9: Fraud Type 1: The Disciples Stole the Body
9
Fraud Type 1: The Disciples Stole the Body
As already addressed in the initial volume and elsewhere in this study, several angles have been suggested over a century of scholarly studies regarding potential burial locations and circumstances pertaining to Jesus’s deceased body. Though hardly the only possible suggestion, most scholars still tend to think along more traditional lines regarding the burial cave owned by Joseph of Arimathea. As such, this chapter will treat primarily this alternate hypothesis regarding scenarios involving Jesus’s followers, and his immediate disciples in particular, rather than a theft from a common grave or from a second burial in another tomb. Yet it should be noted carefully that the location from which the disciples may have stolen Jesus’s body is far from the principal issue here. The major question concerns the likelihood that they perpetrated this act from whatever location it could have taken place. On the chief version of this view, then, Jesus’s disciples stole his dead body out of Joseph of Arimathea’s personal tomb. Afterward, the disciples freely invented stories of his resurrection appearances.
Actually, this is a very ancient hypothesis—perhaps even the oldest alternative appearance theory of all. A few hints of the details have already been mentioned. The charge of the Jewish elders in Matt 27:63 that Jesus was a “deceiver” or an “impostor” (ekeinos ho planos) employs a somewhat technical term similar to other accusations that had been brought against Jesus, suggesting that this theme was perhaps a common one. Incidentally, the more simple assertion that Jesus’s body was stolen from the tomb is not necessarily connected at all to Matthew’s more complicated report that guards were placed at the tomb to stop any shenanigans.
What is called here the Stolen Body Hypothesis 1 (or simply Fraud Type 1) is also probably the most maligned of the better-known naturalistic resurrection theories due to what are considered to be the more obvious refutations. Yet, for whatever reason, it often seems to be one of the initial retorts for some critics, at least on the popular, nonscholarly front. Due to the highly problematic issues raised by this alternative scenario, it was ignored almost completely by the major German liberal scholars of the nineteenth century, when naturalistic resurrection theses were rampant. However, it still needs to be treated here, at least briefly, due to the role it played at particular junctions in both earlier and later discussions.
Two Early Proponents of Fraud Type 1
A few decades before the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the birth of German liberalism, English deist Thomas Woolston employed the stolen body thesis. Often thought to have been mentally ill, Woolston was imprisoned for blasphemy in 1730. Unable to pay his fine, he remained imprisoned until his death in 1733.
While insisting often that he was a Christian, Woolston conceded his dislike for literal biblical interpretations, which he said nauseated him, and favored allegorical notions. He singled out three major religious ideas that he preferred: allegorical interpretations, a “universal and unbounded Toleration of Religion,” and the eradication of the “hired and establish’d priesthood.” Woolston desired a “spiritual Jesus” minus the miracle reports and other physical expressions.
Woolston’s sixth and last treatise on miracles, concentrating particularly on Jesus’s resurrection, proposed that a physical resurrection from the dead would “be the most notorious and monstrous Imposture, that ever was put upon mankind.” Rather, Jesus’s disciples stole his dead body from the tomb: “The Body was to be removed and a Resurrection pretended to the Delusion.” After Jesus’s body was stolen, the “Resurrection [was?] talk’d of.” So Jesus’s disciples performed the theft “in order to pretend a Resurrection” and later preached regarding Jesus’s appearances to them, concocting the messages.
The various stolen body theories, whether the culprits were Jesus’s disciples or others, were also referred to as Fraud Theses. Interestingly, Woolston repeatedly used this same term himself: “Fraud,” the “Argument of Fraud,” or the “Proof of Fraud.” These ideas were presumably drawn from the two-part idea that stealing Jesus’s body was followed by the false proclamation of appearance messages from him, with both being clearly fraudulent and duplicitous. Woolston even criticized Jesus as a “Deceiver,” while maintaining the possibility that the disciples bribed the guards at the tomb, as well as asserting like almost all critics that the Gospel texts contained discrepancies and so forth. Overall, in Woolston’s opinion, the entire ignominy was “the most bare faced, and the most self evident Imposture that ever was put upon the World,” pointing out several varieties of fraud.
Since at least some of Jesus’s disciples were willing to die for their belief that they had actually seen the risen Jesus alive again (with some having actually suffered martyrdom), this generally stopped most liberals in their tracks from employing this thesis. After all, martyrdom is usually a good antidote with which to face liars. But such was not the case with Woolston. He proclaimed that many “Cheats and Criminals . . . have asserted their Innocency” even to the point of death, totally missing the crucial distinction that the disciples died willingly for their message. Woolston thought that this would have been the most successful religious farce of all time, had it not been for his taking the necessary steps to unmask the entire travesty for the rest of the world!
