Category: Bible

The four Gospels all mention the empty tomb of Christ, which has become a mainstay of modern apologetics.

But some argue that the idea of the empty tomb was a late development in early Christianity—that it only arose decades after the Crucifixion, and that early Christians thought Jesus had been “spiritually” raised from the dead, not literally.

It was only with the passage of time that this spiritual resurrection was interpreted as a literal one, leading to the idea of the empty tomb.

In arguing for this view, advocates of this view might ask why earlier documents of the New Testament don’t mention the empty tomb.

This is, in fact, something that Philip Jenkins is wondering about . . .

 

Jenkins on the Empty Tomb

Over at his blog, Dr. Jenkins writes:

Let me pose the problem. From the time of Mark’s gospel, around 70, the empty tomb became central to the Resurrection narrative, so central in fact that Jews evolve rival stories to account for the absence of Jesus’s body (Matt. 28. 11-15). The story evidently mattered in religious polemic. Over the next thirty years or so, the story is repeated in various forms in three other gospels. Yet even Luke, who knows the story, makes no use of it in Acts. Before the 90s, moreover, (the time of Matthew and Luke), the one account that we do have of the empty tomb does not refer to visions of a bodily risen Jesus at or near the site.

Where is the empty tomb story before 70?

Suppose I face an atheist critic, who makes the following argument. Yes, he says, early Christians believed that they encountered the risen Jesus, that they had visions, but these visions had no objective reality. They just arose from the hopes and expectations of superstitious disciples. Even then, Christians saw that Resurrection in spiritual, pneumatic, terms. Only after a lengthy period, some forty years in fact, did the church invent stories to give a material, bodily basis to that phenomenon, and the empty tomb was the best known example.

How can I respond? Help me.

Some have already responded in his combox, but I’d like to provide a fuller response, so let’s go.

 

Challenging a Premise

My first response to an atheist critic would be that I don’t accept one of the premises—that the Gospels were written at such late dates.

The book of Acts suddenly stops, without resolving the story of Paul’s trial and imprisonment, in A.D. 60. Whether Paul was exonerated or executed, either would have been a fitting ending to Acts, and the best explanation for why Luke stopped writing without finishing the story is that those events simply had not happened yet. In other words, Acts was written in A.D. 60.

Since Acts is the sequel to the Gospel of Luke, that means Luke was written no later than A.D. 60 and possibly quite a bit earlier.

Depending on your theory of the order in which the Gospels were composed, either Matthew or Mark (or both) were written before Luke, and that would push them into at least the A.D. 50s, which is the same period that most of Paul’s epistles were being written.

Indeed, in 2 Corinthians 8:18, written in the mid A.D. 50s, Paul tells the readers that he is sending them “the brother whose praise is in the Gospel.” This may be a reference to either Mark or Luke, both sometime travelling companions of Paul and both authors of Gospels.

Even John shows signs of being written in the A.D. 60s. He refers to things in Jerusalem as still standing that would have been devastated in A.D. 70 (cf. John 5:2), and in the literal Greek of John 21:19 he speaks of Peter’s death—which took place in A.D. 67—as still in the future (“This he said to show by what death he [Peter] will glorify God”—future tense in the Greek). (There’s also the fact that John expressly claims to be written by an eyewitness of the empty tomb itself.)

So, despite the dates you commonly hear assigned to the Gospels, the evidence is that they were actually written quite a bit earlier, and their composition overlapped the period in which the epistles were written (see John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament for more).

 

Challenging a Second Premise

KEEP READING.

In Galatians, St. Paul says at one point:

But when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.

For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party.

And with him the rest of the Jews acted insincerely, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity.

But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” [Gal. 2:11-14].

What are we to make of this?

Some among the Church Fathers thought that this was a fake disagreement that Paul and Peter engaged in for teaching purposes.

For example, in his Commentary on Galatians, St. Jerome states:

Now, if anyone thinks that Paul really opposed Peter and fearlessly insulted his predecessor in defense of evangelical truth, he will not be moved by the fact that Paul acted as a Jew among fellow Jews in order to win them for Christ. What is more, Paul would have been guilty of the same kind of dissimulation on other occasions, such as when he shared his head in Cenchrea, when he made an offering in Jerusalem after doing this, when he circumcised Timothy and went barefoot-all of which are clearly aspects of Jewish religious ritual.

