Was the Tomb of Jesus Empty?

Part One: The Historical Case for the Empty Tomb

This week I returned to school and was making small talk with a colleague about his Easter break. My friend – an avowed atheist and historian – said that he had been to Church over Easter and was offered an argument for the resurrection based on three facts: Jesus’ death, the empty tomb, and the appearance of Jesus to the disciples. And he wanted to know what I made of these facts historically.

I told him that we are very confident that Jesus died by crucifixion, and that most scholars agree that at least some of Jesus’ disciples had experiences of him after his death. But historians are more divided on the ‘fact’ of the empty tomb.

In past posts, I’ve unpacked some of the reasons why the empty tomb is so controversial, historically. For example, I’ve discussed arguments for and against whether Jesus was buried in a tomb, and looked at whether women witnesses guarantee its historicity. I have also explored apologetic features in the empty tomb stories, and probed a popular proposal that they are a type of ‘translation fable.’

Yet in this two-part post, I want to offer a more comprehensive survey of the key arguments around the empty tomb. What are some of the reasons a critical scholar might accept its historicity, and what are some grounds for scepticism? Hopefully this will serve as a helpful resource to get to grips with a fascinating historical debate.

Arguments for the Empty Tomb

I begin by surveying some considerations in favour of the empty tomb. These range from the consideration that unlikely individuals are involved in the story (Joseph of Arimathea and women) and its presence in earlier source material to the plausibility of a missing body and the necessity of the empty tomb for resurrection belief.

a. Joseph of Arimathea

To say that Jesus’ body went missing from his tomb is to assume that there was a tomb in which Jesus was buried. Which takes us to our first positive consideration: the fact that a member of the Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea, is said to have buried Jesus.

It is certainly intriguing that a member of the council which condemned Jesus to death is entrusted with burying Christ. The tendency of the gospel is to be critical of the Jewish leadership, not to be sympathetic to its cause. So some scholars have considered Joseph’s role an unlikely detail for a follower of Jesus to invent.

Yet in purely historical terms, Joseph’s involvement may make a good deal of sense. At least according to the gospel stories, Jesus was executed on a Friday just before the Jewish sabbath. If he was left on the cross, his body would have defiled the land. Thus, the idea that the Sanhedrin would have had someone in place to make sure that the land was undefiled seems to make sense within a Jewish context.

Against this point, it is sometimes pointed out that Joseph’s characterisation seems to develop in later gospel literature. In Matthew and John, he is a ‘disciple of Jesus’; in Luke, he is a ‘good and righteous man’, and in the Gospel of Peter, he is even a ‘friend of the Lord’. One might say, then, that if we reverse-engineered Joseph’s character even further behind Mark, he may have played an even more mundane role.¹ Perhaps he was involved in Jesus’ burial, but would he have placed him in his own tomb?

Another point against Joseph’s involvement concerns the plausibility of placing Jesus in his own tomb. According to the gospels, it was important that Jesus was buried before sundown. It may have been a hurried burial. But the likelihood that a wealthy man like Joseph would have a tomb close to a site of crucifixion is questionable.

It does seem remarkable, however, that we are told Joseph placed Jesus in his own tomb. Some scholars suppose that it is for precisely this reason that he is remembered. Joseph did something quite out of the ordinary. And for this peculiar deed, he was elevated in the tradition and his rather obscure name was preserved.

b. Pre-Markan Passion Narrative

Another reason for thinking that the tomb was empty is that Mark (c. 70 AD) may be relying upon earlier material for his narrative. So while Paul says that Jesus was ‘buried’ in the creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, we may have a pre-Markan source which indicates that Jesus was buried specifically in a tomb.

What form this source took is much debated. The empty tomb story is sometimes seen as part of a ‘Pre-Markan Passion Narrative’, a text which may date as early as 37 CE. Yet it is worth noting that there is no agreement today on the extent or dating of this written source, with a number of scholars calling it into existence into doubt. For a summary of these arguments, you may want to see my earlier piece, here.