A few decades after Thomas Woolston was writing in England, German rationalist Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) likewise advocated the first version of the stolen body or fraud thesis, where Jesus’s disciples were the perpetrators. While spending most of his life teaching oriental languages at the gymnasium (an academic high school) in his native city of Hamburg, Germany, Reimarus penned a 4,000-page manuscript that he did not intend for publication, named An Apology for the Rational Worshippers of God. The document circulated anonymously. However, between the years 1774 and 1778, a librarian in Wolfenbüttal, Germany, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, published seven fragments from Reimarus’s work, one of which was entitled “Concerning the Story of the Resurrection.” Lessing published this account in 1777.
Reimarus postulated that after Jesus’s death, his disciples underwent a time of much fear and anxiety, which dominated their thinking for some time. Gathering their courage, they pretended to be fearless even in the face of death. Jesus had preached an uncomplicated message that opposed the legalism of the Jewish leaders of his day. At the center of Jesus’s proclamation was that the kingdom of God was coming on earth as a temporal kingdom and the initiation into it was through the act of repentance. This was accompanied by kingdom morality, about which Jesus taught much. Jesus thought that a popular Jewish movement would place him as the head of this kingdom, and on at least a couple of occasions he came close to seeing it happen. But Jesus had miscalculated. Instead, he was crucified, which dashed the disciples’ dreams of being a part of this grand kingdom scenario. They did not get over this shock for some time.
After Jesus’s apparent and unexpected failure caused by his untimely death, the disciples recast Jesus’s earthly kingdom message as a spiritual one, to that of Jesus being the suffering Savior who died for the world’s sins and was then raised from the dead by his Father. To further this message, they stole Jesus’s dead body out of the tomb before any serious decomposition took place. When the empty tomb was discovered by others, the disciples feigned their surprise and ran to the tomb, only to discover that it was empty. The disciples hid Jesus’s body for fifty days so that it would be unrecognizable by that time. Just in case anyone should challenge them, they could never be disproven and hence have their plot exposed. Then they disposed of the body and spread the stories that the risen Jesus had appeared to them, spoken with them, eaten with them, and later ascended to heaven, promising to return again. The conspiracy worked well and having taken the proper steps, they could never be branded with the fraud.
So, the disciples began preaching, proclaiming boldly that Jesus had risen, was alive again, and had appeared to them. Like Jesus had taught them, the disciples also performed events that seemed to the people to be miracles, which of course increased their appeal. Just as when Jesus was alive, the disciples found that their audiences were very generous. Here too as before, the disciples never lacked for food or money. Some people sold their property and gave the proceeds to the apostles, having been promised eternal rewards as a result. To be sure, Jesus’s followers accepted all the payments and gifts that they were offered, amassing wealth and power. Of course, these men agreed unanimously that none of them would expose their scheme. While Reimarus thought that the Gospels got many things wrong and were hopelessly contradictory, this much of the story could be ascertained!
The element of the disciples’ fraud in Reimarus, from which this hypothesis gets one of its names, certainly presents an easy target. As Daniel Fuller remarks: “Reimarus’ reconstruction of New Testament history never gained general acceptance because it failed to explain how, if the disciples were perpetuating what they knew to be a fraud, they were yet willing to suffer and die for Jesus.” Other scholars have also been critical of Reimarus, given his ineptitudes.
Numerous problematic puzzle pieces are apparent here and reinforce Fuller’s observation, such as the disciples stealing Jesus’s body in the first place, thereby occasioning the empty tomb; their counterfeited surprise at the discovery from others; their hiding Jesus’s deceased body, then preaching a resurrection message that they knew was false; feigning their bravery and true life changes when that was really not the case; and lying about the many details of Jesus’s appearances to them, including his ascension. Subsequently, they grew rich while accepting countless gifts by way of dishonest gain.
Of course, all the retelling of these false stories as well as the disciples’ accompanying deceitful actions had to be duplicated many times through the remainder of their lives. The lies had to be reinforced in a consistent manner too, with everyone in the group relating the same falsehoods, even when it resulted in uncertainty, continual discomfort, physical mistreatment of the worst sorts, and even premature deaths for a number of them. Further, none of Jesus’s disciples ever recanted, as far as is known, or confessed the fraudulent details of the story during moments of weakness.
