Ancient Apologetics for the Empty Tomb

Are the Gospels doing Apologetics?

‘… But Pilate gave over to them Petronius the centurion with soldiers to safeguard the sepulcher. And with these the elders and scribes came to the burial place. And having rolled a large stone, all who were there, together with the centurion and the soldiers, placed it against the door of the burial place. And they marked it with seven wax seals; and having pitched a tent there, they safeguarded it. But early when the Sabbath was dawning, a crowd came from Jerusalem and the surrounding area in order that they might see the sealed tomb….’

Sometime in the second-century, a Christian penned these words in Peter’s name.¹ This text, which we know today as the Gospel of Peter, draws on the earlier passion and resurrection traditions in the canonical Gospels, but with some crucial additions.

Did you notice them?

There is the centurion who now has a name: Petronius. There is the marking of Jesus’ burial place with seven wax seals (the perfect number.) And there is the great crowd of witnesses who have come to see the tomb, alongside the elders and scribes.

What are all of these details doing here? They appear to conspire for a single purpose: to tell us that Jesus was really buried and everyone knew it, and so when he vacated his tomb, we can be sure that it was empty. In short, they are a form of ancient Christian apologetics.

When we are confronted with such additions in an apocryphal source – a text outside of the New Testament – it is easy to notice the additions to the earlier narratives. It is also easy to assign a clear ‘agenda’ to the text. In this case, an apologetic one.

Yet what I want to suggest is that it is not only the apocryphal Gospels which have a tendency to add apologetic details to the empty tomb accounts. We can already see this process within the canonical Gospels themselves. I will focus here on just a few examples.

Example 1: The Guard at the Tomb

The first clear example of apologetics in the empty tomb accounts is found in Matthew. It is the story of the guard at the tomb, which the Gospel of Peter takes up and embellishes.

In Matthew’s story, the chief priests and Pharisees request a guard from Jesus. They think that the disciples will steal his body to convince people that he had risen. So they persuade Pilate to post a guard at the tomb and seal it (27:62-66).

When Jesus rises from the dead, the guards go into the city and tell the chief priests what have happened: a violent earthquake had rolled the stone away and an angel had appeared. And the priests pay them off to say that his disciples stole the body.

This story bears a very clear apologetic purpose. It answers the question of why the disciples could not simply have stolen the body: there were guards at the sealed tomb. This is the first clue that Matthew is engaging in an early Christian apologetic.

Example 2: The Newness of the Tomb

The second apologetic feature concerns the newness of the tomb. As Mark Goodacre has pointed out, we tend to ask the question: was the tomb empty? But for an ancient person, a more natural question was: how empty was the tomb?

Rock-cut tombs in Jerusalem would accommodate multiple people.² A whole family could be buried together. Therefore, to assure their audiences that Jesus’ tomb was actually empty, the evangelists would have to tell us that the tomb of Jesus was fresh.

Editing Mark, this is exactly what the later evangelists say. Matthew begins by noting that the tomb was ‘new’ (27:60) and Luke, perhaps not quite content with this, is even more careful to note that it was a tomb in which no one had been laid (23:53). John combines the two: it was a ‘new tomb in which no one had ever been laid’ (19:41).

In Mark, however, it is not clear whether the tomb was empty. The assumption that it wasn’t may be present in the note that the women specifically see where they laid him (16:6).³ The later writers clear up any doubt that Jesus’ tomb was really empty.

Further Apologetic Touches

We have looked at two of the most conspicuous apologetic additions to Mark’s account: Matthew’s story of the guard and the alleged freshness of the tomb.

Yet these are not the only features in the canonical Gospels’ accounts which may betray an apologetic agenda.⁴ Let us just briefly mention a few more.

1. Matthew notes that the women came to the tomb when the first day of the week was ending (28:1). If this implies that they came on Saturday evening – a matter of dispute – then it would reduce the likelihood that the body could have been stolen.

2. There is a general tendency in the post-Markan sources to add witnesses to the events narrated. Thus, in Matthew, the guards witness the events and the women see Jesus; in Luke, a larger group of women are present at the tomb; and in John and Luke, men confirm the women’s testimony to the empty tomb.

3. In John, the spear in Jesus’ side anticipates the objection that he had not actually died, while in Matthew, Luke and John, his ability to be touched showed that he had truly risen (and was not merely a ghost.)

Apologetics & History

What is the purpose of drawing attention to these details? Does the fact that these details have apologetic value mean that they should be instantly discounted?

This is not the argument I’m making. Rather, I am noting that we often freely accept apologetic additions in apocryphal sources – and see these as fictions – but do not do so in the canonical texts. If this is not handled carefully, it can result in special pleading: embellishment is found in the apocryphal sources alone.

One might reply that the canonical Gospels are generally more historically accurate than apocryphal ones. For instance, they are often dated to the first century.

Yet this is not the safeguard against invention which it is often assumed to be. For one thing, it only takes only a moment to fabricate a detail, or to incorporate material which has been invented. For another, we can be confident that the Gospels do, at times, contain legendary material. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is Matthew’s story of a mass resurrection.

Recently, a text critic claimed on Joe Rogan that the apocryphal Gospels are problematic because they rely upon the earlier Gospels and have a clear agenda to them – for example, the Gospel of Peter is uncomfortable with women witnesses to the tomb. I agree: they should not be trusted as historical sources. But what this presentation leaves out is that the same apologetic agenda can be found in revisions within the canonical Gospels too.

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Thank you for reading this piece! If you enjoyed this piece, you might appreciate my other posts on the resurrection, such as this two-parter.

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Further Reading

Mark Goodacre, “How Empty Was the Tomb?” JSNT 44 n.1 (2021): 1-15.

1. This translation by Raymond Brown is accessible online: https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/gospelpeter-brown.html.

2. See Mark Goodacre, “How Empty Was the Tomb?” JSNT 44 n.1 (2021): 1-15 (2-6).

3. Goodacre considers it possible that Mark himself may be signalling the tomb was new, in his notice that the young man was ‘sitting on the right side’, since “the hewing of loculi in tombs began on the right of the tomb’s entrance and proceeded anti-clockwise through the chamber”, while others prefer to see this detail as symbolic. See Goodacre, “Tomb,” 11-12.

4. For a fuller list, see Dale C. Allison Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 152-153.