datum was not included in the very early creed that Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, and if the author of that creed had known such a thing, he surely would have included it, since without naming the person who buried Jesus, as we have seen, he created an imbalance with the second portion of the creed where he does name the person to whom Jesus appeared (Cephas). Thus, this early creed knows nothing about Joseph. And Paul also betrays no knowledge of him.

Moreover, another tradition of Jesus’s burial says nothing about Joseph of Arimathea. As I pointed out earlier, the book of Acts was written by the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke. When writing Luke, this unknown author (we obviously call him Luke, but we don’t know who he really was) used a number of earlier written and oral sources for his stories, as he himself indicates (Luke 1:1–4). Scholars today are convinced that one of his sources was the Gospel of Mark, and so Luke includes the story of Joseph of Arimathea in his version of Jesus’s death and resurrection. When Luke wrote his second volume, the book of Acts, he had yet other sources available to him. Acts is not about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus but about the spread of the Christian church throughout the Roman empire afterward. About one-fourth of the book of Acts consists of speeches made by its main characters, mainly Peter and Paul—speeches, for example, to convert people to believe in Jesus or to instruct those who already believe. Scholars have long recognized that Luke himself wrote these speeches—they are not the speeches that these apostles really delivered at one time or another. Luke is writing decades after the events he narrates, and no one at the time was taking notes. Ancient historians as a whole made up the speeches of their main characters, as such a stalwart historian as the Greek Thucydides explicitly tells us (Peloponnesian War 1.22.1–2). They had little choice.

When Luke composed his speeches, however, it appears that he did so, in part, on the basis of earlier sources that had come down to him—just as his accounts of Jesus’s teachings in the Gospel came from earlier sources (such as Mark). But if different traditions (speeches, for example) come from different sources, there is no guarantee that they will stand in complete harmony with one another. If they do not stand in harmony, it is almost always because someone is changing the stories or making something up.

That makes Paul’s speech in Acts 13 very interesting. Paul is speaking in a synagogue service in Antioch of Pisidia, and he uses the occasion to tell the congregation that the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem had sinned severely against God by having Jesus killed: “Though they could charge him with nothing deserving death, yet they asked Pilate to have him killed. And when they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb” (Acts 13:28–29).

This may appear to harmonize generally with what the Gospels say about Jesus’s death and burial—in that he died and was buried—but here it is not a single member of the Sanhedrin who buries Jesus, but the council as a whole. This is a different tradition. There is no word of Joseph here, any more than there is in Paul’s letters. Does this pre-Lukan tradition represent an older tradition than what is found in Mark about Joseph of Arimathea? Is the oldest surviving burial tradition one that says Jesus was buried by a group of Jews?

It would make sense that this was the older tradition of the two. Any tradition that is going to lead up to an empty tomb simply has to show that Jesus was properly buried, in a tomb. But who could do the burial? According to all the traditions, Jesus did not have any family in Jerusalem, and so there was no possibility of a family tomb in which to lay him or family members to do the requisite work of burial. Moreover, the accounts consistently report that his followers had all fled the scene, so they could not do the job. The Romans were not about to do it, for reasons that will become clear below. That leaves only one choice. If the followers of Jesus knew that he “had” to be buried in a tomb—since otherwise there could be no story about the tomb being empty—and they had to invent a story that described this burial, then the only ones who could possibly do the deed were the Jewish authorities themselves. And so that is the oldest tradition we have, as in Acts 13:29. Possibly this is the tradition that lies behind 1 Corinthians 15:4 as well: “and he was buried.”

As the burial tradition came to be told and retold, it possibly became embellished and made more concrete. Storytellers were apt to add details to stories that were vague, or to give names to people otherwise left nameless in a tradition, or to add named individuals to stories that originally mentioned only nameless individuals or undifferentiated groups of people. This is a tradition that lived on long after the New Testament period, as my own teacher Bruce Metzger showed so elegantly in his article “Names for the Nameless.”⁷ Here he showed all the traditions of people who were unnamed in New Testament stories receiving names later; for example, the wise men are named in later traditions, as are priests serving on the Sanhedrin when they condemned Jesus and the two robbers who were crucified with him. In the story of Joseph of Arimathea we may have an early instance of the phenomenon: what was originally a vague statement that the unnamed Jewish leaders buried Jesus becomes a story of one leader in particular, who is named, doing so.

