Demolishing Triablogue: The Jewish objection to the empty tomb is a reasonable justification for skepticism

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer of Triablogue entitled

Early Jewish Acknowledgment Of The Empty Tomb

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

A few early Christian sources tell us that their Jewish opponents acknowledged that Jesus' tomb was found empty after the body had been placed there. Were the later sources just repeating what the first one, Matthew, told them?
Even if so, there's no good reason to reject Matthew's report.

You are blindly assuming we are obligated to believe anything we read in ancient religious history unless somebody comes along and proves the source unreliable.  You are high on crack.  I have about as much intellectual obligation to believe Matthew's report as I have to believe 1st Enoch.  You couldn't demonstrate the unreasonableness of complete apathy toward the gospels if your life depended on it.  FUCK YOU.

The gospel seems to have been written by a Jew and seems to have been written for an audience with a lot of knowledge of Judaism, Israel, and other elements of Christianity's early Jewish context.

Which is precisely why Matthew's failure to say anything that might support apostle Paul is telling.  Matthew was a Judaizer.

R.T. France notes that the idea of non-Jewish authorship of the gospel "enjoyed quite a vogue" during the third quarter of the twentieth century, "but is now not widely supported" (The Gospel Of Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2007], n. 26 on p. 15).

Ok, then you cannot complain if a skeptic bases some of their reasonableness-arguments on the fact that some belief is "widely accepted".

Grant Osborne comments that "One major consensus is that Matthew writes a Jewish gospel." (Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2010], p. 31) Matthew comments that acknowledgment of the empty tomb by Jewish opponents of Christianity originated just after Jesus' death and existed "to this day" (Matthew 28:15), a claim that easily could have been falsified if untrue.

You are blindly assuming that the Christians made such a big spectacle of the resurrection preaching that opponents would have cared enough to "refute" it.  Since Acts is a combination of history and fiction, I don't really give a fuck if it presents the Jews as angry at Christian preaching.  And it is far from certain that the Jews would have known which exact tomb Jesus was buried in.  Must it be that Joseph of Arimathea told them where it was?  Must it be that the cemetery was crowded with people when Joe was putting Jesus inside the tomb?

And like so much else in Christian history, it remains possible that the Jews DID falsify the empty tomb theory, but accounts of this were suppressed or destroyed (at least one wasn't, Justin knew of such account).   Indeed, the Jews could have done such a thing in less than one day's time, and there's no reason to suppose a written record of that would have been made or would have survived.  So quit implying the impossibility of the skeptical theory.

And of course, Jesus' resurrection can be falsified on numerous grounds independent of your trifles about the empty tomb.  IMO, the only reason there was early tradition about Jesus being buried in a rich man's tomb was because this was a fiction invented to make his death conform more to Isaiah 53.  Under stupid apologist reasoning, skeptics have no reasonable choice except to believe anything that is "multiply attested"...such as Matthean priority.

William Lane Craig discusses some other evidence that Matthew's account is reliable.

Around the middle of the second century, Matthew's account is corroborated by a passage in Justin Martyr in which he seems to quote from a Jewish source on the subject.

Gee, 1st Enoch also "corroborates" Genesis 6.

In section 108 of his Dialogue With Trypho, Justin seems to cite a Jewish document or tradition, in which Jesus is referred to as a "deceiver" and reference is made to Jesus as Him "whom we crucified", apparently speaking from the perspective of non-Christian Jews ("we"). This passage in Justin contains multiple details not found in Matthew's gospel. For example, Michael Slusser's edition of Justin has him referring to how the Jews "chose certain men by vote and sent them throughout the whole civilized world" in order to argue against Christianity, including by accusing the disciples of stealing the body from the tomb (Dialogue With Trypho [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Of America Press, 2003], p. 162). It's not as though people would have been dependent solely on Matthew for information on such subjects. Justin had more than Matthew's account to go by. And he seems to be quoting some sort of Jewish document or tradition.

It may well have been that the Jews said the disciples stole the body.  I don't see the problem, as that's a very reasonable criticism, since Christians cannot deny that at least some of the original players knew where Jesus was originally buried (Matthew 27:61).  So you cannot deny their ability to steal the body.  Then we also have a motive to steal the body if we assume historicity of the accounts in Acts.  You will insist they were cowards without a motive at Jesus' crucifixion, but I don't believe everything in the gospels the way you do.  Such stories of cowards can easily be accounted for by the theory that by making them into cowards, their "transformation" upon seeing Jesus seems more dramatic.

You will say they wouldn't have stolen the body because they later died for their beliefs as martyrs.  But the best that can be gleaned from such legends is that the apostles were executed for being Christians.  I'm not aware of any reliable accounts that say any apostle was given a chance to deny Christ and live.  So the fact they were executed, if true, does not increase the probability that they endured such death willingly.  But since I say the original bodily resurrection story was rooted in nothing but visions, we are dealing with fanatics who could easily deceive themselves so much as to be willing to die for beliefs that had no external corroboration.

Are you willing to die for Jesus?

And yet you are not an eyewitness, right?  See how that works?  You CAN get to the point of having a martyrdom complex even when you have no first-hand knowledge.

Justin is familiar with many Jewish responses to Christianity, as his interactions with their scripture interpretations, for example, demonstrate. He "shows acquaintance with rabbinical discussions" (ibid., n. 9 on p. 33). Bruce Chilton writes that Justin "appears to adapt motifs of Judaism", and Rebecca Lyman comments that Justin "is aware of Samaritan customs as well as some patterns of rabbinic exegesis" (in Sara Parvis and Paul Foster, edd., Justin Martyr And His Worlds [Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2007], pp. 83, 163). He wasn't just repeating what he read in the New Testament documents. He's aware of Jewish arguments outside of those reflected in the New Testament, and he's aware of post-apostolic developments in Judaism. His willingness to compose a work as lengthy as his Dialogue With Trypho tells us something about his interest in Jewish arguments against Christianity.
Though Justin wrote around the middle of the second century, he sets his dispute with Trypho earlier, around the year 135. And the Jewish tradition he's citing in the passage I mentioned above would date even earlier.