Later, he writes:

Just as people who walk normally but pretend to limp do not have a problem with their feet, though there is a reason why they [pretend to] limp, so also Peter, aware that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters but only keeping the commandments of God, ate beforehand with Gentiles but for a time withdrew from them to avoid alienating the Jews from their faith in Christ. Paul likewise employed the same pretense as Peter and confronted him and spoke in front of everyone, not so much to rebuke Peter as to correct those for whose sake Peter had engaged in simulation. Now, if anyone is not convinced by this interpretation, that Peter was not in error and Paul did not rashly rebuke his elder, he must account for why Paul criticized another for doing the same thing he had done.

St. John Chrysostom has the same interpretation here, and Jerome reports that Origen held it as well, though it does not appear in his surviving writings.

The Church Fathers were far from unanimous in this opinion, however, and it seems that Jerome and the others were in the minority.

The majority view, represented by St. Augustine, was that the two apostles had a real difference of opinion about the appropriateness of Peter’s actions. St. Augustine, in particular, points out that Jerome’s theory would involve the two apostles in lying.

A while back, I was reading one of Pope Benedict XVI’s audiences, where he weighed in on the subject:

Here the other epicenter of Mosaic observance emerges: the distinction between clean and unclean foods which deeply separated practicing Jews from Gentiles. At the outset Cephas, Peter, shared meals with both; but with the arrival of certain Christians associated with James, “the Lord’s brother” (Gal 1: 19), Peter began to avoid contact with Gentiles at table in order not to shock those who were continuing to observe the laws governing the cleanliness of food and his decision was shared by Barnabas.

This decision profoundly divided the Christians who had come from circumcision and the Christians who came from paganism.

This behavior, that was a real threat to the unity and freedom of the Church, provoked a passionate reaction in Paul who even accused Peter and the others of hypocrisy: “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” (Gal 2: 14).

In fact, the thought of Paul on the one hand, and of Peter and Barnabas on the other, were different: for the latter the separation from the Gentiles was a way to safeguard and not to shock believers who came from Judaism; on the contrary, for Paul it constituted the danger of a misunderstanding of the universal salvation in Christ, offered both to Gentiles and Jews.

If justification is only achieved by virtue of faith in Christ, of conformity with him, regardless of any effect of the Law, what is the point of continuing to observe the cleanliness of foods at shared meals? In all likelihood the approaches of Peter and Paul were different: the former did not want to lose the Jews who had adhered to the Gospel, and the latter did not want to diminish the saving value of Christ’s death for all believers.

It has been noted that the fact that, after describing his rebuke of Peter, Paul does not immediately say, “And I won, and Peter agreed with me!” is a sign that he actually lost the argument.

If so, it may have given him cause for further reflection, which may have led him to consider situations in which some accommodation to Jewish practices was warranted–even if the situation in Antioch was not one of them. Pope Benedict noted:

It is strange to say but in writing to the Christians of Rome a few years later (in about the middle of the 50s A.D.), Paul was to find himself facing a similar situation and asked the strong not to eat unclean foods in order not to lose or scandalize the weak: “it is right not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your brother stumble” (Rm 14: 21).

The incident at Antioch thus proved to be as much of a lesson for Peter as it was for Paul.

Only sincere dialogue, open to the truth of the Gospel, could guide the Church on her journey: “For the kingdom of God does not mean food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rm 14: 17).

It is a lesson that we too must learn: with the different charisms entrusted to Peter and to Paul, let us all allow ourselves to be guided by the Spirit, seeking to live in the freedom that is guided by faith in Christ and expressed in service to the brethren [General Audience, Oct. 1, 2008].

Thus Paul might have regarded Peter as wrong in the Antioch incident but have been led to more closely consider situations in which accommodating Jewish practices was permissible and even needed.

That could explain Jerome’s question about Paul later did similar things himself.