Such an extraordinary scenario obviously required so many elements to occur precisely on cue without any slipups! It is hardly any wonder that the nineteenth-century German liberal establishment quite strictly eschewed the hypotheses of Woolston and Reimarus with their plethora of idiosyncrasies, including features that demanded exact timing, the fact that many different personalities could easily have ruined everything by not remaining true to their false message with all of the contradictions that might be imagined, or even a drunken confession. Each of the actors certainly knew the basic falsity of the tale too. Their lives at times must have been balanced on a razor’s edge. It is not easy to live in the midst of all of these potential foibles with all of these moving parts. Still, the view remains a historical fixture of the resurrection landscape, with a similar accusation being recorded ever so briefly in Matt 28:11–15.
Neither Woolston nor Reimarus were very sophisticated compared to the standards of many nineteenth-century German liberal critics who emerged and redirected theological trends just a few decades later. Nonetheless, while these later liberal scholars definitely did not follow Reimarus’s notion that the disciples stole Jesus’s dead body, certain other elements of Reimarus’s eschatological ideas did exercise some influence among the later liberals.
For example, Schweitzer concluded that Reimarus was the first researcher in eighteen centuries to veer in the direction of a particular angle on eschatology being a central emphasis in his work. Various aspects in eschatological thinking might be mapped from the early centuries of the church. But Schweitzer seemed to think that these views encapsulated an interlude of misinterpretations until Reimarus, whose thesis was also mistaken according to Schweitzer. But the latter at least brought further attention to the subject from a more promising angle. Some of the critical reemphases were reborn more than a century later in the writings of those researchers such as Weiss and Schweitzer. But to repeat, on his theme of Jesus’s disciples stealing his dead body and lying about the appearances, Reimarus was basically ignored except for the criticisms of his view.
It will remain difficult for many to compare the early church perspectives on eschatology to those of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal scholars. More specifically, there is a huge conceptual gap between those very early Christian scholars who actually accepted and believed the truth of Jesus’s proclamations concerning the future as contrasted with those like Reimarus, Weiss, and Schweitzer. While the latter may have emphasized the role of eschatology in Jesus’s teachings, they rejected the time-space realities of these categories, such as Jesus’s virgin birth, the resurrection, Jesus’s return, a literal kingdom of God, and so on. Hence, there is a huge conceptual gap between the views of the earliest church thinkers, however diverse, and those particularly of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, which were both diverse as well as dismissive of the literal positions held by Jesus and the early church writers.
Dawes makes the additional point that in spite of Reimarus’s historical shortcomings, he recognized that the early church interpreted Jesus’s teachings “in the light of later Christian beliefs.” This insight can lead in different directions. Though Reimarus rejected the historicity of the resurrection as well as much of the remaining literal message of Jesus, he realized that Jesus’s chief emphasis for both the early church and contemporary theologians had to do with answering the questions pertaining to his identity as well as his other teachings. If in fact Jesus had actually been raised from the dead, this would have shed a different light on his teachings.
Such insights potentially left these liberal scholars in a tough spot. According to the New Testament, the reality of Jesus’s resurrection potentially changed the import and truth of his preaching and teaching. Which portions of Jesus’s teaching might thereby have been shown to be true by virtue of this event, if it occurred? If Jesus was not the Son of God, for example, then why did God raise him from the dead? And what would the truth of the resurrection potentially dictate about other aspects of Jesus’s message?
Multiple Problems with the Fraud Type 1 Hypothesis
The tenor of scholarly acceptance or rejection of various ideas is not always an accurate gauge of either truth itself or whether a particular idea served as a strong or weak thesis. Sometimes a general vote follows the evidence and other times it does not—popularity can be fickle. But perhaps this time, the virtual ignoring of Reimarus’s stolen body option throughout the more than a century-long heyday of naturalistic resurrection options during the reign of German liberalism is an indication that the Fraud Type 1 thesis may simply have fallen short in its ability to explain away this event. Add to this the virtual continued absence of any supporters to speak of during the twentieth century, and that makes about two centuries with nary a taker! So what were some of the serious problems with this idea?
(1) Naturalistic resurrection hypotheses may not generally be thought of as being overwhelmed by what might be referred to as one-punch knockouts. But this does seem to be the case with Fraud Type 1 hypotheses. Martin’s cautions above notwithstanding, it would be virtually impossible for Jesus’s disciples to go through all the motions involved in suffering the totally unexpected shock of Jesus’s crucifixion and their loss of hope for eternity, hiding in fear for their own lives, then in quite short order removing his dead body from one tomb to another location while acknowledging that this deceased individual had actually been raised from the dead, as he had predicted several times. To top off the entire story, the disciples would have lied repeatedly, claiming to have been with the risen Jesus often. They arguably would have made the jump from the very lowest time ever in their lives to hatching a plot that would affect the entire world from that time onward! This hardly seems workable.
