CHAPTER 11:
CONSPIRACY HYPOTHESIS
According to the Conspiracy Hypothesis, the disciples stole Jesus’ body out of the tomb and then lied to people about his appearances, so that Jesus’ resurrection was a hoax. This was the very first counter-explanation for the empty tomb, mentioned in Matthew’s Gospel, and European Deists revived it during the eighteenth century. Today, however, this hypothesis has been completely abandoned by modern scholarship. To see why, let’s apply to it the standard criteria for testing historical hypotheses.
1. Explanatory scope: The Conspiracy Hypothesis does offer explanations of the full range of the evidence: It provides an explanation of the empty tomb (namely, the disciples stole Jesus’ body); the post-mortem appearances (the disciples made these up); and the origin of the disciples’ (supposed) belief in Jesus’ resurrection (again, they made it up). The question is whether these explanations meet the remaining criteria.
2. Explanatory power: So what about the explanatory power of the Conspiracy Hypothesis? First, consider the fact of the empty tomb; if the disciples had stolen Jesus’ body, then why would they make up a story about women discovering the tomb to be empty? That wouldn’t be the sort of story Jewish men would invent. Moreover, the Conspiracy Hypothesis does a poor job of explaining the simplicity of the empty tomb story. Where are the Old Testament proof-texts, the fulfilled prophecies? Why is there no description of Jesus’ resurrection, as we find in later forgeries like the Gospel of Peter? Moreover, the Conspiracy Hypothesis doesn’t explain the argument between Christian Jews and non-Christian Jews very well; if the disciples just made up the story of the guard at the tomb, then why doesn’t Mark’s Gospel tell the story? Even in Matthew’s story, the guard is set too late to preclude theft of the body: The disciples could have stolen it before the guard arrived on Saturday morning, so that they were actually guarding an empty tomb! To see how an invented story would look, see again the forged Gospel of Peter, where the guard is set immediately on Friday, when Jesus is buried.
The Conspiracy Hypothesis also has trouble explaining the evidence for the appearances. A Jewish person making up such stories would probably describe Jesus’ resurrection appearances in terms of visions of God, and descriptions of the end-time resurrection in the Old Testament (as in Dan. 12:2). But then, wouldn’t the stories describe Jesus’ appearing to the disciples in dazzling glory? And why isn’t the resurrection itself described? Why are there no made-up stories of appearances to the high priest Caiaphas or to the members the Sanhedrin, as Jesus predicted? Making up stories of how Jesus appeared to them would have the advantage that then they could be branded as the real liars, not the disciples, for denying that Jesus did appear to them!
But the Conspiracy Hypothesis is undoubtedly the weakest when it comes to explaining the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection. For the hypothesis really denies that fact; instead, it seeks to explain only why it appeared that the disciples believed in Jesus’ resurrection. But as scholars have universally recognized, you can’t plausibly deny that the earliest disciples at least sincerely believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead with so much conviction that they were willing to die for that belief. The transformation in the lives of the disciples cannot be plausibly explained by saying that they were liars and hoaxers; this problem alone has served to sink the old Conspiracy Hypothesis forever.
3. Plausibility: It gets even worse when we come to the plausibility of the Conspiracy Hypothesis. Here we might mention objections to the unbelievable complexity of such a conspiracy or the unlikelihood of the disciples’ being psychologically disposed to such a conspiracy; but the problem that dwarfs all others is that it’s completely anachronistic to imagine that first century Jews would try to hoax Jesus’ resurrection.
You see, the Conspiracy Hypothesis looks at the disciples in the rearview mirror of Christian history rather than from the perspective of a first-century Jew. In ancient Judaism, there was no conception of a Messiah who, instead of conquering Israel’s enemies and re-establishing David’s throne in Jerusalem, would be shamefully executed by his enemies as a criminal. Moreover, the idea of being raised from the dead was just unrelated to the idea of Messiah and even incompatible with it, since Messiah wasn’t supposed to be killed! As the British New Testament historian N. T. Wright nicely puts it, if you’re a first-century Jew, and your favorite Messiah got himself crucified, then you’ve basically got two choices: Either you go home, or get yourself a new Messiah. But the disciples would never have come up with the outlandish and un-Jewish idea of stealing Jesus’ corpse and saying that God had raised him from the dead.
Many popularizers today suggest that early Christians could have come up with the idea of Jesus’ resurrection through the influence of pagan mythology. Back around the turn of the twentieth century, scholars in comparative religion combed the literature of ancient mythology looking for parallels to Christian beliefs, and some even thought to explain Christian beliefs, like the belief in Jesus’ resurrection, as the result of the influence of such myths. The movement soon collapsed, however, for two reasons: the myths were not really parallel and there was no causal connection.
Parallels
You see, the ancient world was a cornucopia of myths of various gods and heroes. Comparative studies in religion demand sensitivity on the part of the scholar to their similarities and differences; otherwise, the result is inevitable distortion and confusion.
Unfortunately, scholars eager to find parallels to Jesus’ resurrection failed to exercise such sensitivity, so many of the supposed parallels are actually stories of the assumption of the hero into heaven (Hercules, Romulus). Others are disappearance stories, which claim that the hero has disappeared into a higher realm (Apollonius of Tyana, Empedocles). Still others are just seasonal symbols for the crop cycle, as the crops die in the dry season and come back to life in the rainy season (Tammuz, Osiris, Adonis). And finally, some are political expressions of emperor worship (Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus).