It’s obvious that the four Gospels agree on the main facts about Jesus’ life:

• He lived in first century Palestine.
• He travelled through Galilee and Judea.
• He worked miracles.
• He taught.
• He was crucified in Jerusalem at the time of Passover during the administration of Pontius Pilate.
• He rose from the dead.
• And so on.

All that’s obvious.

 

Contradictions Among the Gospels?

Critics of the Gospels therefore tend to focus on lesser matters—various differences among the Gospels on matters of detail.

The charges of contradictions among the Gospels tend to vanish, however, if one reads the texts carefully and if one understands the way ancient narrative texts worked and the freedom that authors had in how they presented their material.

They were, for example, free to paraphrase, they were free to place events in non-chronological order for literary effect, they were permitted to simplify and streamline events to just the main facts, and they were free to draw out different implications.

 

Rehearsed Witnesses?

Defenders of the Gospels sometimes point out that these kinds of differences are what we would expect of Gospels written by eyewitnesses or based on eyewitness testimony.

After all, in a courtroom you expect eyewitnesses to see things from different perspectives, to not all say exactly the same things, to paraphrase, and to alternately overlap and omit detail.

If the witnesses have too much harmony in their testimony—if they all say exactly the same things in exactly the same words, with no variation of detail—then it’s a sign that the witnesses have been rehearsed and their testimony becomes suspect.

They may be colluding with each other instead of telling what they really experienced.

 

Signs of Credibility

When evaluating testimony, lawyers (and juries!) look for signs of credibility in the testimony of the witnesses.

One sign of credibility is when tiny details do line up, but they’re the kind of details that the witnesses would not have thought to conspire about.

At first, these details don’t leap out at you. They’re hidden until you do a closer study of the testimony.

But when they harmonize, they give added evidence that you’re hearing the truth.

Are there such hidden harmonies among the Gospels?

Yes!

 

A Question for Philip

Here’s a hidden harmony between the material recorded in John’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel.

KEEP READING.

Among skeptics, Dr. Aaron Adair is sometimes hailed as the “go to” guy on the Star of Bethlehem.

He’s even written a book arguing that the Star didn’t exist.

Recently, he engaged a post I wrote about the Star of Bethlehem.

Here is my reply . . .

 

First Things First

First, you can read our previous interaction in the comments box on this post.

I want to thank Dr. Adair for striving to maintain a positive tone, both in the combox and in his book, The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View.

Although he has occasional lapses (who doesn’t?), it’s clear that he is striving to avoid the kind of snark and venom that are often found in works by some skeptics.

As a non-fan of snark and venom (including when it is used by Catholics), I appreciate that.

 

Various Proposals

In his book, Adair rightly argues against a number of interpretations of what the Star was, and this is to be expected.

The Star can’t have been all of the different things that have been proposed, and some of the proposals are easier to rule out than others.

Sometimes part of his argument is based on the erroneous (but popular) idea that Jesus was born sometime before 4 B.C.

I’ve argued why that was not the case before, on grounds completely unrelated to the Star (see here, here, and here).

Because he uses the more popular dating, Adair too quickly discounts some possible understandings of the Star, but even in these cases, he has an argument to fall back on.

 

Adair’s Ultimate Argument

For Adair, the ultimate argument against any understanding of the Star as a natural (but providential) phenomenon, is based on the alleged motion of the Star as described by Matthew.

This argument is found in chapter 7 of his book, “           Failure of All Natural Hypotheses,” and it is regularly presented as the “clincher” for why any particular view of the Star as a natural phenomenon cannot be true.

Adair summarizes the argument this way:

Matthew talks about a Star that travels south towards a particular destination, leading on eastern sages, until it comes to its destination, stops and hangs over a particular hovel in the small town of Bethlehem. No object in the sky can do such a thing, not by a long shot.

Although I had not read Adair’s book when I wrote my original post, this was precisely the view I was arguing against.

The text of Matthew does not, in fact, require the star to move in an abnormal manner.

So in the combox, I asked Adair how he would respond, and he provided a brief response.

Since he has more length to argue his view in his book, however, I will reply to what is found there.

