More on the resurrection

Hi. You may have wondered what I’ve been working on since my last post.

After I decided to delete my page on the execution of Jesus and start instead with the claims of Jesus’ resurrection, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and a little revising of what I already wrote on the topic.

My page on the evidence for the resurrection was based mostly on a careful re-reading of the relevant passages in the Christian scriptures and a little initial reading in current research. I’ve done multiple revisions to that page, re-organizing the text and adding some new information at a few points as I’ve learned more.

In the meantime, I’ve located a number of books on the topic (or related to it) in my city’s library system, which has access to some local universities, and am having them shipped over to my local branch for me to check them out. I’ve already read a few that provided me with new information and altered my thinking somewhat.

And finally, I’ve started a draft of my next page, which will also be on the resurrection. Specifically, it will cover modern interpretations of the resurrection appearances and offer my assessment of the arguments about what really happened. I’ve gathered a lot of material and am about ready to get my thoughts down in writing. I hope you will find it interesting and informative!

Thanks for your interest in this project. Feedback is always welcome.

–Alan

Hi Alan,

Congratulations on doing this work. It makes for an excellent summary of events and interpretations.

For my part we need to explain less the empty tomb and more the stories of the empty tomb. Debates over what really occurred at the tomb assume that something occurred. But this assumption needs to be scrutinised.

It is quite viable that the rumour or belief of the resurrection arose not because of the discovery of an empty tomb, but because of a prevalent belief that resurrection was a likely event. For eg, Herod thought that Jesus was John the Baptist, the woman with the dying daughter knew of the teaching that at the end times the dead would be resurrected, and of course Matthew’s ‘zombie march’ in Jerusalem’ all suggest that the idea of resurrection was foremost in people’s minds.

For a community of people steeped in resurrection ideology, the loss of a charismatic leader who spoke of the immanent end times could quite easily have triggered a belief that the man had risen. This is driven by the desire not to have lost him, to see Israel lifted from the Roman yoke despite Jesus’ death, to reassert the ideas that he had embedded in the people.

What follows then are, first, Paul’s philosophising about the nature of resurrection in 1 Cor 15 and, subsequently, more popular tales about the events – the empty tomb, the appearances the ascension. These tales grow more elaborate as they are told, from Mark’s ‘go see him in Jerusalem’, to Matthew’s vision on a mountain where some were ‘Yeah, nah’, and then to the visitations in Luke and ultimately to John with Thomas poking his fingers into Jesus’ wounds as a moral caution to believe without such poking around. (Incidentally I have always liked the doubters in Matthew, who – contrary to the caution in John – saw but did not believe. The gospel stories relate many events involving the disciples, but emphasise only a few, especially Peter. Others – and the full list of names is not clear among the four gospels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostles_in_the_New_Testament – have far less prominence. It is easy to see them on the hill looking across the valley at what they are told is Jesus and saying, ‘I’ve had enough. Let’s just go home. He ain’t coming back. It’s all BS).

Anyway, this discussion suggests that there is no real reason to think that anything happened at all regarding a tomb, or its emptiness or who was there and who wasn’t. To my mind the discrepancies in the stories support the view that it is all made up, a rendition of rumours that had spread from a belief in the possibility – indeed the yearned for desire – that the man might have risen, might continue the fight, this time with profound evidence of his divine backing.

This even applies to Peter. I don’t think we need to conclude that Peter had any experience. After all, we only have Paul’s side of the story; nothing from Peter about what he thought or saw. It is quote conceivable that Peter had the vague idea of resurrection that had been circulating, and Paul ‘fleshed it out’ for him (either actually convincing Peter as to his ideas of what the resurrection is, or reporting that Peter agreed). Instead the infant church as it was in Jerusalem – the attendants of the Jesus movement post Easter which was headed by James the brother of Christ – are given no independent voice as to what they believed, are only visible in the writings of Paul. The problem is we simply do not know what the earliest members of The Way thought.

The Book of Acts is not helpful in this regard. It is written too far after the events of Easter 33AD, by someone who wasn’t there, and it writing on the same basis as the gospels – making up stories to illustrate a point of view.

The net result – we have no idea what happened on the Sunday morning, and the discrepancies in the telling reveal a creative reconstruction of events that bears no strong resemblance to the actualities of what went on, whether at the tomb or in people’s minds.

Of the empty tomb stories, there are two I like that seem very reasonable (while the ones you list never did to me. (Incidentally your link to the Lost body hypothesis doesn’t take us anywhere).

The two are:

Body removal and reburial. This is James Tabor’s proposition in The Jesus Dynasty. As the day of crucifixion drew close to the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea organised for the body to be hastily buried in an open tomb. Just put it there for safe keeping, til we can deal with it properly. Then after the sabbath he arranged for it to be relocated to a permanent tomb, either at sunset after the sabbath had concluded, before the women turned up with their baskets of funerary ointments the next day. And when they do turn up on Sunday morning at the original tomb, he isn’t there. They don’t know about the actions of Joseph of Arimathea’s men, and so the rumour begins, fuelled by the fervour for resurrection I mentioned above.