Rather than questioning the promise of the coming kingdom and Jesus’s presumed reign, together with them, the disciples would have moved in the very opposite direction by preaching a series of falsehoods. They would have realized that their own presumed futures had still vanished, gone for naught, but the crowd was encouraged to believe that all was well. What a comedy of errors amid hatching several new problems in the process!
As for some of the additional problems posed by this “solution,” why would the disciples even be inclined to carry on their “ministry” after those dark moments? Worse yet, how would they respond later whenever their lives may have been on the line once again? Would at least some of them continue to be willing to go to their deaths, knowing full well that Jesus did not conquer death himself? Such decisions would have to be revisited regularly during many new situations. Having decided to lie and otherwise contort the truth about Jesus having appeared to them, what could there possibly be in the future given this obviously false message, especially seen from the perspective of years later when still nothing had changed?
True, other religious and political movements discovered new ways to carry on in the face of defeat. But in how many of these cases had such an involved scenario ensued, with falsehoods perpetrated at every turn in just this way? The very center of their message had been destroyed—this time regarding the present and future kingdom and all that it signified in the future—followed by a string of falsehoods. That very message involved the disciples’ outright fabrications many, many times over. Now the original center of the message that Jesus had proclaimed had been disproven, negated, and defeated. The very heart of their hopes, dreams, and messages had been dashed. It is virtually impossible to understand this situation in any way other than as total defeat.
Sometimes it is remarked that the disciples may have gotten rich in the process. But rather than simply pull suggestions out of thin air, critics need to produce the compelling first-century data for this claim—where is this support? And how useful are riches in such circumstances, both conceptually as well as physically, when the disciples apparently did not even enjoy such wealth? Critical scholars must have agreed with these critiques as well, for as we have seen, virtually no one supported this position in some 250 years.
Again, the ultimate one-punch knockout refutation of the Fraud Type 1 view is that liars do not make willing martyrs. At the very least, liars do not yield persons who put themselves in danger constantly and remain at least willing to become martyrs. Sure, the story might be recast otherwise in new plot theses, but apparently not persuasively enough to convince the critical scholars. The hallmark of being willing to die for one’s faith begins with individuals who truly believe what they teach, especially when the teachings concern the very center of their theology. On this development alone, this natural hypothesis fails. The disciples would more likely have denied their belief or simply have slipped away and said nothing further, since they already knew that Jesus was truly dead, since they stole his dead body, followed by concocting misrepresentations and fakeries regarding his “appearances.” How does this scenario breed real-life transformations?
(2) If the disciples stole their teachers’ dead body and Jesus therefore never rose from the dead or appeared to them, how do we then explain the known extent of the radical and complete transformations of the apostles? This is a huge problem in itself because the disciples could have stolen Jesus’s dead body, misrepresented the situation a few times in their preaching, and then called it quits and gone back to their families and jobs. But what led to the subsequent, lifelong changes in the apostolic cases where the details are largely known?
Again, other movements present changed lives too, but no message in the history of religions can claim this revolutionary of a change that was based squarely on real experiences that were thought to be resurrection appearances. We are told repeatedly that Jesus’s apostles were transformed by the truth of their central message—that of their resurrection faith and its further application for eternity. But on this alternate thesis, there was no truth in the disciples’ message whatsoever, and they knew it. It would be absolutely remarkable if the apostles both chose and preached the resurrection of Jesus and his appearances as their central, transforming message even when they knew without question that their centermost, weight-bearing column could hold no weight whatsoever, since there was no reality to it. So how can their utter transformations, as even admitted by the strongest critics, be explained adequately?
(3) Another unlikelihood followed soon after the disciples’ initial “changes.” What could account for the conversion of James the brother of Jesus? James’s previous unbelief during Jesus’s public ministry, plus his conversion that most likely occurred due to an appearance of Jesus, have been both supported by the historical facts and recognized by critical scholars. How should especially the latter be accounted for if Jesus neither rose from the dead nor appeared to anyone?
(4) A few years after the crucifixion the infamous church persecutor Saul (i.e., Paul) became totally convinced that he had also seen the risen Jesus. If Jesus’s appearances never occurred and the resurrection was untrue, Paul would most likely have never come to faith. So what was the impetus in each of these additional cases for these pious men to become believers in Jesus Christ from their previously unbelieving states?
(5) As far as is known, none of Jesus’s disciples recanted or otherwise turned away from the faith that they preached after having reported witnessing his resurrection appearances. As Sean McDowell stated after completing his doctoral dissertation on this subject, “And yet not a single account exists that any of the Twelve, including Paul and James, recanted their belief that Jesus had appeared to them alive after his death.” It is incredibly amazing on more than one level that if the disciples knew that Jesus had not really appeared to them, this staunchness in their faith would have remained their trademark, without anyone having recanted! Under these circumstances, as far as is known, why would they all have remained steadfast in their faith until the end?
