CHAPTER 4
THE JEWISH POLEMIC
If you think about it, the earliest Jewish polemic presupposes the fact of the empty tomb. As an example, see Matthew’s attempt to refute the earliest Jewish response to the Christian proclamation of the resurrection:
While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place. And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers and said, “Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day. —Matthew 28:11—15
Now our interest is not in the historicity of Matthew’s story of the guard at the tomb but rather in his incidental remark at the story’ s close: “This story has been spread among the Jews to this day.” This remark reveals that Matthew was concerned about refuting a widespread Jewish explanation of the resurrection.
So what were unbelieving Jews saying in response to the disciples’ proclamation “He is risen from the dead”? That these men were full of new wine? That Jesus’ corpse still lay in the tomb? No. They were saying, “His disciples came by night and stole him away.”
Think about that: “His disciples came by night and stole him away.” The Jewish authorities did not deny the fact that Jesus’ tomb was empty; instead they entangled themselves in a hopeless series
of absurdities, trying to explain it away. In other words, the Jewish claim that the disciples stole the body presupposes that the body was, in fact, missing. Therefore, we have evidence from the very adversaries of the early Christian movement for the fact of the empty tomb.
These five lines of evidence, taken together, give sufficient grounds for thinking that Jesus’ tomb was, in fact, found empty on the first day of the week by a group of his female followers. Most scholars, therefore, regard the fact of Jesus’ empty tomb to be well-established. According to Jacob Kremer, a New Testament critic who has specialized in the study of the resurrection: “By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements about the empty tomb.”8 In fact, in a survey of over two thousand publications on the resurrection in English, French, and German since 1975, Gary Habermas found that seventy-five percent of scholars who have written on the subject accept the historicity of the women’s discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb.9 The evidence has convinced even a number of Jewish scholars, such as Pinchas Lapide and Geza Vermes, that Jesus’ tomb was found empty. Therefore, we can regard the first of the three facts to be explained as, if not beyond dispute, historically well-established.