Dr. Lydia McGrew's errors in defending the empty tomb

This is my reply to a review article by Christian scholar Dr. Timothy McGrew, entitled

(Guest Post) Was there a guard at Jesus’ tomb?

a guest post by Timothy McGrew

Posted by Lydia McGrew on February 24, 2019 2:33 PM

Skeptical objections to the historicity of the Gospel narratives are numerous. They are also, for the most part, old news.

But not quite as old as the New Testament.
snip

Michael Alter’s book The Resurrection: A Critical Inquiry (2015) is certainly long enough to seem imposing, and somewhat to my surprise it has thrown my acquaintance V. J. Torley into a bit of a tailspin. Torley has written a very long, detailed, glowing review of Alter’s book -- a review that is practically a monograph in its own right -- in which he claims that the book is a “bombshell” that “demolishes Christian apologists’ case for the resurrection.”

snip 

Torley rejects the story that there was a guard at the tomb for the following four reasons:

A. It is mentioned only in Matthew’s Gospel, not in the other three.

B. This account fails to explain why the body could not have been stolen on Friday night.

C. We are not told why Pilate would agree to the Jewish leaders’ request. In particular:

1. The request concerned a purely religious matter, and we would not expect Pilate to care much about such things

2. Pilate had just been pressured into ordering Jesus’ crucifixion, and therefore any further request would be unlikely to meet with a favorable reception

D. The Jewish rulers would not have made such a request of Pilate, since a gentile employed by a Jew would not be allowed to work on the Sabbath.

Let us consider these reasons in turn.

First, only Matthew’s Gospel mentions the setting of a guard at Jesus’ tomb. It is not clear how much weight Torley intends this fact to bear by itself. But as the argument from silence in such cases is generally terribly weak, it is hard to see why it should be significant just here. Many of the events of antiquity crop up in only one source.

And unfortunately for you, nobody is intellectually "compelled" to think that trusting the singular uncorroborated source is "reasonable".  When an ancient fact comes to us by way of an uncorroborated singular source, you are a fool to pretend the fact is "established" or that the burden shifts to the skeptic to "disprove" it.

Furthermore, if the empty tomb was the major apologetic used by the apostles as you think, then there is legitimate room for skepticism, to wit, why wouldn't the other gospel authors have found this evidence for the empty tomb worthy of mention?  Peter allegedly refers to the empty tomb (Acts 2:29-32), and if as a conservative you believe Peter's preaching was the basis for Mark's gospel, then why doesn't Mark mention this story of the guards being employed to prevent grave robbers?

The conditions that have to be met for an argument from silence to be strong are rather stringent and are rarely met in historical work. (For details, see my paper “The Argument from Silence,” Acta Analytica 29 (2014), 215-28.)

I overcame that objection:  If your assumption that Peter is the basis for Mark's gospel be correct, then we would not expect Mark to "choose to exclude" the part of Peter's alleged preaching that refers to the empty tomb.  Had Mark known about the guard at the tomb, this would have made the empty tomb seem more miraculous and he wouldn't have likely excluded it.  You are not going to show that skeptics are unreasonable in this, particularly because of the scholarship that is against Peter being a major source of Mark's gospel, and because of the scholarship that views the speeches in Acts as nuggets of historical truth that are laced with the author's own perspective, so that to what degree the speeches in Acts reflect or don't reflect on the alleged apostle being quoted, is impossible to determine with any reasonable degree of certainty.  All we need do as skeptics is show that your own presupposition of Petrine influence over Mark creates a presumption that Mark would both have heard about, and wished to record for posterity, Peter's focus on the reality of the empty tomb, a point Mark would find more forceful in the context of a story of about guards making sure nobody could steal the body.  You lose.

And since it appears the chief scribes insisted Jesus was possessed by a demon and misleading Israel (Matthew 12:24), it is highly unlikely they'd allow somebody they consider a dangerous blasphemer the dignity of a proper burial.  If they seriously feared the disciples might conspire to steal the body from a tomb, they would have recognized that throwing Jesus' dead body to the dogs, as was customary anyway, would make it far more difficult for the disciples to later claim he rose from the dead. 

As Torley has not attempted to argue that the silence of the other evangelists meets the probabilistic challenge laid out there, I will not belabor the point.

Second, Torley objects that the account does not explain why the body could not have been stolen on Friday night. In making this objection, he assumes that the request was made on Saturday morning. For the moment, suppose it was; even so, the objection has little force. There are simply too many plausible ways for the rulers to fail to make the request on Friday. Pilate might have left pointed instructions that he wasn’t to be bothered further that evening. The Jewish leaders might have left someone of their own to keep an eye on the tomb overnight. Failing that, they might still have thought that it would be better than nothing to have a guard set for the remainder of the time period specified.