(6) There is no serious evidence in favor of the Fraud Type 1 hypothesis. The view simply hangs out there in space on mere assertions without support. Stephen T. Davis notes the “radical change that came over the disciples” and then emphasizes that there is “not one bit of evidence to support [the stolen body thesis].” Further, “no such secret ever ‘leaked out,’” nor are there any data to support turmoil among the disciples or that some did not truly believe the resurrection. All of the evidence makes it clear that they “believed wholeheartedly in the resurrection of Jesus.”
(7) This last reason still remains just a possibility at present. But if the Shroud of Turin turns out finally to be Jesus’s burial garment, as now appears to be quite possible to many careful scientific and other researchers, then this would be an additional, huge reason against the Fraud 1 Type hypothesis. But the indications so far are that due to the intact condition of the bloodstains on this cloth, the body in the shroud, in all probability, was not unwrapped by the disciples or by anyone else. Rather, there are indications that the body left the cloth in some other way than by being unwrapped.
The multiple factual problems for the Fraud Type 1 alternative hypothesis to the resurrection appearances of Jesus are significant. But major critical scholars only rarely get past citing the initial critique alone, since it is so devastating; time and again this is their chief concern. It seems quite straightforward: the evidence works strongly against the thesis. Agnostic New Testament scholar A. J. M. Wedderburn asserts, “We have no reason to suggest that these early Christians deliberately lied.” Self-styled liberal scholar E. P. Sanders adds, “I do not regard deliberate fraud as a worthwhile explanation” since Jesus’s followers spent their lives preaching that he was risen and several of them died for their message. Wolfhart Pannenberg points out that “it is hard to understand how [the disciples] could risk their lives for such a conspiracy.” Hugo Staudinger adds the point, “Even less can we reckon with some kind of conspiracy . . . for this conspiracy would run directly counter to their own personal interest.”
G. T. Eddy summarizes the issue here: “We may agree at once that conscious, deliberate, concerted and sustained fraud is unthinkable as the origin of the Easter faith.” Historian Paul Maier provides the chief reason for this conclusion: “Would [the disciples] have gone on to give their very lives for this fraud? Clearly . . . myths do not make martyrs.” Many other scholars share similar views and critiques such as these.
Conclusion
All told, Fraud Type 1 and its implication of Jesus’s disciples stealing their master’s dead body frankly does not come anywhere close to making the grade necessary to explain adequately all of the known data regarding Jesus’s appearances. It is most likely the very weakest of the major naturalistic theses, as indicated by one knockout critique along with several other solid refutations. These are a substantial number of considerations against the position, especially given its major weaknesses.
While it is the facts that demonstrate the falseness of this hypothesis rather than the critical evaluations per se, it is still significant that virtually all scholars seem to agree with assessments such as this, including many of the most skeptical researchers as well. This failure to explain the data best explains why this thesis basically has not been a popular alternative view taken by critical scholars for some 250 years, even during the nineteenth century, when these alternate options were so popular. The multiple refutations indicate these problems quite clearly. Yet this natural response frequently seems to come quickly to the minds of nonscholars who question the resurrection appearances. But the thesis is even rejected by a rather diverse collection of skeptical as well as non-Christian scholars of many stripes, among whom are John Dominic Crossan, Bart Ehrman, Dale Allison, and John A. T. Robinson, along with major Jewish scholars, including Joseph Klausner, Geza Vermes, and Pinchas Lapide.
Another way to view this matter is to unpack the second critique already mentioned above: virtually every scholar researching these questions recognizes that at the center of the lives of Jesus’s disciples were the experiences that they believed absolutely to be appearances of the risen Jesus. These events changed their lives completely. As Ehrman attests: “Their conviction on this matter eventually turned the world on its ear. Things have never been the same since.” These disciples believed that they had seen Jesus alive after his resurrection from the dead and, as a result, Jesus was presently alive too. For them, this belief carried with it the ultimate meaning of life, both here and eternally, shaping how they lived in the present. They embraced this message wholeheartedly with both their beliefs and their actions. It revolutionized everything they thought, taught, and believed. It is this basic conviction that also so radically cuts against the Fraud Type 1 thesis.
That Jesus’s disciples had these experiences and beliefs is basically not disputed in the current theological literature. As Ehrman states again, “When speaking as historians . . . we can say with complete certainty” that Jesus’s disciples believed these things. Therefore, Ehrman “has no difficulty whatsoever” embracing the apostles’ beliefs at this point. Why not? After all, the disciples’ conviction here is “a matter of public record . . . it is a historical fact.” This is what birthed the church.