I asked Dr Helen Bond about this idea at the NINT sessions. She hadn’t heard it, and was dismissive, but I think there is merit in it, if we are looking for possible explanations of the empty tomb.

(As an aside I note that Dr Tabor fancies, but is by no means committed to, the idea that the more permanent tomb to which Jesus’ corpse was moved is the Talpiot Tomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talpiot_Tomb . Doubtful but exciting to consider).

The other possibility (and I can’t remember where I came across this) is that the women simply went to the wrong tomb. Distraught with grief, uncertain after the confusion of two nights before, in an unknown location, they went were they thought Jesus had been buried, but got it wrong. It’s a simple and understandable explanation. Peter and the other disciple in John 20 make the same mistake, quite possibly under the innocent misdirection of the women. After all, there is no record of Peter attending the burial.

The appeal of these two explanations is that they are innocent of any underhand motive. The other explanations – Caiaphas arranging removal, theft by the disciples, swoon, twins – are all tainted by guile, insinuating foul play (in the case of theft or substitution) or involving high unlikelihood (eg a swooning Jesus getting after a flogging and a few hours on the cross).

But while these two are reasonable given their innocence, the details in them do not, to my mind, support the veracity of what they are trying to depict, or the necessity of an empty tomb at all. I think the better conclusion is the one I have summarised above, the rumour of resurrection that grows in the popular mind after Paul’s philosophical energies.

I note that Paul’s idea of resurrection does not involve the resurrection of a physical body. He sets out his ideas in I Corinthians 15 where he explains that we will all be changed, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet from the physical body, to the spiritual body. The physical is perishable and flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, the perishable cannot inherit the imperishable. Hence there is no need for an actual resurrection of the bones and flesh of the person, but there is a remaking of the person in immortal fashion.

As a result, it is quote conceivable that Paul convinced Peter that the resurrected Christ was not an exhumation of the corpse, but the transformation of the person into a spiritual body. This enables Peter to hold a belief that Christ rose. Meanwhile those not in contact with Paul and with lesser philosophical inclinations start telling stories of the physical resurrection we see in the gospels.

Anyway, there’s some thoughts. I hope you enjoy them.

Cheers from down under

Rob Wilcher

+61 (0)411 814 593

The Moving Pen http://www.themovingpen.com.au/

LikeLiked by 1 person

2 thoughts on “More on the resurrection”

robwilcher says:

January 13, 2026 at 9:24 pm

Hi Alan,

Congratulations on doing this work. It makes for an excellent summary of events and interpretations.

For my part we need to explain less the empty tomb and more the stories of the empty tomb. Debates over what really occurred at the tomb assume that something occurred. But this assumption needs to be scrutinised.

It is quite viable that the rumour or belief of the resurrection arose not because of the discovery of an empty tomb, but because of a prevalent belief that resurrection was a likely event. For eg, Herod thought that Jesus was John the Baptist, the woman with the dying daughter knew of the teaching that at the end times the dead would be resurrected, and of course Matthew’s ‘zombie march’ in Jerusalem’ all suggest that the idea of resurrection was foremost in people’s minds.

For a community of people steeped in resurrection ideology, the loss of a charismatic leader who spoke of the immanent end times could quite easily have triggered a belief that the man had risen. This is driven by the desire not to have lost him, to see Israel lifted from the Roman yoke despite Jesus’ death, to reassert the ideas that he had embedded in the people.

What follows then are, first, Paul’s philosophising about the nature of resurrection in 1 Cor 15 and, subsequently, more popular tales about the events – the empty tomb, the appearances the ascension. These tales grow more elaborate as they are told, from Mark’s ‘go see him in Jerusalem’, to Matthew’s vision on a mountain where some were ‘Yeah, nah’, and then to the visitations in Luke and ultimately to John with Thomas poking his fingers into Jesus’ wounds as a moral caution to believe without such poking around. (Incidentally I have always liked the doubters in Matthew, who – contrary to the caution in John – saw but did not believe. The gospel stories relate many events involving the disciples, but emphasise only a few, especially Peter. Others – and the full list of names is not clear among the four gospels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostles_in_the_New_Testament – have far less prominence. It is easy to see them on the hill looking across the valley at what they are told is Jesus and saying, ‘I’ve had enough. Let’s just go home. He ain’t coming back. It’s all BS).

Anyway, this discussion suggests that there is no real reason to think that anything happened at all regarding a tomb, or its emptiness or who was there and who wasn’t. To my mind the discrepancies in the stories support the view that it is all made up, a rendition of rumours that had spread from a belief in the possibility – indeed the yearned for desire – that the man might have risen, might continue the fight, this time with profound evidence of his divine backing.