 Do you allow skeptics to get rid of problems through similarly unsubstantiated speculation?

But it is not even clear from the text that the request was made on Saturday. The Jews reckoned the beginning of the Sabbath with sundown on Friday, so for all the text says, they may have made the request on Friday evening as soon as they ascertained the location of Jesus’ body. In his work The Burial and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, According to the Four Evangelists (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1827), Johann David Michaelis argues that the language of Matthew, with its peculiar turn of phrase (ἥτις ἐστὶν μετὰ τὴν Παρασκευήν, hardly necessary after Τῇ δὲ ἐπαύριον unless something more specific than the generic succession of days is intended) actually indicates that the request was made just past sundown on Friday:

    Literally translated, on the following day, which is after Friday. As it is self-evident that one day must follow another, and it requires no author to tell us this, the meaning is, “on the following day, immediately after the end of Friday,” or in other words, immediately after sunset, with which, according to the custom of the Jews, the day ends, and the sabbath begins. This mode of speaking seems singular in Greek, but in Hebrew, from the same word [ערב] signifying “evening,” “holy evening,” or, as we should say, “vespers,” it becomes more intelligible. The meaning is, that from an apprehension the body might be stolen in the night, they did not wait until the following morning, they went immediately to Pilate that same evening, which now no longer belonged to Friday, but formed part of the sabbath, and requested a guard. [100; cf. the German edition, 83]

I don't see the point, the story says Joseph and whoever might have been with him put Jesus' body in the tomb then sealed the entrance, then left...leaving the reader with the impression that the tomb was left unguarded for a certain amount of time:

 59 And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth,
 60 and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock; and he rolled a large stone against the entrance of the tomb and went away.
 61 And Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting opposite the grave.
 62 Now on the next day, the day after the preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered together with Pilate,
 63 and said, "Sir, we remember that when He was still alive that deceiver said, 'After three days I am to rise again.'
 64 "Therefore, give orders for the grave to be made secure until the third day, otherwise His disciples may come and steal Him away and say to the people, 'He has risen from the dead,' and the last deception will be worse than the first."
 65 Pilate said to them, "You have a guard; go, make it as secure as you know how."
 66 And they went and made the grave secure, and along with the guard they set a seal on the stone. (Matt. 27:59-28:1 NAU)

 It doesn't matter how small a time-window you try to make between Joseph leaving the tomb and the guards arriving later.  Two followers of Jesus were present at the tomb watching when Jesus was buried therein, so they knew where it was (v. 61), and they would more than likely tell the disciples as long as you insist such women trusted in Jesus.  How much time would be required, at minimum, for the women to tell the disciples where the body was, then for the disciples to arrive, roll away the stone and steal the body?  12 hours?  Obviously not.

Various other New Testament scholars, not all of them conservative (Doddridge, Paulus, Kuinoel, Thorburn) concur in Michaelis’s analysis. Meyer dissents, but without adducing any reasons other than his disagreement with these authorities regarding the meaning of the expression τῇ ἐπαύριον. He does not engage with Michaelis’s point regarding the parallel Hebrew expression [ממחרת ערב השבת] at all.

Hagner says the body was unguarded over Friday night:

The security of tombs was important enough to have become the subject of a Roman imperial edict between 50 b.c. and a.d. 50 (see Metzger). Since this strategy was not formulated until “the next day” (v. 62), the tomb in fact remained unguarded over Friday night. As R. E. Brown (Death of the Messiah, 1309, n. 53) rightly points out, however, the guard would hardly have sealed the tomb without first checking to see if the body was there. If Matthew created this story ex nihilo, however, it is more likely that he would have had the guard posted immediately after the interment (rightly, Carson).

n. note

Hagner, D. A. (2002). Vol. 33B: Word Biblical Commentary : Matthew 14-28. Word Biblical Commentary (Page 863). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.

 Hagner tries to rescue the situation by saying the guards would have likely checked to make sure the body was still there, but my reply is that if we are to believe the guards could be bribed to tell an unbelievbable lie that would have them executed for dereliction of duty (the disciples stole him while we were asleep, Matthew 28:13), they were certainly amenable to being bribed by the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea (Matthew 27:57) to avoid looking in the tomb and falsely report that yes, they confirmed the body was still there before sealing the tomb.

And let's not forget that even Licona thinks the zombie resurrection of 27:52 is apocalyptic imagery, and so this Matthew-author was not beyond mixing fact with fantasy, something he also appears to be doing with the angel and lightning crap in 28:2-3.

The second objection, then, is either very weak (if Michaelis is wrong) or completely misguided (if he is right). This is hardly the sort of reasoning that should lead us to discard a contemporaneous narrative account of a public event.