Since this is as well-known and accepted as anything we know about the disciples, how could they (apart from mental illness) have held so tenaciously to their belief in Jesus’s resurrection as the very dearest of all their views and, at the same time, know that they were the ones who had stolen Jesus’s dead, lifeless body? But if they had stolen Jesus’s body, then the resurrection could not have occurred. And if the resurrection had not happened, they were indeed liars, and none of their key theological beliefs were true. As Paul stated, if their claims were untrue, then they had never been forgiven of their sins, their loved ones had died without Christian hope, and their own Christian vision of eternity, likewise, was nonexistent. Paul recognized this and encapsulated it all so clearly that, apart from the resurrection, they would have been “of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:19 NRSV; cf. vv. 12–19).
Perhaps the chief point here is that, in addition to all the other severe problems with the Fraud Type 1 hypothesis noted above, what scholars know most assuredly about Jesus’s disciples—their all-encompassing belief that Jesus had risen from the dead and had appeared to them—was most directly at odds with them having been the ones who had stolen Jesus’s body. As mentioned, liars do not make good martyrs. This was the initial knockout punch against the Fraud Type 1 view. But the second major critique above regarding this approach is also an exceptionally powerful blow. The disciples’ incredible transformations were not short-lived, as they well might have been. Rather, at least several of their cases are known to have been extended, lifelong commitments that lasted for decades after the initial resurrection events. How do such enormous, honorable changes result from the combination of losing both one’s best friend and mentor along with one’s most deeply cherished beliefs, perpetrating perhaps the greatest heist in human history with repeated lies followed by lives of service and more, all without a foundation? No wonder this hypothesis has been almost entirely ignored.
Notes
The revised doctoral dissertation by Matti Kankaanniemi is quite helpful here: The Guards of the Tomb (Matt 27:62–66 and 28:11–15): Matthew’s Apologetic Legend Revisited (Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2010). Kankaanniemi argued that Matthew had an earlier source (95–106) and especially that the words ekeinos ho planos (i.e., “the deceiver”) indicate that the term came from the Jewish leaders rather than from the author. N. T. Wright argues similarly in The Resurrection of the Son of God, vol. 3 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 403–4, 637, also, 633–40.
Matthew’s story of the guards at the tomb is evaluated in detail in the initial volume of this study.
The two names for this challenge to the resurrection indicate the difference in the angles being viewed or presented. The “Stolen Body” naturally depicts what the disciples (or others) did with Jesus’s dead body, while the “Fraud” appellation depicts the lies or false reports that were spread afterward, proclaiming that Jesus appeared to them after his death when he had obviously not done so, which supposedly launched the teaching that Jesus had risen from the dead. The number 1 differentiates this species of stolen body or lie theory perpetrated by Jesus’s disciples as contrasted with the next view, where one or more persons other than the disciples did the dirty work.
Thomas Woolston, “A Defence of the Discourses on Miracles,” in Deism: An Anthology, ed. Peter Gay (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1968), esp. 131–35, 138.
Thomas Woolston, A Sixth Discourse on the Miracles of our Saviour, In View of the Present Controversy between Infidels and Apostates (London: Printed by the Author, 1729), 5. As mentioned, Woolston begins this treatise by affirming his support for “the mystical Resurrection of Jesus . . . mystical Resurrection of our spiritual Jesus.”
Woolston, 16.
Woolston, 17.
Woolston, 29; similarly on 20–21, 25.
Woolston, 15, 18, 20, 21, 28, 30, 32, 33.
Woolston, 5, 14, 19, 27, 47.
Woolston, 27.
Many of the pertinent background specifics here are found in Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans.W. Montgomery (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 14–26; Gregory W. Dawes, ed., The Historical Jesus Quest: Landmarks in the Search for the Jesus of History, rev. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), 54–56. Daniel P. Fuller also adds further relevant material in Easter Faith and History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 31–35.
Charles H. Talbert, ed., Reimarus: Fragments (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970). Selections from Talbert’s work here are also reproduced in Dawes, Historical Jesus Quest, 56–86, such as Reimarus, Fragments, part 1, fragment 7:6, 8, 29; part 2, fragment 6:54. Some of the section demarcations in Reimarus’s text are rather confusing and actually differ with each other. Besides Talbert, another example is found in Charles Voysey, ed., Fragments from Reimarus (London: Williams & Norgate, 1879). For example, Fuller places Reimarus’s denial of the resurrection in the fifth fragment (32), while Talbert has the main resurrection denial in the sixth fragment (81–83). Also relevant here are Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 19–21, 24, and Dawes, Historical Jesus Quest, 55–56.