So?  I don't see anything unreasonable in accusing the disciples of stealing the body, as I take the gospel descriptions of the post-crucifixion disciples as cowards, to be mere hyperbole or straight up lying, since the gospels also expect us to believe they were obstinately stupid even after watching Jesus perform genuinely supernatural stunts for three years.

If you think "multiple attestation" proves me wrong, then apparently you are a dipshit who is not aware of how a single false belief can take root and become repeated by thousands of others.  See Acts 21:18-24.  Multiple attestation is not a worthless criteria, but you push it too god-damn hard and act as if skeptics have nowhere to run as soon as one report is "corroborated".

And since most Christian scholars posit a theory of literary interdependence between the Synoptics, it is less likely these are three independent witnesses to disciple cowardice and only one report that is merely being repeated with fictional modification by the later gospels.

  You also don't acknowledge that two contrary positions can be equally reasonable, probably because you have no objective criteria for reasonableness.  Probably because if you did, you'd eventually have to explain why most professional historians don't find the gospel narratives particularly believable.

Late in the second century, Tertullian summarizes Jewish arguments concerning the empty tomb:
"This is He whom His disciples secretly stole away, that it might be said He had risen again, or the gardener abstracted, that his lettuces might come to no harm from the crowds of visitants!" (The Shows, 30)
Notice that Tertullian mentions something that neither Matthew nor Justin had reported.

Which means we have no choice but to accept it as gospel truth.

Apparently, the argument that the disciples stole the body was still the primary Jewish response.

Which is reason enough to take the Jewish response seriously, instead of dismissing it with "the Jews sure did care about Christianity immediately after Jesus died!  Wouldn't they have exhumed the body and put forth all that effort to suppress the resurrection message!?!"

But some Jews had argued that the body was moved by a gardener, perhaps because of how implausible the argument for theft by the disciples had become in light of the suffering and martyrdom of the disciples.

No, you cannot historically justify saying the disciples were "martyred".  It could very well be that in addition to the correct theory, another theory to explain the empty tomb became popular.  1st century Palestine was a hotbed of false rumor.  Read Josephus.  Early Christianity was a hot-bed of fictional claims that attracted ignorant converts.  Read the pastorals.

Keep in mind that the argument that the disciples stole the body originated before any of the disciples died as martyrs and before they had suffered much. The argument was better early on than it would become later.

No, you find the Jews declaring the "disciples stole the body" argument in Matthew, then you blindly assume the Jews were saying such things in 34 a.d.  But most scholars date Matthew to 70 a.d., which is right when most of the apostles would have already died.  That is, the author safely delayed his accusations of what Jews were saying in 34 a.d. until the actual Jews that would know better, were likely dead.

Now what are you going to do?  Suddenly discover that Matthew was  published in 34 a.d.?

It should also be noted that Tertullian, like Justin, wrote an entire treatise against Judaism (An Answer To The Jews). The idea that he would have been dependent solely on Matthew for his knowledge of the Jewish response to the Christian claim about the empty tomb is unlikely.

So?  Once again, I think accusing the disciples of stealing the body is reasonable, and so would anybody else who is objective and doesn't blindly insist on biblical inerrancy, or misunderstand rules of historiography as infallible guides.

All three of these early Christian sources include information not mentioned by the others. All three would have had easy access to the Judaism of their day, and they all show interest in interacting with Jewish arguments against Christianity. Matthew and Justin are making highly public claims that could easily have been discerned to be false if they had been false (e.g., "to this day" in Matthew, men "sent throughout the whole civilized world" in Justin).

And since most scholars date Matthew to 70 .a.d., we are reasonable to say the earliest date Matthew publicized such story of Jewish scheming was 70 a.d.  You have no fucking clue the extent to which Matthew's oral preaching repeated anything in his written gospel.  But I'm sure you will pretend that the only reasonable conclusion is that he would have preached every bit of the written form....something that would identify him as a Judaizer and opponent of Paul.

And once again, you continue pretending that the the earliest Christian resurrection preaching would have bothered the Jews enough for them to desire to go exhume Jesus' body, when in fact it is likely they would not wish to rob such grave, it was illegal, and they'd need Roman permission which likely wouldn't be granted.

 I also believe the original resurrection belief was "visionary", so that the Jews would be even less worried to "refute" such mindless bullshit.

All three include information unlikely to have been made up by a Christian (see Craig's article about Matthew; Justin seems to be citing a Jewish source; Tertullian or a Christian source he relied on probably wouldn't have made up an alternate argument about the removal of Jesus' body that avoids the main problem with the theft argument). For reasons like these, and because there isn't any good argument to the contrary, it seems likely that there was early and widespread Jewish acknowledgment of the empty tomb.

Except that the earliest gospel, Mark, candidly acknowledges that an anonymous "man" wearing a "white robe" was at the open tomb and had been there for some time before the first witnesses, the women, got there.   You'll kindly pardon me if

a) I don't get "angel" out of "white robe" or "man", and
b) I have an alternative theory that this man moved the body, and Mark has simply morphed a grave-robbery story into a resurrection story.

The pastorals and Acts 21 make it clear that the earliest Christians had a habit of making up false claims and successfully hoodwinking thousands of others about what the apostles did.