 Sorry, but I'm already justified to dismiss ANY reported miracle account if it appears to be the work of later editors embellishing what might be something written by the original author.  Especially one from 2,000 years ago, when there is at least a 150 year textually dark period where god-only-knows what changes were being made to the alleged original stories.  You do not get the upper hand here by blindly presuming that skeptics have to refute an ancient embellished account on the merits before they can be reasonable to reject it.

The third objection is that Matthew’s narrative does not tell us why Pilate would acquiesce in the request of the Jewish leaders. On the face of it, this is a very odd way to object to historical evidence. Many narratives recount events without affording us an explanation for them, and sometimes we are left to guess what that explanation might be. So what?

But perhaps this problem is just a matter of wording; perhaps the real objection is that the two considerations Torley mention are supposed to make it unlikely that Pilate would grant a guard at the tomb. Is it so?

The first consideration is that Pilate, as a secular authority dealing exclusively with non-religious matters, would have had no reason to grant a request of this sort -- perhaps also that the Jewish leaders would not have had the temerity to put it to him. But this consideration misses the mark entirely. The matter of Jesus’ death, though of religious importance to the Jewish rulers, had far wider ramifications. An imposture might well raise civil trouble in Jerusalem, particularly as it was swollen at this time with hundreds of thousands (Josephus, Jewish War 2.14.3 (Loeb #280), estimates three million) of Passover pilgrims. Jesus’ popularity with the crowds was well known. Unrest at Passover had led to disastrous results within living memory, notably on the death of Herod the Great, as Josephus describes in his Antiquities 17.9.3 (Loeb #213-18). Preventing civil unrest lay squarely within Pilate’s sphere of responsibility. On this count, the matter is exactly the sort of thing we would expect the Jewish rulers to request of Pilate. It is a mark of authenticity rather than of inauthenticity.

 Not true; if Jesus really was as popular with the crowds as the gospels say, Pilate would have known that Jesus was claiming to be a higher authority than Pilate, and as such Pilate would have likely found tossing Jesus' body to the dogs as a disgrace and deterrent to future-likeminded saviors, a more attractive social policy than allow him the dignity of a decent burial...especially if he had the least bit of concern the disciples would try to steal the body. 

The second consideration is that Pilate, whom the Jewish leadership had (according to the Gospels) maneuvered into having Jesus crucified against his own better judgment, would have been unlikely to grant them a further request. This point deserves close consideration, because it has a significance that has escaped Torley and Alter. According to the Gospel narratives, Pilate did not believe Jesus had done anything worthy of death.

 And that part of the trial transcript is total bullshit, since not only did Jesus make it clear that he was a higher authority than Rome, but that he was the "messiah" whom the Jews expected to free them from foreign occupation, and even after three years of hearing this first hand from the horses' mouth, the disciples still understand him to be a military conqueror (Acts 1:6), and Jesus' answer doesn't deny the legitimacy of their question, but simply says they don't need to know this (v. 7).  You cannot deny that it is reasonable to infer from these passages either that the disciples were unbelievably stupid...or Jesus had taught them for three prior years that yes, he would be freeing the Jews from Roman rule.  Either way, Pilate's allegedly finding Jesus innocent of the charge of blasphemy or sedition rings false....therefore he likely thought Jesus guilty as charged, and would thus find a dishonorable method of corpse disposal that was already in use (using it as carrion) would serve more of the purpose he sought to serve in having Jesus die by crucifixion, which was also dishonoring.

Whatever the case, skeptics cannot be called unreasonable merely because they call Matthew a liar.  That's your problem, Dr. McGrew, your religion requires you to defend just anything and everything these gospel authors say.  That's a requirement of your religious dedication, not a requirement of historiography.

He allowed the Jews to have their way on this matter only because he feared that they would send a twisted version of events to Rome, destabilizing his governorship and perhaps leading to his being recalled in disgrace. For the sake of their argument, Alter and Torley need to grant at least this much authenticity to the Gospel narratives. In a subsequent post, I will return to this point, as it substantially undermines a claim that Torley and others have made in support of the second and third objections.

But the consideration is relevant here only if there is no other reason that Pilate might have felt moved to grant such a request. And even assuming that Pilate was thoroughly unhappy with the Jewish leaders by this time, such a reason lies ready to hand. The theft of a body and proclamation that the individual in question was alive was the sort of scenario a Roman governor under Tiberius could not safely ignore.