Whether or not we embrace an extended written source for Mark’s passion, however, there are some good reasons to think that Mark has employed some sources in his passion narrative. Beyond the fact that it is common for ancient bíoi to draw upon sources, Mark’s narrative contains some details which don’t seem to fit well with his passover chronology. And in one place, he even alludes to the sons of Simon of Cyrene – an irrelevant detail which may suggest they were known to his audience.

Of course, the fact that Mark seems to have used sources for parts of his story does not necessitate that he has used them for the empty tomb. It also does not necessitate that his sources are historical. Yet the fact that we can detect earlier material in his passion narrative may raise the likelihood that he has done so in this case as well.

c. The Presence of Women

Perhaps the most popular argument for the empty tomb relates to its discovery by women. The argument runs that if the evangelists had fabricated the story, they would not have the tomb discovered by women whose testimony was considered untrustworthy – especially not Mary, who was formerly demon possessed (Lk. 8:2).

Flavius Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, expresses a familiar prejudice. In his elaboration on Deuteronomy 19, he states: ‘… let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex.’ While we know that women were permitted to give testimony in certain legal cases – at least according to later rabbinic sources – their testimony was not treated as the same as a man’s.

Interestingly, this issue of the women’s testimony seems to have been taken – at least by one ancient thinker – as a reason to doubt the resurrection. In his treatise, True Doctrine, the second century philosopher Celsus puts it bluntly: ‘But who saw this [the empty tomb]? A hysterical female, as you say, and perhaps some other one of those who were deluded by the same sorcery…” (Origen, Contra Celsum 2.55).

Tempering this point, however, I have suggested that the early Church did not always hold women in as low regard as the prejudicial figures cited above. They were leaders, prophets, and were portrayed as effective witnesses. For example, John records that many believed on the basis of the Samaritan ‘woman’s testimony’ (4:29).

We might also note that, in Mark’s social and narrative world, the women are the most natural characters to find the tomb. Women were entrusted with the responsibility of mourning the dead, and in Mark’s narrative, all of Jesus’ male disciples have abandoned him. It is only the women, then, who know the location of the tomb.

Yet I don’t believe that this argument for the empty tomb is entirely without weight. The women are notably absent from the creed of witnesses in 1 Corinthians 15. And even the evangelists seem unsatisfied by Mark’s narrative of the discovery of the tomb by women, which is described in Luke as an ‘idle tale’ (24:11). Notably, both Luke and John do have men come to the tomb, perhaps to shore up the women’s testimony.

Why then does Mark narrate that women discovered the tomb empty? If it was an invention, we might suppose the women would be absent, or the women might have been accompanied by the men. It may just be that the reason why Mark brings our attention to the women is because they were really thought to be there.²

d. The Necessity of the Empty Tomb

Another argument for the empty tomb is its necessity for the disciples to come to believe and proclaim Jesus’ resurrection. The ‘resurrection’ which the disciples came to profess was corporeal. Thus, if the tomb was not empty, there would be no way for the disciples to confirm Jesus’ resurrection or proclaim it so rapidly in Jerusalem. The authorities him would have been able to rebut their claims by presenting the corpse.³

In my view, this is a considerably weaker argument than those made above. For it makes a number of contested assumptions. One is that it assumes that the earliest appearances of Jesus were in Jerusalem. This is certainly the picture painted by the later evangelists. Yet in Mark, the women are to tell the disciples that Jesus has gone ahead to Galilee – an assumption which might make a good deal of sense.

This argument will also hold no traction with those who do not think that Jesus was buried in a tomb. In this sense, the argument assumes an empty tomb – or at least, an entombment – rather than argues for it. As I have noted elsewhere, if Jesus received a more common burial or was buried with others, the question of checking the grave would not have arisen. No pious Jew would be ‘verifying’ a decomposing corpse.