In addition, we have clear evidence in the Gospel traditions that as time went on, and stories were embellished, there was a tendency to find “good guys” among the “bad guys” of the stories. For example, in Mark’s Gospel both of the criminals being crucified with Jesus malign and mock him on the cross; in Luke’s later Gospel only one of the two does so, and the other confesses faith in Jesus and asks him to remember him when he comes into his kingdom (Luke 23:39–43). In John’s Gospel there is an additional good guy among the Sanhedrin bad guys who wants to help with Jesus’s burial, as Nicodemus accompanies Joseph to do his duties to Jesus’s corpse (John 19:38–42). Most notable is Pontius Pilate, who, as a thoroughly bad guy, condemned Jesus to death in our earliest Gospel Mark. But he does so only with great reluctance in Matthew and only after explicitly declaring Jesus innocent three times in both Luke and John. In later Gospels from outside the New Testament, Pilate is portrayed as an increasingly innocent good guy, to the point that he actually converts and becomes a believer in Jesus. In part, this ongoing and increasing exoneration of Pilate is enacted in order to show where the real guilt for Jesus’s undeserved death lies. For these authors living long after the fact, the guilt lies with the recalcitrant Jews. But the pattern is also part of a process of trying to find someone good in the barrel of rotten opponents of Jesus. Naming Joseph of Arimathea as a kind of secret admirer or respecter or even follower of Jesus may be part of the same process.

In addition to the rather general considerations I have just given for questioning the idea that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, there are three more specific reasons for doubting the tradition that Jesus received a decent burial at all, in a tomb that could later be recognized as empty.

Roman Practices of Crucifixion

Sometimes Christian apologists argue that Jesus had to be taken off the cross before sunset on Friday because the next day was the Sabbath and it was against Jewish law, or at least Jewish sensitivities, to allow a person to remain on the cross during the Sabbath. Unfortunately, the historical record suggests just the opposite. It was not Jews who killed Jesus, and so they had no say about when he would be taken down from the cross. Moreover, the Romans who did crucify him had no concern to obey Jewish law and virtually no interest in Jewish sensitivities. Quite the contrary. When it came to crucified criminals—in this case, someone charged with crimes against the state—there was regularly no mercy and no concern for anyone’s sensitivities. The point of crucifixion was to torture and humiliate a person as fully as possible, and to show any bystanders what happens to someone who is a troublemaker in the eyes of Rome. Part of the humiliation and degradation was the body being left on the cross after death to be subject to scavenging animals.

John Dominic Crossan has made the rather infamous suggestion that Jesus’s body was not raised from the dead but was eaten by dogs.⁸ When I first heard this suggestion, I was no longer a Christian and so was not religiously outraged, but I did think it was excessive and sensationalist. But that was before I did any real research on the matter. My view now is that we do not know, and cannot know, what actually happened to Jesus’s body. But it is absolutely true that as far as we can tell from all the surviving evidence, what normally happened to a criminal’s body is that it was left to decompose and serve as food for scavenging animals. Crucifixion was meant to be a public disincentive to engage in politically subversive activities, and the disincentive did not end with the pain and death—it continued on in the ravages worked on the corpse afterward.

Evidence for this comes from a wide range of sources. An ancient inscription found on the tombstone of a man who was murdered by his slave in the city of Caria tells us that the murderer was “hung . . . alive for the wild beasts and birds of prey.”⁹ The Roman author Horace says in one of his letters that a slave was claiming to have done nothing wrong, to which his master replied, “You shall not therefore feed the carrion crows on the cross” (Epistle 1.16.46–48).¹⁰ The Roman satirist Juvenal speaks of “the vulture [that] hurries from the dead cattle and dogs and corpses, to bring some of the carrion to her offspring” (Satires 14.77–78).¹¹ The most famous interpreter of dreams from the ancient world, a Greek Sigmund Freud named Artemidorus, writes that it is auspicious for a poor man in particular to have a dream about being crucified, since “a crucified man is raised high and his substance is sufficient to keep many birds” (Dream Book 2.53).¹² And there is a bit of gallows humor in the Satyricon of Petronius, a one-time advisor to the emperor Nero, about a crucified victim being left for days on the cross (chaps. 11–12).