Some sixteen years earlier, one Clemens, a slave of Caesar Augustus’s grandson Agrippa Postumus, stole the ashes and bones of his murdered master and spread the rumor that Agrippa had in fact escaped the attempt on his life. As he resembled his dead master in age and physique, he went so far as to impersonate him in some of the towns at twilight. Tiberius, who had become sole emperor after the death of his adopted father Augustus in that very year, feared a conspiracy and had Clemens apprehended, interrogated, and slain in a private part of his palace. (See Tacitus, Annals 2.39-40.)

So this second consideration, as well, turns out not only to pose no problem for the authenticity of the narrative but actually to be a point in its favor. These are the sorts of details that modern critics, even those professing to examine historical matters very minutely, are apt to overlook because they are not intimately familiar with the historical context.

  Which is precisely why denying Joe's request for Jesus' body and requiring it to be used as carrion which was the usual method of corpse-disposal anyway, has greater historical plausibility.  Pilate would have known that following the normal procedure here would more effectively preempt false claims about Jesus' resurrection, than if he allowed the body to be disposed by proper burial in a way that removed it from his custody for a while.

The fourth objection is that the Jewish leaders would not have asked Pilate to set a guard at the tomb, since it was the Sabbath day, and Jewish law would have forbidden them to hire a gentile to do such work on the Sabbath. Yet again, the objection seems to me to be fundamentally misguided, and in two ways. First, even supposing the objection to be fairly stated, there is no guarantee that the Jewish authorities would be particularly scrupulous in the matter of hiring a Roman guard to do their work, as they had already shown their willingness to hold a trial by night in prima facie violation of their own rules.

 But the kangaroo court details provided by Matthew are also unbelievable.  Your argument might impress those who already trust in Matthew's historical reliability, but nobody else.

But as it happens, the text does not bear out the idea that they were hiring anyone.

 Gee, the bible doesn't tell you so?

Rather, they were making a request to Pilate, as the civil governor, that he would secure the tomb with a guard. Nothing in Jewish law as interpreted at the time would prevent them from making such a request.

 But again, it is not likely they'd make such a request, because it isn't likely that Pilate would have found Jesus innocent.  He'd have found Jesus guilty and a major threat to civil order that insisting on crucifixion and using the body as carrion in a common grave would more strongly address the problem.  The whole idea that Jesus was given a decent burial is total bullshit.

And if you think the the creed of 1st Corinthians 15:3-4 goes all the way back to the first Sunday after Jesus was crucified, remember that while Paul was alive, false rumors about him spread like wildfire throughout the Jewish faction of the church.  Acts 21:18-24.  Sorry, Dr. McGrew, but false rumors could easily, and actually did, arise at a very early stage.  And nothing in the NT indicates that the Jewish church ever gave up belief in this "false" rumor about Paul, showing that if a false rumor did take hold, it had a lot of staying power even despite efforts of the people at issue to dispel it.

I conclude that on the first point, Alter’s argument, as summarized by Torley, completely fails to undermine the credibility Matthew’s account of the setting of a guard at the tomb where Jesus had just been buried.

 Wouldn't matter if you were correct, you are falsely assuming that Matthew's account stands as reliable historical evidence unless and until it is refuted on the merits. That's just a fancy way of saying everything in the bible must be presumed true unless skeptics can prove it false.  Sorry, that's not how historiography works.  Especially when the sources are ancient, some of them changed each other's testimony, we don't know how much of it goes back to the original authors and how much is just the embellishment of later authors, etc, etc. If you were being prosecuted in a court of law for murder, on the basis of written testimony that was equally as textually questionable as the gospels, you'd be screaming your head off that this evidence is not sufficient to justify a jury finding you guilty.  You'd also be objecting that the witness's telling supernatural stories makes the testimony inherently implausible.

Indeed, some of the particular considerations raised against that account are actually points that count on the other side, showing a minute consistency with the historical context and recent historical events that have escaped the notice of these critics.

In my subsequent posts, I will examine Torley’s two remaining challenges.

[UPDATE: See the comments thread below for an argument of Torley's on a related point.]

Posted by Lydia McGrew on February 24, 2019 2:33 PM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (New Testament)

Comments (20)

Dr. McGrew,

Do you (or anyone else of note) attribute any credence to the idea that Pilate’s “you have a guard. Secure it the best you can.” Was a refusal after all. In other words Pilate was sarcastically reminding the Jews that they should use the Temple guard, which Roman oversight had allowed them to maintain. This is after Morris, I believe.

I’ve always been a fan of the “use your own guard and stop bothering me” hypothesis, if only for it’s fun contrarian elan. Is it completely unsupportable in your view?

Posted by Kevin. Wells | February 24, 2019 5:41 PM

Kevin,

I'm ambivalent about that point. It could be correct. But later, the guards seem to be in particular danger from the Roman authorities, and the Jewish leaders offer to run interference from them. That fact isn't decisive, but it does seem to point in the direction of their being a Roman guard.

