Historical Contradictions of the Empty Tomb

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Hey everyone,

 

Welcome to The Sunday Catholic Word, a podcast where we reflect on the upcoming Sunday Mass readings and pick out the details that are relevant for explaining and defending our Catholic faith.

 

I’m Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.

 

In this episode, we’re going to focus on five details found in each of the readings for this upcoming Easter Sunday, Year B. The first detail comes from the first reading, taken from Acts 10:34a, 37-43, which is Peter’s testimony that they have witnessed the ministry of Jesus and his resurrection. The relevant apologetical topic is that Christian faith is not blind faith. The next two details are taken from each of the optional second readings, Colossians 3:1-4 and 1 Corinthians 5:6b-8. The relevant topics are the nature of justification and the Real Presence of Jesus’ flesh in the Eucharist. The last two details are found in the Gospel reading, which is John’s report of the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb, taken from John 20:1-9. Each detail is alleged to be in contradiction with reports from the Synoptics, thereby giving rise to an opportunity to reflect on the historical reliability of John’s Gospel.

 

Let’s get started with the first reading, which again is taken from Acts 10:34a, 37-43. The verses that I want to highlight are 39-41, where Peter says,

 

We are witnesses of all that he did

both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem.

They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.

This man God raised on the third day and granted that he be visible,

not to all the people, but to us,

the witnesses chosen by God in advance,

who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

 

Skeptics to Christianity often criticize Christians for having what’s called blind faith—that’s to say, belief without evidence. For example, popular atheist Richard Dawkins, in his 1997 Humanist article “Is Science a Religion” writes, “Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.” Julian Baginni, British atheistic philosopher, concurs, writing in his 2003 book Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (pg. 32), “Belief in the supernatural is belief in what there is a lack of strong evidence to believe in.”

 

But the passage we just quoted from our first reading proves that these digs aren’t justified. Peter doesn’t invite those to whom he’s speaking to believe in Jesus simply because they have a feeling or some other ethereal reason. Rather, he invites them to believe based on the evidence of their eyewitness testimony—they witnessed Jesus do the miraculous in his ministry, and they witnessed Jesus die and appear to them for forty days afterward, eating and drinking with them. This is not a call for blind faith. Rather, it’s an invitation to have faith in response to the eyewitness evidence.

 

To the non-believer who asks, “Why should I believe in Jesus?” Peter says, “Because we saw him perform miracles, and we saw him risen from the dead.” Again, this is a far cry from blind faith.

 

Now, a skeptic might object that we need to assess whether Peter’s testimony is credible. And our response is, “Sure we would.” Is Peter lying? Is he reliable in telling us what Jesus said and did? Fortunately, the apostolic testimony is rooted in history, thus making it possible to historically investigate the reliability of the Gospels. We don’t have time to do such an investigation here, but suffice to say there is enough good evidence to merit a general approach of trust in what they report.

 

It would be different if Peter were saying, “I proclaim to you, Jesus, whom I, and everyone else, have never seen or touched. You just have to believe!” In this case there would be nothing subject to historical investigation, and thus one would have to make a blind act of faith. But this is not what Peter is requiring of non-believers.

 

Therefore, it belongs to the Christian faith to believe based on evidence rather than make what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls a “blind impulse of the mind” (CCC 156).

 

Let’s now turn to the two options for the second reading. Option 1 is taken from Colossians 3:1-4. Paul writes,

 

If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above,

where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.

Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

When Christ your life appears,

then you too will appear with him in glory.

 

The detail that I want to focus on here is Paul’s teaching that we die and rise with Christ. To speak of death and resurrection implies that there’s something that happens to us interiorly (within the soul) when we’re “born again” and initially become a Christian. Christians of all denominations refer to this as sanctification.

 

Now, some Christians, such as Catholics, believe that such sanctification is the ground or basis for what theologians refer to as “justification”—being in a right relationship with God. Other Christians, however, reject this idea of justification and assert that justification is purely forensic or exterior, rooted solely in God’s declaration that we are just, or in a right relationship with Him. Such disagreement gives rise to the question, “Which view is right?”

 

Here is where the highlighted detail for option 1 of the second reading for this upcoming Sunday Easter, Year B comes into play. Paul’s teaching about death and resurrection in Christ is found also in Romans 6:3-4 where he speaks of baptism being that which causes this death and resurrection. Then, in verse 7 of the same chapter, Paul writes, “For he who has died [the baptismal death] is freed from sin.”

 

The freedom from sin is further emphasized in verses 17-18, thereby strongly indicating that Paul has the interior transformation of the soul in mind, again, what Christians call sanctification.

 

Paul explicitly ties this freedom from slavery, which involves an intrinsic state, to justification in the preceding verse 7, when he writes, “For he who has died [the death of baptism] is freed from sin.” The Greek verb for “freed” is dikaioō. This is the same word Paul uses when he speaks of our justification by faith: “Since we are justified [Greek, dikaiōthentes] by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:1). So the phrase “freed from sin” in Romans 6:7 can literally be translated “justified from sin.”

 

This tells us that, for Paul, the ground of our righteousness, or justification, is not merely an extrinsic declaration by God that we’re in a right relationship with him without a corresponding interior state within the believer to match. According to Paul, God’s declaration that we are righteous does have an interior state of righteousness within the believer for it to match up or correspond to, thus giving biblical support for the Catholic belief that our justification is grounded in the interior state of righteous that God’s grace brings about within us.

 

Option 2 for the second reading is taken from 1 Corinthians 5:6b-8. The relevant detail here is Paul’s statement, “For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the feast . . . with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

 

Paul here affirms that Jesus is our New Passover Lamb. And like the old lamb, which had to be sacrificed as part of the Passover ritual, Jesus as the New lamb has been sacrificed.