It is unfortunate that we do not have from the ancient world any literary description of the process of crucifixion, so we are left guessing about the details of how it was carried out. But consistent references to the fate of the crucified show that part of the ordeal involved being left as fodder for the scavengers upon death. As the conservative Christian commentator Martin Hengel once observed: “Crucifixion was aggravated further by the fact that quite often its victims were never buried. It was a stereotyped picture that the crucified victim served as food for wild beasts and birds of prey. In this way his humiliation was made complete.”¹³

I should point out that other conservative Christian commentators have claimed that there were exceptions to this rule, as indicated in the writings of Philo, and that Jews were sometimes allowed to bury people who had been crucified. In fact, however, this is a misreading of the evidence from Philo, as can be seen simply by quoting his words at length (emphasis is mine):

Rulers who conduct their government as they should and do not pretend to honour but do really honour their benefactors make a practice of not punishing any condemned person until those notable celebrations in honour of the birthdays of the illustrious Augustan house are over. . . . I have known cases when on the eve of a holiday of this kind, people who have been crucified have been taken down and their bodies delivered to their kinsfolk, because it was thought well to give them burial and allow them the ordinary rites. For it was meet that the dead also should have the advantage of some kind treatment upon the birthday of the emperor and also that the sanctity of the festival should be maintained.¹⁴

When the statement is read in toto, it is clearly seen to provide the exception that proves the rule. Philo is mentioning this kind of exceptional case precisely because it goes against established practice. Two things should be noted. The first, and less important, is that in the cases that Philo mentions, the bodies were taken down so that they could be given to the crucified person’s family members for decent burial—that is, it was a favor done for certain families, and one might assume these were elite families with high connections. Jesus’s family did not have high connections; they did not have the means of burying anyone in Jerusalem; they weren’t even from Jerusalem; none of them knew any of the ruling authorities to ask for the body; and what is more, in our earliest accounts, none of them, even his mother, was actually at the event.

The bigger point has to do with when and why these exceptions Philo mentions were made: when a Roman governor chose to honor a Roman emperor’s birthday—in other words, to honor a Roman leader on a Roman holiday. This has nothing to do with Jesus’s crucifixion, which did not occur on an emperor’s birthday. It happened during a Jewish Passover feast—a Jewish festival widely recognized as fostering anti-Roman sentiments. It is just the opposite kind of occasion from that mentioned in Philo. And we have no record at all—none—of governors making exceptions in any case such as that.

In sum, the common Roman practice was to allow the bodies of crucified people to decompose on the cross and be attacked by scavengers as part of the disincentive for crime. I have not run across any contrary indications in any ancient source. It is always possible that an exception was made, of course. But it must be remembered that the Christian storytellers who indicated that Jesus was an exception to the rule had an extremely compelling reason to do so. If Jesus had not been buried, his tomb could not be declared empty.

Greek and Roman Practices of Using

Common Graves for Criminals

My second reason for doubting that Jesus received a decent burial is that at the time, criminals of all sorts were, as a rule, tossed into common graves. Again, a range of evidence is available from many times and places. The Greek historian of the first century BCE Diodorus Siculus speaks of a war between Philip of Macedonia (the father of Alexander the Great) in which he lost twenty men to the enemy, the Locrians. When Philip asked for their bodies in order to bury them, the Locrians refused, indicating that “it was the general law that temple-robbers should be cast forth without burial” (Library of History 16.25.2).¹⁵ From around 100 CE, the Greek author Dio Chrysostom indicates that in Athens, anyone who suffered “at the hands of the state for a crime” was “denied burial, so that in the future there may be no trace of a wicked man” (Discourses 31.85).¹⁶ Among the Romans, we learn that after a battle fought by Octavian (the later Caesar Augustus, emperor when Jesus was born), one of his captives begged for a burial, to which Octavian replied, “The birds will soon settle that question” (Suetonius, Augustus 13). And we are told by the Roman historian Tacitus of a man who committed suicide to avoid being executed by the state, since anyone who was legally condemned and executed “forfeited his estate and was debarred from burial” (Annals 6.29h).¹⁷

Again, it is possible that Jesus was an exception, but our evidence that this might have been the case must be judged to be rather thin. People who were crucified were usually left on their crosses as food for scavengers, and part of the punishment for ignominious crimes was being tossed into a common grave, where very soon one decomposed body could not be distinguished from another. In the traditions about Jesus, of course, his body had to be distinguished from all others; otherwise, it could not be demonstrated to have been raised physically from the dead.