Posted by Tim | February 24, 2019 6:30 PM

 But as we learn from other NT texts, the Roman leadership did not find the purely religious concerns of the Jews to be sufficiently important to justify expenditure of Roman resources in adjudicating them.  Gallio is unwilling to become involved in judging a Jew for allegedly violating Jewish laws, Acts 18:12-15.

Whether Pilate cared enough to assist the Jews with guards is a central factor in this dispute, yet you are "ambivalent" about it?  Is that because God's word is so clear and compelling?

A reader has pointed out that Torley has an additional argument, not against the setting of a guard at the tomb but to the story of what happened to the guards in the aftermath of the resurrection. Here is Torley's discussion, appearing after he has quoted John Wenham, in The Easter Enigma, as saying that the account "bristles with improbabilities":

    The aftermath is even more absurd: despite the fact that the penalty for guards falling asleep was crucifixion upside down, the guards agree to spread the totally implausible story that they all fell asleep on Sunday morning, and that none of them woke up while the disciples broke the seal of the tomb, rolled back the stone, and removed the body of Jesus!

    Nevertheless, Wenham is inclined to credit the story of the guard, precisely because it’s so full of obvious holes that he thinks no-one would have made it up in the first place. In reply, Alter suggests (2015, pp. 340-342) that the story was originally created in order to forestall an anti-Christian explanation for the empty tomb: maybe the reason why it was found empty is that Jesus’ body was stolen. To forestall that possibility, someone concocted a fictitious account of the Jewish priests going to Pilate and requesting a guard, in order to quell popular rumors that Jesus would rise from the dead on the third day. But that created a problem: if there were a guard at the tomb, then the women wouldn’t have been able to enter and find it empty. So in the story, the guard had to be gotten out of the way. This was done by inserting a terrifying apparition of an angel just before the women arrived at the tomb, causing the guards to fall into a dead faint, and conveniently providing the women with the opportunity to enter the tomb. And in order to explain why there was no public record of the guard seeing the angel remove the stone, the story of the guards being bribed into silence by the Jewish chief priests was invented. In short: the lameness of the guard story cannot be used to establish its authenticity. The story is an ad hoc creation, designed to forestall a common objection to the empty tomb accounts.

There is certainly something ad hoc going on in Alter's treatment of the matter, but the problem lies in the methodology Alter employs here rather than in the story as told in Matthew's Gospel. Start with a surmise -- "Maybe it didn't really happen." Faced with the fact that there isn't much reason to doubt it, make up a purely hypothetical motivation that someone might have had for inventing such a story: "Maybe Jesus' body really was stolen, and they had to create a cover story for that fact."

 What do you think prosecutors do every day when faced with a guilty Defendant who has provided a facially plausible alibi?  Do they dismiss charges?  No, they try to show that the ablibi is false by comparing it to other established facts and showing the alibi is unlikely to be true.  Call it what you want, but engaging in hypothesis to explain evidence is routine procedure in legal and historical analysis.

Faced with the further problem that this particular cover story is hardly what one would invent to answer to that hypothetical state of affairs and could easily be contradicted by people on the ground in Jerusalem who knew the guards,

See what I mean?  Not even YOU can escape from inventing speculations.

ignore the problem and instead double down on creating hypothetical rationales for other parts of the story. "The guards have to be gotten out of the way so the women can enter ..." Okay, why not just have Jesus' resurrection itself knock them out instead of resorting to the awkward fabrication of their falling asleep?

 Because people who lie often don't do so in a completely efficient and convincing fashion.  When people are determined to lie, they often find themselves being forced to reconcile their story with other known facts, and then at that point, they have to pile one lie on top of another.  After a while, their lie just sounds more and more implausible.

You are also overlooking the fact that Licona admits, that Matthew's authors wasn't beyond mixing fact with fiction.  Why not just have Jesus' resurreciton itself knock them out?  Because that wouldn't give them an opportunity to do what Jewish tale-bearers did in the first century, and accompany the alleged miracle with angelic visitations, that's why.

Simple questions like this suffice to show how specious such reasoning is. What historical narrative, however faithful, could not be dissolved (at least in the imagination of the critic) by the application of such methods?

That's your problem.  Historiography is an art, not a science.  Blame on the stupid god who had more desire for the Hittites and Egyptians to record matters on stone so that today's generations would have access to the actual originals...while he didn't want the Christians to document their "truths" this rigidly.