This even applies to Peter. I don’t think we need to conclude that Peter had any experience. After all, we only have Paul’s side of the story; nothing from Peter about what he thought or saw. It is quote conceivable that Peter had the vague idea of resurrection that had been circulating, and Paul ‘fleshed it out’ for him (either actually convincing Peter as to his ideas of what the resurrection is, or reporting that Peter agreed). Instead the infant church as it was in Jerusalem – the attendants of the Jesus movement post Easter which was headed by James the brother of Christ – are given no independent voice as to what they believed, are only visible in the writings of Paul. The problem is we simply do not know what the earliest members of The Way thought.

The Book of Acts is not helpful in this regard. It is written too far after the events of Easter 33AD, by someone who wasn’t there, and it writing on the same basis as the gospels – making up stories to illustrate a point of view.

The net result – we have no idea what happened on the Sunday morning, and the discrepancies in the telling reveal a creative reconstruction of events that bears no strong resemblance to the actualities of what went on, whether at the tomb or in people’s minds.

Of the empty tomb stories, there are two I like that seem very reasonable (while the ones you list never did to me. (Incidentally your link to the Lost body hypothesis doesn’t take us anywhere).

The two are:

Body removal and reburial. This is James Tabor’s proposition in The Jesus Dynasty. As the day of crucifixion drew close to the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea organised for the body to be hastily buried in an open tomb. Just put it there for safe keeping, til we can deal with it properly. Then after the sabbath he arranged for it to be relocated to a permanent tomb, either at sunset after the sabbath had concluded, before the women turned up with their baskets of funerary ointments the next day. And when they do turn up on Sunday morning at the original tomb, he isn’t there. They don’t know about the actions of Joseph of Arimathea’s men, and so the rumour begins, fuelled by the fervour for resurrection I mentioned above.

I asked Dr Helen Bond about this idea at the NINT sessions. She hadn’t heard it, and was dismissive, but I think there is merit in it, if we are looking for possible explanations of the empty tomb.

(As an aside I note that Dr Tabor fancies, but is by no means committed to, the idea that the more permanent tomb to which Jesus’ corpse was moved is the Talpiot Tomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talpiot_Tomb . Doubtful but exciting to consider).

The other possibility (and I can’t remember where I came across this) is that the women simply went to the wrong tomb. Distraught with grief, uncertain after the confusion of two nights before, in an unknown location, they went were they thought Jesus had been buried, but got it wrong. It’s a simple and understandable explanation. Peter and the other disciple in John 20 make the same mistake, quite possibly under the innocent misdirection of the women. After all, there is no record of Peter attending the burial.

The appeal of these two explanations is that they are innocent of any underhand motive. The other explanations – Caiaphas arranging removal, theft by the disciples, swoon, twins – are all tainted by guile, insinuating foul play (in the case of theft or substitution) or involving high unlikelihood (eg a swooning Jesus getting after a flogging and a few hours on the cross).

But while these two are reasonable given their innocence, the details in them do not, to my mind, support the veracity of what they are trying to depict, or the necessity of an empty tomb at all. I think the better conclusion is the one I have summarised above, the rumour of resurrection that grows in the popular mind after Paul’s philosophical energies.

I note that Paul’s idea of resurrection does not involve the resurrection of a physical body. He sets out his ideas in I Corinthians 15 where he explains that we will all be changed, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet from the physical body, to the spiritual body. The physical is perishable and flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, the perishable cannot inherit the imperishable. Hence there is no need for an actual resurrection of the bones and flesh of the person, but there is a remaking of the person in immortal fashion.

As a result, it is quote conceivable that Paul convinced Peter that the resurrected Christ was not an exhumation of the corpse, but the transformation of the person into a spiritual body. This enables Peter to hold a belief that Christ rose. Meanwhile those not in contact with Paul and with lesser philosophical inclinations start telling stories of the physical resurrection we see in the gospels.

Anyway, there’s some thoughts. I hope you enjoy them.

Cheers from down under

Rob Wilcher

+61 (0)411 814 593

The Moving Pen http://www.themovingpen.com.au/

LikeLiked by 1 person

1. Alan Z. says:
  
  January 14, 2026 at 9:59 am
  
  Hi Rob, good to hear from you! Thank you for the informative comment, and especially for notice of the dead link. I’m unlikely to notice that on my own. I really did enjoy and appreciate your feedback.
  
  I obviously agree there is not much of historical value in the empty tomb stories. I intend to talk more about why Mark invented it when I discuss the composition of Mark. I wanted to start with the empty tomb and gospel/acts resurrection appearances because those are what most people have in their mind when they think of the resurrection. This gives me a chance to show that the accounts in gospels/acts are contradictory and thus need to be questioned before going on to look at what Paul says about Jesus’ life and teachings. The two explanations you offer–a body removal and the women went to the wrong tomb–are ones I hadn’t thought of and will add them next time I revise the page.
  
  I doubt a general belief in resurrection would have been enough to persuade Paul, for one, to make such a 180 in his attitude toward the Christian movement. Something happened to him at least. And I would temper your comment that we only have Paul’s side of what happened to Peter, as Paul seems to be referencing a tradition that predates him. I will get more into the theories of what may have triggered him and Peter on the page I am currently drafting.
  
  Thanks again.
  
  LikeLike

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