Following Reimarus here, Fragments, part 2, fragment 6:54, 56–57. See the comments by Dawes, Historical Jesus Quest, 56; Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 21; Fuller, Easter Faith and History, 33.
Reimarus, Fragments, part 2, fragment 6:1, 54–55, 57. Also, Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 21; Fuller, Easter Faith and History, 33.
Fuller, Easter Faith and History, 33n4.
Especially David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1972), 738–40; Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 22–23; Dawes, Historical Jesus Quest, 56.
Atheistic philosopher Michael Martin made a point worth thinking about here: there are many forms of wishful thinking and self-deception and not all of them involve “deliberately perpetrating a fraud.” See Michael Martin, “Reply to Davis,” Philo 2 (1999): 68. But it needs to be recognized that there is still a vast difference between explaining the known data well and not really explaining it at all.
Actually, Reimarus even rather incredibly mentions just such a possibility on the part of the disciples; see Fragments, part 2, fragment 6:54!
In his volume Das Leben Jesu (1901), Oskar Holtzmann briefly entertained the hypothesis that the disciples may have carried Jesus’s deceased body back to Galilee, followed later by this German scholar abandoning the idea. See Holtzmann, The Life of Jesus, trans. J. T. Bealby and Maurice A. Canney (London: Black, 1904), 499.
For instance, Schweitzer judged that Reimarus was mistaken in holding to an earthly hope—that “the Messianic ideal which dominated the preaching of Jesus was that of the political ruler, the son of David” (Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 23). The emphases of Johannes Weiss and Schweitzer were chiefly on the futuristic concepts of Jesus’s eschatology, termed consistent eschatology. In fact, for Schweitzer, Weiss’s concept of Jesus’s kingdom teaching was “wholly future.” Only Jesus’s casting out of demons is an exception (239–41). Schweitzer moved further in this futuristic eschatological emphasis (239–41 and chapter 19). In Weiss’s own repeated words, Jesus and the early church thought that the kingdom was quite near, but it was still “not yet here” (74 and stated similarly on 66); Johannes Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, trans. and ed. Richard Hyde Hiers and David Larrimore Holland (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), esp. 65–74.
Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 22–24, 241, 313, 321, 346, 367.
Dawes, Historical Jesus Quest, 56.
See, for example, Michael L. Brown’s discussion of a modern Jewish movement in Brown, Resurrection: Investigating a Rabbi from Brooklyn, a Preacher from Galilee, and an Event that Changed the World (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma, 2020), 61–72.
For just a few of these texts, see Acts 4:2, 33; 1 Cor 15:32; Phil 1:21–23; 3:10–11, 18–21; Col 3:1–4; 1 Pet 1:3–5.
See Sean McDowell, The Fate of the Apostles: Examining the Martyrdom Accounts of the Closest Followers of Jesus (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 263, cf. also 6, 8, 243, 259–65.
Some seemingly offhanded statements may appear occasionally as if the view were actually being asserted by critical scholars. But as has been mentioned repeatedly, though a few researchers here and there have made some positive comments along the way during the past 250 years, as if to mention a consideration, virtually no scholars have actually preferred or taken this position. This must be kept in mind.
Stephen T. Davis, Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 181–82.
Gerd Lüdemann makes a strange comment that sounds like he is also arguing against the disciples stealing the body, and that may have been indeed what he was doing. He states that fraud by the disciples is disproven. Though Lüdemann’s language here seems to be a little convoluted (possibly due to the translation?), the strangeness is due to Lüdemann’s comment that the disciples did not even know where Jesus was buried. The reason for this lack of knowledge is apparently linked somehow to “their utter disappointment” which also seemed to keep them from being “in a position to perpetrate such a fraud.” See Gerd Lüdemann with Alf Özen, What Really Happened to Jesus: A Historical Approach to the Resurrection (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 52. This seems incredibly strange from start to finish, and for a large number of reasons. So why did the disciples not know where Jesus was buried? Was it because of “their utter disappointment”? If so, does this mean that no one can ever be severely disappointed about life and still carry out their responsibilities? Further, is it to be thought that not a single one among the disciples, due to differences of temperament or whatever, was less affected emotionally and could then have been the one to go and check where Jesus was being buried? Are we also to believe that after they were utterly devoted to Jesus for perhaps three years, not a single one of them would care one iota where Jesus’s final resting place would have been? Was not even one of the disciples able to inquire later as to who ended up burying the body by checking with Joseph of Arimathea? Perhaps most of all, did the women never go to the tomb on Sunday morning, as per the testimony of all four Gospels, because they were also so disappointed? Last, even if it could be imagined that neither the disciples nor the women had anything to do with Jesus’s burial, would neither Joseph nor Nicodemus have sought them out and initiated the conversation regarding the burial that they had performed? This is all very strange indeed.