The Policies of Pontius Pilate in Particular

My third reason for doubting the burial tradition has to do with the Roman rule of Judea at the time. One of the chief regrets of any historian of early Christianity is that we do not have more—lots more—information about Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea from 26 to 36 CE, who, among many other things, condemned Jesus to be crucified. What we do know about him, however, all points in the same direction: he was a fierce, violent, mean-spirited ruler who displayed no interest at all in showing mercy and kindness to his subjects and showed no respect for Jewish sensitivities.

Pilate’s governorship is lightly documented in the surviving material record, as we have some coins that were issued during his reign and an inscription, discovered in modern times at Caesarea, that mentions him. The New Testament record is somewhat mixed, for reasons already mentioned. As time wore on, Christian authors, including those of the Gospels, portrayed Pilate as more and more sympathetic toward Jesus and more and more opposed to the recalcitrant Jews who demand Jesus’s death. As I have suggested, this progressive exoneration of Pilate serves clear anti-Jewish purposes, so the accounts of Jesus’s trial in the later Gospels—Matthew, Luke, and John—must be taken with a pound of salt. In an earlier tradition of Luke we get a clearer picture of what the man was like, as we hear, very opaquely, of “the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices” (Luke 13:1). This sounds as if Pilate had Jews murdered while they were performing their religious duties. It’s an unsettling picture.

But it coincides well with what we know about Pilate from other literary sources, especially the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. Josephus tells of two episodes that transpired while Pilate was governor of Judea. The first occurred when he took office. Under veil of night, when Pilate first came into Jerusalem, he had stationed around town the Roman standards, which had an image of the emperor embellished on them. When the Jews of Jerusalem saw the standards in the morning, they were outraged: no images were allowed in the holy city, as suggested in the law of Moses, let alone images of a foreign ruler who was worshiped elsewhere as a god. A Jewish crowd appeared to Pilate at his palace in Caesarea and demanded that he remove the standards, leading to a standoff that lasted five days. Pilate had no interest at all in bowing to Jewish demands (contrast the stories of Jesus’s trial in the Gospels!). On the contrary, at the end of the five days he directed his troops to surround the Jewish protestors, three rows deep, and cut them to shreds. Rather than backing down, the Jews to a person reached out their necks and told the soldiers to do their utmost. They would rather die than cave in. Pilate realized that he could not murder such masses in cold blood and, “surprised at their prodigious superstition,” ordered the standards removed (Antiquities of the Jews 18.3.1).¹⁸

The second incident resulted in actual violence. Pilate wanted to build an aqueduct to provide freshwater to Jerusalem. That was well enough, but he financed the project by raiding the sacred treasury of the temple. The authorities and the people were outraged and protested loudly. Pilate responded by having his soldiers mix in with the crowds, disguised, to attack the people, not with swords but with clubs, at his command. They did so, and “many” of the Jews were killed in the onslaught, and many others were trampled to death in the tumult that followed (Antiquities 18.3.2).

Pilate was not a beneficent prefect who kindly listened to the protests of the people he governed. Was Pilate the sort of ruler who would break with tradition and policy when kindly asked by a member of the Jewish council to provide a decent burial for a crucified victim? Not from what we can tell. As Crossan dismissively states: “[Pilate] was an ordinary second-rate Roman governor with no regard for Jewish religious sensitivities and with brute force as his normal solution to even unarmed protesting or resisting crowds.”¹⁹ Even more graphic is the complaint of Philo, who lived during Pilate’s time and indicated that his administration was characterized by “his venality, his violence, his thefts, his assaults, his abusive behavior, his frequent executions of untried prisoners, and his endless savage ferocity” (Embassy to Gaius 302).²⁰

As I have said, there are some things that we just cannot know about the traditions relating to Jesus’s resurrection. One of those traditions, which the resurrection narrative itself presupposes, is that Jesus received a decent burial, either from members of the Sanhedrin or from one of their prominent associates, Joseph of Arimathea. As a historian, I do not think we can say definitively that this tradition is false, although I think it is too much to say definitively that Jesus was eaten by dogs. On the other hand, we certainly do not know that the tradition is true, and there are, in fact, some very compelling reasons to doubt it. I personally doubt it. If the Romans followed their normal policies and customs, and if Pilate was the man whom all our sources indicate he was, then it is highly unlikely that Jesus was decently buried on the day of his execution in a tomb that anyone could later identify.