 

Going Greek

In my original post, I did not discuss the Greek text of Matthew because I try to keep my blog posts as accessible as possible and because 95%+ of the time, there is no need to appeal to the original language (or, at least, no reason to get into the details).

Adair, however, does rely on the Greek text, and so I’ll need to discuss that here.

Upon reading Adair’s argument concerning the Greek, it became apparent that this was not an area he had full command of. Indeed, the Acknowledgements of his book state:

In order to engage in the texts, I needed to learn the Greek language, in which Carl Anderson and William Blake Tyrell have helped me, though I dare not claim proficiency as they can.

Adair is to be credited for making this admission, and he’s trying to do the best he can with the knowledge of Greek he has.

But it is clear that his handling of the Greek is problematic.

 

Some Examples

To put it briefly, Adair uses incorrect grammatical terminology, does not understand the way a major Greek verb tense works, and overtaxes the language to support his conclusion, not recognizing the degree of flexibility it contains.

As an example of the first (incorrect grammatical terminology), he at one point refers to Greek prepositions taking certain “declinations.” He also identifies the genitive as a “declination.”

This is inaccurate. Greek prepositions do not take “declinations.”

They take “cases” (e.g., genitive, dative, accusative), and the genitive is a case. (This will be familiar if you’ve had Latin, German, or other languages that use cases.)

This is a small matter, though. These could just be slips of the tongue, and we all have those.

What is more serious is his misunderstanding of the way a major Greek verb tense works.

 

In an Instant?

A key part of Adair’s argument depends on a Greek tense known as the “aorist.”

We don’t have this tense in English, but it is the single most common tense in the Greek New Testament.

It is even more frequently used than the present tense, and so understanding it correctly is very important.

Adair notes that two Greek verbs used for the Star (erchomai = “come/go” and histami = “stand”) are both in the aorist tense.

He claims that the aorist tense means that the Star, in an instant, came and stopped its motion in the sky.

Here’s what Adair argues:

As the verb [erchomai] is here conjugated (as a participle), it means that in an instant (the aorist tense) it came to its destination. . . .

The verb [histami] is again conjugated like erchomai to indicate that the Star came to a standstill in an instant using the aorist tense.

This is false.

 

The Abused Aorist

Adair is simply wrong about the meaning of the aorist tense. Greek does not have a tense devoted to things that happen instantaneously. Neither does English. Neither does any language I am aware of.

In English, if you want to signify that something happened instantly, you need to modify the verb with an adverb, like “instantly” or “immediately.”

The same thing is true in Greek. You need to use an adverb like euthus (“immediately,” “at once,” “straight away,” “directly”). In fact, the Gospel of Mark is renown for using euthus regularly just for dramatic effect.

The aorist means something else.

In fact, it tells you very little about the event it is describing.

 

What This Tense Means

The aorist tense is usually (though not always) used to refer to an event in the past, but it tells you very little about that event.

In particular, it does not tell you whether the event was finished or ongoing at the time you are speaking of.

It leaves this matter undefined, which is why it is called the “aorist” tense.

“Undefined” is what the word “aorist” means (this is a case where word origins do point to the meaning of a word).

For example, suppose I was speaking of a particular time last night and I said, “Bob built a fire.”

If I used the aorist tense to say this, you would not be able to tell whether Bob had finished building the fire at the time I was speaking of or whether he was still building it then.

The aorist leaves those matters undefined, and if you want to know the answer to them, you have to look to something other than the verb tense.

Thus William Mounce summarizes the aorist this way:

The aorist indicates an undefined action normally occurring in the past [p. 194].

(For introductory-level presentations of what the aorist does and doesn’t mean, see William Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek and D. A. Carson’s Exegetical Fallacies. For more advanced discussions, see Daniel Wallace’s         Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics and Frank Stagg’s classic article The Abused Aorist).

 

The Bottom Line

The bottom line for our purposes is that the aorist tense is not devoted to actions that happen in an instant, and so Adair is wrong to infer from its use in Matthew that the Star “instantly” came and stood at a particular place in the sky.

It is true that the Star came to stand above the house where Jesus was, but the use of the aorist does not tell us that this happened through a sudden, instantaneous arresting of its motion.