Torley expresses incredulity that Wenham argues from the improbabilities in the story (conceived as a story) that the best explanation for why it is told is that it was notoriously true. But in fact, this is a well-known pattern of argument that Aristotle discusses in his Rhetoric 2.23.21 (1400a):

    Another line of argument refers to things which are supposed to happen and yet seem incredible. We may argue that people could not have believed them, if they had not been true or nearly true: even that they are the more likely to be true because they are incredible. For the things which men believe are either facts or probabilities: if, therefore, a thing that is believed is improbable and even incredible, it must be true, since it is certainly not believed because it is at all probable or credible.

The other side of that coin is that because all miraculous events involve improbability, they are all true.  That's obvioiusly stupid, so you can only push the "truth stranger than fiction" cop-out so far.

The argument is an inference to the best explanation, so we may properly demur at Aristotle's saying that it must be true.

Then why don't you believe the Catholic miracles?  They are improbable, thus, they are true!

Nevertheless, it is not an unreasonable method of argumentation.

Granted, but that doesn't mean every improbable story is true, nor that you are reasonable to view life that way for yourself.  You forget that in nearly all cases, we reasonably suspect a story to be false precisely because it sounds improbable.  So improbabilities are a sword that cuts both ways.

Compared to the tissue of utterly ungrounded hypotheses that Alter fabricates as an alternative, it seems by far the more sober choice.

Posted by Tim | February 24, 2019 7:09 PM

Drive-by comments on four reasons cited by McGrew why Torley rejects the account of there being a guard at Jesus' tomb

...My brief comments (inferior to McGrew's) are as follows. Any cheekiness in tone is unintentional, just my quick reactions.

A: so what?

B: it would be nice to have everything explained, but we don't get that in ancient documents. How is the fact that not everything the critic wants explained gets explained an argument against an account.
...Posted by Joe Lightfoot | February 24, 2019 8:43 PM

 Yes, the lack of explanation is not infallible proof of falsity, but the lack of explanation is indeed a typical feature of fabricated alibis and stories.  Lack of explanation leaves room for the fact-finder to consider that an explanation inconsistent with the given story, is the actual 'truth'.

Without fail, the one element everybody arguing against the guard at the tomb overlooks is that the tomb was sealed. There is no way in the world a Roman centurion would have assumed the responsibility for that seal without knowing the body of Jesus was in the tomb.

 But the guards were corrupt and accepted a bribe from the Jews to tell a lie that would likely cause them to be executed (sleeping on the job), so the guards were far more likely to be bribed by the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea to just seal what they knew was an empty tomb, but falsely confess later that they confirmed Jesus was in the tomb before they sealed it.

The temple authorities would have known this, and they knew what the Romans would do. They knew the Romans would have to open and enter the tomb, something Jews couldn't do on the Sabbath.

 Well gee, Jews weren't "allowed" to lie either, yet they are found lying all over the place in the NT.  I have no problems with the theory that the Jewish disciples thought stealing Jesus' body was an exceptional situation calling for departures from normative ethics.  After all, they were known supporters of Jesus and thus equally as amenable to being executed for the same offense Jesus was.  They had a strong motive to do something to make it seem like Jesus was the real deal.  At the end of the day, they are no different than the millions of people who embellish or fabricate their own miracle stories.

That explains why they went to Pilate. They wanted that tomb sealed because they didn't know if the body was in there, either. All they knew was that it had been turned over to Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, both of whom they likely regarded as political enemies, and these two had allegedly interred it. They had to know the body of Jesus was in there prior to the third day in order to prevent a fake resurrection, and this was the only way they could find out.

Simply put,the guard at the tomb had to be Roman, or the tomb could not have been sealed. A Jewish guard could not do that.

 Well gee, Jews also weren't allowed to lie under oath.  Yet the entire Sanhedrin was responsible for the kangaroo court that eventually had Jesus executed.

It's questionable if the Jews could have even posted a guard without violating the Sabbath rules, but it is for certain they could not have moved the stone. But the Romans could, and they would have had to in order to document the tomb's contents. Furthermore, the soldiers who made up this guard probably had no idea who Jesus was, let alone what He looked like.

 You don't have enough evidence to make  reasonable probably judgment on that point one way or the other.  Jesus was allegedly very popular with the crowds.

That explains why the temple authorities tagged along. They would be needed to provide the witnesses who could identify the body.

 But wouldn't "tagging along" constitute "work"?

Again, we know this had to be done because the tomb was sealed. The centurion in charge would not have assumed responsibility for the seal unless he had eyewitness identification of a body he had seen with his own eyes. Seals are nothing to trifle with, even today, but in those days Roman discipline was severe, and no soldier was going to half do his job, and leave himself open to that.

 Except perhaps for the soldiers who were willing to lie in exchange for money, that is, the soldiers who were involved in the alleged sealing of the tomb.