Was There an Empty Tomb?

The discovery of the empty tomb presupposes that there was a tomb in the first place, and that it was known, and of course that it was discovered. But if serious doubt is cast on whether there ever was a tomb, then the accounts of its discovery are similarly thrown into doubt. Christian apologists often argue that the discovery of the empty tomb is one of the most secure historical data from the history of the early Christian movement. I used to think so myself. But it simply isn’t true. Given our suspicions about the burial tradition, there are plenty of reasons to doubt the discovery of an empty tomb.

Among other things, this means that historians who do not believe that Jesus was raised from the dead should not feel compelled to come up with an alternative explanation for why the tomb was empty. Apologists typically have a field day with such explanations. Anyone who says that the disciples stole the body is attacked for thinking that such moral men who firmly believed what they did could never have done such a thing. Anyone who says that the Romans moved the body is shouted down with claims that they would have had no reason to do so and would have produced the body if it had been theirs to produce. Anyone who says that the tomb was empty because the women went to the wrong tomb is maligned for not realizing that it might occur to someone else—for example, an unbeliever—to go to the right tomb and reveal the body. Anyone who claims that Jesus never really died but simply went into a coma and eventually awoke and left the tomb is mocked for thinking that a man who was tortured to within an inch of his life could roll away a stone and appear to his disciples as the Lord of life, when in fact he would have looked like death warmed over.

I don’t subscribe to any of these alternative views because I don’t think we know what happened to the body of Jesus. But simply looking at the matter from a historical point of view, any of these views is more plausible than the claim that God raised Jesus physically from the dead. A resurrection would be a miracle and as such would defy all “probability.” Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a miracle. To say that an event that defies probability is more probable than something that is simply improbable is to fly in the face of anything that involves probability. Of course, it’s not likely that someone innocently moved the body, but there’s nothing inherently improbable about it. Of course, it’s unlikely that one of Jesus’s followers stole the body and then lied about it, but, well, people do wrong things all the time and lie about it. Even religious people. Even people who become religious leaders. And no one should be put off by the claim, “No one would be willing to die for what he knew to be a lie.” We don’t know what happened to most of the disciples in the end. We certainly have no evidence that they were all martyred for their faith. On the contrary, almost certainly most of them were not. So there is no need for talk about anyone dying for a lie. (Moreover, we have lots of instances in history for people dying for lies when they think it will serve a greater good. But that’s neither here nor there: we don’t know how most of the disciples died.) My point is that one could think of dozens of plausible scenarios for why a tomb would be empty, and any one of these scenarios is, strictly speaking, more probable than an act of God.

But all of this is beside the point, which is that we don’t know whether the tomb was discovered empty because we don’t know whether there even was a tomb.

In this connection I should stress that the discovery of the empty tomb appears to be a late tradition. It occurs in Mark for the first time, some thirty-five or forty years after Jesus died. Our earliest witness, Paul, does not say anything about it.

Would Anyone Invent the Women at the Tomb?

Christian apologists often argue that no one would make up the story of the discovery of the empty tomb precisely because according to these stories, it was women who found the tomb. This line of reasoning believes that women were widely thought of as untrustworthy and, in fact, their testimony could not be allowed in courts of law. According to this view, if someone wanted to invent the notion of a discovered tomb, they would be sure to say that it was discovered by credible witnesses, namely, by the male disciples.²¹

I used to hold this view as well, and so I see its force. But now that I’ve gone more deeply into the matter, I see its real flaw. It suffers, in short, from a poverty of imagination. It does not take much mental effort to imagine who would come up with a story in which the female followers of Jesus, rather than the male followers, discovered the tomb.

The first thing to point out is that we are not talking about a Jewish court of law in which witnesses are being called to testify. We’re talking about oral traditions about the man Jesus. But who would invent women as witnesses to the empty tomb? Well, for openers, maybe women would. We have good reasons for thinking that women were particularly well represented in early Christian communities. We know from the letters of Paul—from passages such as Romans 16—that women played crucial leadership roles in the churches: ministering as deacons, leading the services in their homes, engaging in missionary activities. Paul speaks of one woman in the Roman church as “foremost among the apostles” (Junia in Rom. 16:7). Women are also reputed to have figured prominently in Jesus’s ministry, throughout the Gospels. This may well have been the case, historically. But in any event, there is nothing implausible in thinking that women who found their newfound Christian communities personally liberating told stories about Jesus in light of their own situations, so that women were portrayed as playing a greater part in the life and death of Jesus than they actually did, historically. It does not take a great deal of imagination to think that female storytellers indicated that women were the first to believe in the resurrection, after finding Jesus’s tomb empty.