None of these ideas is parallel to the Jewish idea of the resurrection of the dead. In fact, most scholars have come to doubt whether there really were any myths of dying and rising gods at all in the ancient near east. For example, in the myth of Osiris, which was one of the best-known symbolic seasonal myths, Osiris doesn’t really come back to life—he just continues to exist in the realm of the dead.
Generally speaking, scholars have come to realize that pagan mythology is just the wrong interpretive framework in which to correctly understand Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus and his disciples were first-century Israelite Jews, and it’s in that context that they must be understood. The spuriousness of the alleged parallels is one specific indication that pagan mythology is the wrong interpretive context for understanding the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection.
Causal Connections
So with that point in mind, there was no causal connection between the pagan myths and the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Jews were certainly familiar with the seasonal deities (Ezek. 37:1—14) . . . and found them abhorrent. For that reason, we don’t find any trace of cults with dying and rising gods in first century Israel.
At any rate, it’s highly unlikely that the Jesus’ disciples would have come up with the idea that Jesus was risen from the dead because they had heard pagan myths about dying and rising seasonal gods. As a result, historical scholars have abandoned this approach. That such a hypothesis is still repeated endlessly today in popular literature is sad testimony to the chasm that exists between scholarly work on Jesus and pop culture.
So if the influence of pagan myths is not the source of the idea of Jesus’ resurrection, what about Jewish influences? Jews already believed in the resurrection of the dead; perhaps the disciples came up with the idea of saying Jesus was risen as a result of the influence of Jewish beliefs about the afterlife?
Again, this is unlikely, for the Jewish doctrine of resurrection differed in at least two fundamental ways from Jesus’ resurrection; to put it simply, it differed in the when and the who.
Jews believed that the resurrection to glory and immortality only took place after the end of the world; they had no concept of, much less belief in, a resurrection within history. It’s no wonder, then, that the disciples were so confused by Jesus’ predictions of his own resurrection—naturally, they thought he was talking about the resurrection at the end of the world. In Mark 9:9—11, for example, we’re told:
And as they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead might mean. And they asked him, “Why do the scribes say that first Elijah must come?”
Jesus predicts his resurrection, and what do the disciples ask? “Why is it that the scribes say that first Elijah must come?” Jews believed that the prophet Elijah would come again before the Day of the Lord, the judgment day on which the dead would be raised. The disciples had no idea of a resurrection occurring prior to the end of the world; therefore, Jesus’ predictions of his own resurrection only confused them.
So given their Jewish mindset, the disciples after Jesus’ crucifixion would not have come up with the idea that he had been already raised from the dead. They would have only looked forward to the resurrection on the final judgment day and, in keeping with Jewish practices, perhaps kept his tomb as a shrine where his bones could rest until the resurrection.
Now Jews also believed that the resurrection was the resurrection of all the righteous dead—not the isolated resurrection of an individual. Moreover, there was no connection between the individual believer’s resurrection and the prior resurrection of the Messiah, and, indeed, no belief in Messiah’s prior resurrection at all. That’s why we find no examples of other messianic movements claiming that their executed leader was risen from the dead. N. T. Wright has been emphatic about this point:
All the followers of those first century messianic movements were fanatically committed to the cause . . . But in no case right across the century before Jesus and the century after him do we hear of any Jewish group saying that their executed leader had been raised from the dead, and he really was the Messiah after all.16
Ancient Judaism had no place for the resurrection of an isolated individual, especially of the Messiah. Therefore, after Jesus’ crucifixion and burial, all the disciples could do was wait with longing for the general resurrection of the dead to be re-united their Master.
Left to their own devices, then, the disciples would not have come up with the idea that, contrary to Jewish beliefs, God had raised Jesus from the dead. This point undermines not only conspiracy theories, which imagine that the disciples insincerely proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection, but also any theory which suggests that, on the basis of pagan or Jewish influences, they sincerely came to believe in and preached his resurrection.
4. Less contrived: The Conspiracy Hypothesis—like all conspiracy theories of history—is contrived in supposing that what all the evidence seems to support is, in fact, mere appearance only, to be explained away by hypotheses for which there is no evidence. Specifically, it postulates motives and ideas and actions on the part of the earliest disciples for which we do not have a shred of evidence. It can become quite elaborately contrived, as hypotheses are multiplied to ward off objections to the theory; for example, positing massive collusion to account for the appearance to the five hundred brethren, or inventing reasons to explain the unexpected role of women in the empty tomb and appearance stories.
5. Disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs: The Conspiracy Hypothesis is disconfirmed by our general knowledge of conspiracies, for they tend to be unstable and to unravel over time. Moreover, the hypothesis is disconfirmed by widely accepted beliefs about the disciples’ sincerity, first century Jewish messianic expectations, and so on.
6. Exceeds other hypotheses in fulfilling conditions 1—5: Obviously this condition is not met, since there are hypotheses (such as the Hallucination Hypothesis), which don’t dismiss the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection as a blatant lie and therefore do a better job of meeting the criteria.
No scholar defends the Conspiracy Hypothesis today. The only place you read about such notions is in the popular, sensationalist press or on the Internet.