In addition, this explains two other questions that arise from Matthew's account, one of which came up here.

When the tomb was entered by followers of Jesus following the resurrection, the napkin covering the face of Jesus was lying folded by itself, separated from the other grave clothes. We know that the Jewish burial custom of that time was to wrap the head with a cloth, thus covering the face. That would have to be removed in order to identify the body. The point that it was folded, at least to me, implies a military presence. One of the first things a soldier learns is how to handle personal items. Everything must be folded and stored precisely. The Roman soldier was the best trained the world had ever seen up to that time, and the centurion was the best of the best. A duty of this sort wouldn't be handed out lightly, and a guard detail of this importance would have required a centurion. That alone would explain why the face covering was found folded. A well-trained soldier, in my opinion, would not have simply flung the cloth aside. And, being unfamiliar with Jewish burial practices, he would not have bothered rewrapping the head of Jesus, either. His work was done when the identification was made. Thus it would have made no difference when the guard was posted. The body was there or the Romans would not have affixed the seal of the empire, whether on Friday night or Saturday morning.

 Sorry but the whole resurrection narrative rings hollow, and skeptics are hardly under any intellectual obligation to account for every detail of it, as if our failure to explain the folded napkin somehow shows that we secretly know our skepticism is wrong (!?).  How many features of more modern unsolved crimes are you unable to account for?  Does that mean you know the truth and just aren't willing to admit it?

This would also explain why the account appears only in Matthew's gospel. Matthew had been a tax collector. In order to carry out those duties, he had to know how to use seals. He had to transport the monies he collected from Capernaum, where his booth was, probably to Caesarea, where Pilate - the ultimate recipient of Matthew's liabilities - had his headquarters. The only way to do this securely would be by armed guard, with the money properly documented and sealed. So, once Matthew knew the tomb was sealed, he also knew it had been examined and its contents documented. Alone among the apostles, Matthew knew exactly what that seal meant.

 Or Matthew invented the story because he knew about seals.

Once the tomb was closed and sealed, the guard could be posted. Accounts I've read put the number of soldiers at about 16 for this kind of duty, so that they could be stationed in a fan-shaped formation, with at least four at a time awake while the others slept. There was simply no way anybody could have slipped up on the guard and carried off the body. Yet, the empty tomb was never contested.

Argument from silence.  Dr. McGrew will have none of it.

To the contrary, it was confirmed by the enemies of Jesus, ironically through their very efforts to explain it away.

You don't know why the empty tomb isn't attacked by the earliest critics.  I also haven't "contested" the claims of the Heaven's Day cult, but what does that prove?    You also don't know how much literature against Christianity was authored in the 1st century but destroyed at a very early stage.

You also don't know to what degree the "enemies" of Christianity are being fairly or unfairly represented in the gospel texts.  All you are doing is blindly presuming the truth of bible inerrancy and thus preaching to the choir. 

Seals are very simple and very old devices. We can find them in museums today, and depending on who dated them, some are claimed to pre-date the Roman Empire by over 2,000 years. By the time of Rome, and even up to modern times, they were known to be the most effective way to secure the contents of a container. All of Mr. Alter's objections to the story of the guard at the tomb are easily explained.
Posted by Joe Foster | February 25, 2019 1:10 AM

Professional liars know full well that infusing nuggets of historical truth into a false story is a good way to make it sound more convincing.

Alter's general approach is that any natural explanation is more likely than a miraculous one. From this you get 'well maybe this happened . . . .' Regardless of how weak the explanation is. As long as it's natural, right?

Posted by Callum Savage | February 25, 2019 3:20 AM

Yes, just like if you were being prosecuted for murder on the basis of testimony that was held together by supernatural elements, you'd be screaming your head off that the miraculous automatically makes the testimony inherently unreliable.

    Once the tomb was closed and sealed, the guard could be posted.
Posted by Tony | February 25, 2019 7:28 AM

 And a corrupt guard, willing to accept bribes from the highest bidder, could be posted.  Money talks.

Matthew answers this: Publicly they told a lie, and the Jewish authorities told Pilate, "It's okay, don't get them in trouble."

Now, if some became Christians, presumably those guards, would have stopped telling that lie. But by that time nobody was trying to get them in trouble.

Posted by Lydia | February 25, 2019 4:49 PM

So even Lydia, who has no history of mistaking speculation for inerrant truth, of course, is unable to resist the temptation to confuse speculation with truth.

No more needed to happen that that the other writers decided that they didn't want to include the detail about the guards.

 But WHY Mark, Luke and John would not find the guard story compelling, is a legitimate topic to investigate.  Just like you wish to investigate, as a prosecutor, any possible alibi-destroying hypothesis that the man you charged with murder doesn't wish to talk about.

