The Son Rises: Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus

THE WRONG TOMB THEORY

The last important attempt to explain away the evidence for the resurrection was the wrong tomb theory. Kirsopp Lake’s study The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1907) was the last work on the resurrection from the old liberal school of theology, which had grown up in the late 1800s. That school of theology sought to reduce Christianity to “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.” One observer accurately characterized the theology of the old liberal school in this way: a God without wrath leads men without sin into a kingdom without judgment by means of a Christ without a cross.

Liberal theology could not survive World War I, which brought home in a terrible way the grim reality of man’s sinfulness. Its downfall was largely brought about by the writings of one man, Karl Barth. As a young pastor trained in liberal theology, Barth found that he could not climb into the pulpit Sunday after Sunday to preach on the goodness of man when bombs could be heard exploding in the distance. Perhaps the turning point came on October 3, 1914, when a group of ninety-three German intellectuals signed the petition “An die Kulturwelt,” endorsing the war policies of Kaiser Wilhelm II, including those that involved the murder of Belgian civilians and the destruction of the priceless collections of the library at Louvain.6 Among the signatures on the petition were the names of the greatest liberal theologians, who had talked so much about the love of God and brotherhood of man. For Barth, that was a black day. He was later to write, “Among the signatures I found to my horror the names of nearly all my theological teachers whom up to then I had religiously honored. I perceived that . . . at least for me the theology of the 19th century had no future.”7 In Barth’s commentary on Romans (1919) he boldly reaffirmed the sinfulness of man, which theological liberalism had glossed over, and he thus wrought a revolution in theology.

But back to Kirsopp Lake. As a liberal theologian, he rejected the physical resurrection in favor of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul alone.8 Hence, he was forced to explain away the evidence for the empty tomb of Jesus in another way. He held that the women went to the wrong tomb on Sunday morning and found the caretaker in this tomb. He said something like, “You’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He is not here.” The women, however, were so rattled that they fled. Afterward the disciples saw visions of Jesus, and the women’s story was twisted into the discovery of the empty tomb.

Lake’s theory, however, generated little following and has been universally rejected by contemporary critics:

1. According to the gospel accounts, the women noted precisely where Jesus was laid (Luke 23:55) because they intended to return Sunday morning to visit the grave. It is therefore improbable that they would have gone to the wrong tomb.

2. Lake selects arbitrarily the facts he wants to believe. For example, he accepts the words “He is not here; behold here is the place where they laid Him” but quietly passes over “He has risen.” Moreover, the fact that Mark refers to the angel at the tomb as a “young man” does not mean he was an ordinary human figure. The Greek word here is often used of angels,9 and the white robe in which he was dressed is the typical Jewish portrait of angels.10 All the other gospels agree that the figure in the tomb was an angel, and the women’s reaction of fear confirms that he was. Biblical scholars agree that Mark intends the man to be an angel. There is, therefore, really no ground for believing that the women ran into the caretaker, who pointed them to the other tomb. Lake’s reconstruction is clever, but arbitrarily selective and without foundation.

3. The decisive consideration against the wrong tomb theory, however, is that a later check would have revealed the error at once. Indeed, one wonders why the women did not, after their initial fright, go to the correct tomb. In any event, the disciples themselves would have checked it out later. They never could have believed in the resurrection with Jesus’ body still in the tomb. And even if the disciples had not looked at the tomb, the Jews would have done that duty for them. If the resurrection was a colossal mistake based on the women’s error, then the enemies of Christianity would have been more than happy to point that out, indicating where the correct tomb was or maybe even exhuming the body. The idea that the resurrection stemmed from the women’s going to the wrong tomb is too shallow.

What all these alternative theories to the resurrection have in common is that they grant the substantial reliability of the gospel accounts. Granted that the disciples found the empty tomb and saw appearances of Jesus, how is that to be explained? Modern scholarship has rejected across the board these attempts to explain away the empty tomb and appearances. These theories are no longer the issue.