A. J. M. Wedderburn, Beyond Resurrection (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999), 123.
E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993), 279–80.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, “The Historicity of the Resurrection and the Identity of Christ,” in The Intellectuals Speak Out about God, ed. Roy Abraham Varghese (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1984), 257–64, with the quotation on 262.
Hugo Staudinger, “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ as Saving Event and as ‘Object’ of Historical Research,” Scottish Journal of Theology 36 (1983): 309–26, quotation on 321.
G. T. Eddy, “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: A Consideration of Professor Cranfield’s Argument,” Expository Times 101 (1990): 327–29, quotation on 328.
Paul L. Maier, In the Fullness of Time: A Historian Looks at Christmas, Easter, and the Early Church (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 5.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4.1, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, trans. G. W. Bromiley, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 340; James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, vol. 1 of Christianity in the Making (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 838; N. T. Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God, 3:637–39; Raymond E. Brown, “The Resurrection and Biblical Criticism,” Commonweal 87 (1967): 233; Thomas C. Oden, The Word of Life, vol. 2 of Systematic Theology (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1989), 484–86; Richard Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), 183–84; Ulrich Wilckens, Resurrection: Biblical Testimony to the Resurrection. An Historical Examination and Explanation, trans. A. M. Stewart (Atlanta: Knox, 1978), 117; Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 176–77; Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ, trans. V. Green (New York: Paulist, 1976), 130; William Lane Craig, “The Guard at the Tomb,” New Testament Studies 30 (1984): 52, 279; Michael R. Licona with Gary R. Habermas, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004), 93–95; Paul W. Barnett, Jesus and the Logic of History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 130–31; Craig S. Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 340–42; Murray J. Harris, Raised Immortal: Resurrection and Immortality in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 34–39; George Eldon Ladd, I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 133–34; C. E. B. Cranfield, “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ,” Expository Times 101 (1990): 171; Robert Stein, Jesus the Messiah: A Survey of the Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), 269; Robert Geis, Life of Christ (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013), 318–19; Charles C. Anderson, The Historical Jesus: A Continuing Quest (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 168–69; Grant R. Osborne, The Resurrection Narratives: A Redactional Study (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), 276.
N. T. Wright and John Dominic Crossan, “Dialogue,” in The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright in Dialogue, ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), Crossan’s comments are found on 38, see also 33.
Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 164–65.
Dale C. Allison Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Polemics, Criticism, History (London: T&T Clark, 2021), 339; Allison, Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 207–8.
John A. T. Robinson, Can We Trust the New Testament? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 123–25, who well before it was a popular option, referred seemingly disparagingly to the common grave scenario as the view where “his corpse as that of a convict was simply dissolved in a lime-pit,” adding that “the burial of Jesus is one of the best attested facts about him” and listing a handful of sources in its favor.
For an excellent summary of where non-Christian Jewish scholarship is on the relevant issues discussed here, see David Mishkin, Jewish Scholarship on the Resurrection of Jesus (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), esp. 76–89, 201–11.
Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching, trans. Herbert Danby (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 357; Klausner, From Jesus to Paul, trans. William F. Stinespring (New York: Macmillan, 1944), 323–24.
Geza Vermes, The Resurrection (London: Penguin, 2008), 144–45, 149.
Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1983), 126.
Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 230.
Marcus J. Borg is another scholar who also accepts the fact of the disciples’ transformations; see Borg, Jesus, A New Vision: Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), esp. 184–85.
Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, 230–31.
The first two critiques of this naturalistic thesis that we termed Fraud Type 1 are alone devastating. First, that the disciples stole Jesus’s dead body and then were still willing to die for the truth of their resurrection message, especially when some of them actually did die gruesome deaths, is what we called a knockout punch. Second, the disciples’ ultimate transformations that are sometimes known to have lasted a lifetime are also another strong indication of the falsehood of this Fraud Type 1 scenario. If Fraud Type 1 were true, these huge initial changes could alternately have stopped altogether just a short time later after a few very brief forays followed by the disciples’ retirements due to the defeat of their message. The two critiques just noted are both strong arguments that favor the resurrection argument and refute the Fraud Type 1 scenario. Together, these two considerations are powerful roadblocks to this alternate thesis even by themselves. It is no surprise that these two counterresponses are the most-often-cited reasons not to opt for the Fraud Type 1 approach.