It may have moved in an entirely normal manner to arrive above the house for the magi to see.

This leads to another question . . .

 

A Question of Leadership

Another key part of Adair’s argument concerns another verb that Matthew uses.

Adair states:

The word that describes how the Star “went before” the Magi is the verb proago, which means to lead forward.

But in the context of Matthew, it is even more specific because the verb takes a direction object—that which the verb is acting on—and that direct object is clearly the Magi.

As such, the Star was leading the Magi, bringing them forth to their destination; the Star is doing more than standing in a certain direction or even moving about, but it is actually leading the Magi on.

Here we have another incorrect use of grammatical terminology. Verbs do not “take a direction object.” They can have a direct object. That’s normal with any verb that is being used transitively.

Adair is correct that the verb proago can mean “lead,” when it is used transitively, and let’s suppose that this is the meaning here.

Does this imply an unusual motion on the part of the star?

No.

 

Overtaxing the Language

Suppose I am speaking about a camping trip in which I and my companions got lost at night.

Fortunately for us, we realized that the moon was in the southern sky that night, and so we were able to determine our directions. It also provided light for us as we walked south for a few miles until we got back to our camp.

If I said, “The moon led us back to camp,” am I implying that the moon moved in an unusual way?

Of course not.

The moon moved entirely in the expected way, arcing from east to west at a rate of about 15 degrees per hour, but still staying ahead of us in the southern sky as we walked the short distance back to camp.

Nothing unusual about its motion at all.

Of course the moon is not an intelligent being and so, literally speaking, it does not lead anybody. But we still speak in this way in English, and Greek has the same flexibility.

I could say the same thing about a star that was in the sky in front of us and moved normally.

As a result, Adair is overtaxing the language—trying to get more out of it than one fairly can.

And that’s even granting his preferred translation of proago as “lead.”

 

Even More Flexibility

Most words have more than one meaning, and proago is no exception.

One of the most prestigious Greek dictionaries is the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. It’s so famous that people just call it “Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker” or even “BAGD.”

In addition to listing the transitive use of proago and noting that it means “to take or lead from one position to another by taking charge, lead forward, lead, or bring out”, BAGD notes that proago also has an intransitive usage.

It gives the meaning of the intransitive usage as “to move ahead or in front of, go before, lead the way, precede.”

BAGD gives two examples of this usage, both of them from Matthew.

One is Matthew 21:9, where the crowds go before Jesus during the Triumphal Entry. They obviously are not leading Jesus. He is going into Jerusalem any way, but the crowds precede him on his journey.

The second instance is Matthew 2:9, where the star precedes the magi. The situation is the same: They are going to Bethlehem anyway (based on what they learned in Herod’s court). The star just happens to precede them on their journey.

The recognition of other meanings for proago is not unique to BAGD but will be found in any standard Greek dictionary.

This means there is even more flexibility to the language than mentioned in the previous section of this post, and so Adair is overtaxing the language to an even greater degree.

 

Therefore . . .

We see that Adair’s argument from the Greek is flawed and does not prove what he wishes it to.

Whether you take proago to mean “lead” or simply “go before,” we do not have any indication that the star moved in an unusual way.

Neither does the use of the aorist tense indicate that a rapidly moving star instantly came to a stop.

Given the fact that we are told it is a star implies that we should first seek to understand it as moving in the normal way that stars do, and only if this effort fails should we resort to another hypothesis.

 

It Doesn’t Fail

The trip to Bethlehem likely took between one and four hours (depending on things like whether they were mounted, the darkness, and the unevenness of the terrain), so the star would have moved between 15 and 60 degrees in the night sky.

If that much. They might have left before it got dark, so the actual motion may have been even less.

There is no reason why the star could not have been in the southern sky, moved in a normal east-west arc, remaining in the same basic part of the sky as they journeyed.

Then, when they approached the house—from whatever angle they approached it—they noted that the star was in the part of the sky above the house.

Nothing in the text of Matthew—in English or in Greek—requires the star to move in an abnormal way.

I’d like to thank Dr. Adair for engaging in the comments box on this issue, and I look forward to any further response he would like to make.