Moreover, this claim that women found the empty tomb makes the best sense of the realities of history. Preparing bodies for burial was commonly the work of women, not men. And so why wouldn’t the stories tell of women who went to prepare the body? Moreover, if, in the stories, they are the ones who went to the tomb to anoint the body, naturally they would be the ones who found the tomb empty.

In addition, our earliest sources are quite clear that the male disciples fled the scene and were not present for Jesus’s crucifixion. As I stated earlier, this may well be a historical fact—that the disciples feared for their own lives and went into hiding or fled town in order to avoid arrest. Where would they go? Presumably back home, to Galilee—which was more than one hundred miles away and would have taken at least a week on foot for them to reach. If the men had scattered, or returned home, who was left in the tradition to go to the tomb? It would have been the women who had come with the apostolic band to Jerusalem but who presumably did not need to fear arrest.

Moreover, one can imagine strictly literary reasons for “inventing” the women at the empty tomb. Let’s suppose that Mark invented the story. I personally don’t think he did; there is no way to know, of course, but my suspicion is that Mark inherited the story from his tradition. But suppose he did invent it. There would be plenty of reasons, just from his literary perspective, to do so. The more you know about Mark’s Gospel, the easier it is to think of reasons. I’ll give just one. Mark makes a special point throughout his narrative that the male disciples never understand who Jesus is. Despite all his miracles, despite all his teachings, despite everything they see him do and say, they never “get it.” And so at the end of the Gospel, who learns that Jesus has not stayed dead but has been raised? The women. Not the male disciples. And the women never tell, so the male disciples never do come to an understanding of Jesus. This is all consistent with Mark’s view and with what he is trying to do from a literary standpoint.

Again, I’m not saying that I think Mark invented the story. But if we can very easily imagine a reason for Mark to have invented it, it doesn’t take much of a leap to think that one or more of his predecessors may also have had reasons for doing so. In the end, we simply cannot say that there would be “no reason” for someone to invent the story of women discovering the empty tomb.

The Need for an Empty Tomb

In short, there are lots of reasons for someone wanting to invent the story that Jesus was buried in a known tomb and that it was discovered empty (whoever would have discovered it). And the most important is that the discovery of the empty tomb is central to the claim that Jesus was resurrected. If there was no empty tomb, Jesus was not physically raised.

I want to stress that adjective. Without an empty tomb, there would be no ground for saying that Jesus was physically raised. As we will see more fully in the next chapter, some early Christians believed that Jesus was raised in spirit but that his body decomposed. Eventually, this view came to be prominent among different groups of Christian Gnostics. We can see evidence of its presence even in the communities of the authors who produced our canonical Gospels. The later the Gospel, the more the attempt to “prove” that Jesus was raised bodily, not simply spiritually. In our earliest Gospel, Mark, Jesus is clearly raised physically because the tomb is empty—the body is gone. Later, in Matthew, it is even more clear that Jesus is raised physically (not just in his spirit) because Jesus appears to his followers and some of them touch him (Matt. 28:9). In Luke it is even clearer because when Jesus appears to his disciples, he flat-out tells them that he has flesh and bones, unlike “a spirit,” and he tells them to handle him to see for themselves (Luke 24:39–40). Then he eats some food in front of them to convince them (24:41–43). Later still in John, Jesus not only cooks a meal for the disciples (John 21:9–14), but when one of them doubts, he invites him to place his finger in his wounds to know for sure that it is he and that he has been raised physically from the dead, wounds and all (20:24–29).

Some Christians doubted that the resurrection was a physical affair. The Gospels that made it into the New Testament—as opposed to a number that did not—stress that the resurrection was indeed the resurrection of Jesus’s physical body. These debates may have been raging in early Christian communities from the beginning. If so, then the empty tomb tradition not only worked to show unbelievers that Jesus was resurrected, it worked to show believers that the resurrection was not a matter just of the spirit but of the body as well.