 

But sacrifice of the lamb wasn’t the only part of the ritual. There was another part to it: the feast, which included the roasted flesh of the lamb and the unleavened bread.

 

Given that Paul envisions Christ as the New Passover lamb who has been sacrificed for us, he concludes that there is as Passover feast as well that Christians must keep. He says it’s the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, which is a reference to the Eucharist instituted by our Lord at the Last Supper.

 

But the parallel to the Old Passover lamb sheds light on how Paul understood the nature of the Eucharist. Recall, it wasn’t just unleavened bread that was part of the feast. They had to eat the flesh of the lamb as well.

 

Given the parallel, it makes sense that the New Passover feast wouldn’t just include unleavened bread. Rather, it would include the flesh of the New Passover Lamb, Jesus’ flesh.

 

This gives us reason to think that when Jesus said, “This is my body . . . take and eat,” he intended those words to signify the change of unleavened bread into his flesh, the flesh of the New Passover lamb within the context of the New Passover that must be eaten to complete the Passover meal.

 

So, the second option for the second reading gives us an opportunity to reflect on the real presence of Christ’s flesh in the Eucharist.

 

Finally, we come to the Gospel reading, taken from John 20:1-9. For our purposes here, I’m only going to highlight verse 1, which reads, “On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb.”

 

There are two details here that are relevant for apologetical discussions, both of which have to do with alleged contradictions with the Synoptic reports.

 

The first is John’s report that Mary Magdalene went to the tomb. For agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Erhman, in a 2006 debate with Christian apologist William Lane Craig, this detail about only Mary Magdalene going to the tomb contradicts Matthew (28;1-2), Mark (16:1-3), and Luke’s report (24:10) that she was with other women.

 

Now, the first thing we can say in response is that the objection wrongly assumes that John was intending to say Mary Magdalene was the only woman. John merely showcases Mary Magdalene without any mention of the other women. And just because an account is incomplete, it doesn’t follow that it is in error. Even Luke doesn’t give a complete account of the women who went to the tomb (24:10).

 

Moreover, John’s account of Mary’s response to Peter and John indicates that he knew other women were with her: “she ran . . . and said to them . . . we do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:2, emphasis added). Luke employs a similar tactic when he first showcases Peter going to the tomb (Luke 24:12), but then later informs his reader that others had gone as well (Luke 24:24).

 

The second detail is John’s mention of Mary approaching the tomb with the stone already rolled away. Ehrman, in the same debate mentioned before, argues that John’s report here in John 20:1 contradicts Matthew’s report in 28:2, which reveals the women seeing the angel roll away the stone.

 

Once again, the objection makes a false assumption—namely, that Matthew is intending to assert that the women witnessed the angel rolling away the stone. But a close examination of the text proves otherwise.

 

First, as A. Jones argues in A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, the entire passage concerning the angel, the stone, and the guards who “trembled and became like dead men” (Matt. 28:2-4) seems to be a parenthetical statement. It’s unlikely that the women would have conversed with the angel while the guards laid there as if dead.

 

Furthermore, the details concerning the angel and the stone are introduced with the Greek conjunction gar: “And behold, there was a great earthquake; for [Greek, gar] an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone, and sat upon it” (28:2, emphasis added).

 

Such an explanatory conjunction is used to introduce a clarification of a previous part of the sentence. For Matthew, the angel rolling away the stone is his explanation for the earthquake, not to assert that the women witnessed a stone-moving spectacle.

 

This answer could be further supported by Matthew’s use of an indicative mood in the aorist verb tense of ginomai: “And behold, there was [Greek, egeneto] a great earthquake” (28:2, emphasis added). The aorist verb tense in the indicative mood usually denotes the simple past. So a possible translation is “an earthquake had occurred,” implying the women didn’t witness it.

 

Even the angel’s descent can be described as having already occurred, since the aorist participle katabas (“descended”) can be translated with the English past perfect: “for an angel of the Lord had descended” (28:2; ISV, emphasis added).

 

Now, a skeptic might ask, “How did Matthew know about this stuff if the women didn’t see it happen?” It’s possible that Matthew received the details from the same source he received information about the conspiracy theory that the guards and the Jewish rulers made up (Matt. 28:11-15). If the empty tomb was part of the guards’ story of “all that had taken place” (28:11), it’s possible the details in the parenthetical statement (2-4) were part of it as well.

 

So, there is no contradiction between John and Matthew’s account of Mary Magdalene approaching the empty tomb. At least on these grounds, Ehrman can’t reasonably reject John and Matthew’s report.

 

Conclusion

 

Well, my friends, that brings us to the end of this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word. The readings for this upcoming Easter Sunday, Year B provides us with several details that are relevant for doing apologetics on a variety of topics:

 

• The reasonableness of Christian faith as a response to eyewitness testimony,
• The nature of justification involving sanctification,
• The real presence of Jesus’ body in the Eucharist, and
• The historicity John’s report of the empty tomb.

 

These are topics definitely worth thinking about.

 

As always, I want to thank you for subscribing to the podcast. And please be sure to tell your friends about it and invite them to subscribe as well at sundaycatholicword.com. You might also want to check out the other great podcasts in our Catholic Answers podcast network: Cy Kellet’s Catholic Answers Focus, Trent Horn’s The Counsel of Trent, Joe Heschmeyer’s Shameless Popery, and Jimmy Akin’s A Daily Defense, all of which can be found at catholic.com.

 

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I hope you have a blessed Easter Sunday, Year B. Until next time, God Bless!