As with the argument from silence in histories, the argument from lack of perfect parallel is extremely weak in general, and here is no stronger. All you can say about Mark and Luke not including it, is that Mark and Luke didn't include it. Whether that was because they didn't know about the event, or didn't feel it important enough to add to their account, or wanted to leave some details vague and ambiguous, we can't discover from inside the texts.
Posted by Tony | February 25, 2019 6:54 PM

 But we can be reasonable to hypothesize that because the guards-at-the-tomb story would make the events of Easter Morning sound more miraculous, they WOULD have mentioned such things, had they known about them, so it's likely they are silent because they didn't know such stories.


Then you have the theological problem of the Holy Spirit allegedly moving Matthew to include the story, and moving Mark and Luke to exclude it, when in fact one intelligent being telling others to give different versions of the same story is a being that sounds dishonest.

Alter is deluding himself if he thinks that his job is done once he has raised doubts about the story of the guard. Firstly, he needs to say whether he thinks the tomb really was empty.

Yeah, and you need to give the specific identity of Jack the Ripper.

If it wasn’t empty then why was there a debate about the reason for the empty tomb?

 Maybe because 1st century Jews believed in physical resurrection, so that by claiming Jesus rose from the dead, the Christians were forced to conjure up stories of an empty tomb?  You know, the way they conjured up stories that Paul was a hypocrite regarding Mosaic law (Acts 21:18-21).

Perhaps Alter thinks that there was no such debate and that Matthew invented the story of the guard in order to refute an accusation of theft which Matthew himself had invented. Does Alter think that is plausible?

Well if Licona is correct in saying Matthew had no trouble mixing fact with imagination in the resurrection narrative, then I don't see anything implausible in the idea of a storyteller getting sufficiently stupid with his invented details that he finally has to resort to supernatural explanations to make the story sound convincing.  That's pretty sad.  If you ever got into a disagreement with anybody and they tried to shore up the problems in their version of events by resorting to supernatural explanations, you know god-damn well you wouldn't believe them.  Apologetics is uselessly and purely academic, it's word-plays and what-if scenarios have no significant connection to how life actually happens and how we can be reasonable to suspect that a logically possible story is likely false.

Perhaps there really was a debate but both sides were mistaken in thinking the tomb was empty. Does Alter think that is plausible? Or perhaps the tomb really was empty. In that case Alter needs to explain why it was empty. Then he needs to explain the rest of the evidence.

All of those issues will need to be addressed even if the story of the guard is discounted. But it still hasn’t been established that the story should be discounted. All that we have seen so far is a weak attempt to cast doubt on the story.

Posted by David Madison | February 26, 2019 5:02 AM

Yeah, but, what if Alter, while in the middle of doing research to fulfill your demand that he answer the other evidence, dies in a car accident, that is, dies as a non-Christian who said "no" to the gospel invitation?  Will he go to hell?  If so, then what should you have said?  That Alter answer other apologetics concerns, or get saved?

"Alter's general approach is that any natural explanation is more likely than a miraculous one. From this you get 'well maybe this happened . . . .' Regardless of how weak the explanation is."

That's one of the things that makes this form of argumentation frustrating. Among those predisposed to doubt the supernatural it all looks very cut-and-dried. But its proponents tend not to see its question-begging aspects because of their prior commitments. It's something like fundamentalism in reverse, and it appears in "liberal" historiography quite often.

Posted by Nice Marmot | February 26, 2019 6:33 AM

 Sorry I'm not seeing how my naturalistic explanation for the empty tomb involves any question-begging fallacy.

    But its proponents tend not to see its question-begging aspects because of their prior commitments.

That's quite true, NM.

In order for them to avoid question-begging, they would have to modify the premise to something along the lines of "all other things being equal, any natural explanation is more likely than a miraculous one". But of course, this is history, not math or physics, and "all other things being equal" doesn't ever happen: real facts on the ground are always different in some respect. It all then comes down to whether the real and different facts are pertinent to the issue, and of course presuming that facts that tend to point in the direction of the miraculous are themselves to be set at naught (or nearly so) is part of the question-begging.
Posted by Tony | February 26, 2019 10:21 AM

 No, you are forgetting how strong the case is for the anonymity of the gospels, and how stupid it is to pretend anonymous testimony can be sufficient to establish "facts".

Thanks for this article. I had taken it that they requested the guard on the Saturday and that this was an indication of the authenticity of the account, because if Matthew was making up the story he would have ensured the guard was on site right from the moment of burial.

Posted by Paul McCauley | February 26, 2019 2:29 P

 Or...Matthew is a story-telling liar, and he doesn't do the most efficient job he can of lying...like millions of other liars.