What does seem to be the case is that an empty tomb would have supported resurrection belief – and may at least help to explain why they thought he was risen. Since one of the more common (if not the only) beliefs about resurrection was that it involved some form of physical re-animation, it would be surprising if the disciples had not deemed Jesus’ burial place to be noteworthy if he was entombed.

e. Different Witnesses to the Event

Another argument for the empty tomb is that it attested not only in Mark, but also by John’s beloved disciple (BD), whose memories are sometimes thought to lie behind the gospel. For those who accept the BD as an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry, we have at least two distinct witnesses to the empty tomb: Mark and John.

I haven’t made my mind up on the beloved disciple, yet it is important to note that prominent Johannine scholars view the disciple differently. For more conservative scholars, he is identified with John the Son of Zebedee (whose name is attached to the gospel) or another ‘John’ altogether, who was a Judean disciple of Jesus.

For other scholars, the BD is often viewed not as a historical figure at all, but rather as a literary device or a ‘disguised author’.⁴ This is on account of the stylised role he has in the text, the marked absence of the figure in the earlier material, and John’s distinctive depiction of Jesus which departs heavily from earlier synoptic tradition.

The resurrection is just one point at which a departure is evident. In Mark, an angel tells the women to tell the disciples to go ahead to Galilee, where Jesus will appear to Peter. Yet in John’s account, Jesus himself meets Mary in the guise of a gardener. Rather than ‘telling no one’, Mary goes off to tell the disciples and the beloved disciple beats Peter to the tomb. In this way, again, he serves as an ‘ideal’ witness.

How strong one will find this argument is thus dependent upon one who considers the beloved disciple to be. If the disciple is indeed an eyewitness, perhaps there are ways to reconcile John to Mark’s earlier account. The fact that both attest to an empty tomb – albeit in different ways – would count for much. The difficulty is that the beloved disciple is widely disputed as an eyewitness among contemporary scholars.

f. The Evidence of Stolen Bodies

So far, we have mainly considered arguments for the empty tomb accounts as narrated in the gospels. Yet we might also consider the question of the empty tomb from a different angle: namely, how likely is it that Jesus’ body went missing, generally?

One factor that is often brought up in the literature is the theft of bodies. In particular, there is evidence from classical antiquity that bodies were sometimes stolen for use in magical rituals. The body of a holy man and miracle worker, like Jesus, may have been a prime target for those within the grave-robbing ‘industry’.

In the scholarly discussion, a couple of responses are often raised to mitigate this possibility.⁵ One is that the odds of a grave robbery are very small. Another is that we have no clear archaeological evidence of grave-robbery from the Jerusalem region, specifically. The evidence for grave-robbery is found mostly in Gentile areas.

Yet I don’t think that these responses are sufficient to take grave robbery completely off the table. For what it’s worth, Matthew’s story of the guard at the tomb seems to assume that the theft of Jesus’ body was a live possibility in his setting. And we know that other ancient Jews considered tomb-robbery a possible occurrence and placed curses on their epitaphs for those who might disrupt the tomb.

Another potentially relevant datum is the so-called ‘Nazareth Inscription’, an imperial edict which sentenced tomb-robbers to death. While the exact provenance of the artefact is disputed, some scholars have preferred a pre-70 CE Palestinian context, on the basis of its epigraphic links with other sources from the same time and place.⁶ If they are correct, tomb robbery may have been a live problem in Palestine.

None of this is to suggest that Jesus’ tomb was actually pillaged by thieves. Yet it is something to take into account when considering the likelihood of an empty tomb, independent of theological interpretation. It may also help us to see how the original story of an empty tomb would not itself be seen – by outsiders – as especially good evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. This is a further factor to consider in our evaluation of how likely it was for the tomb story to be a wholesale invention.

Excursus: Where is the Tomb?

A subject often overlooked in discussions of the empty tomb is the tomb itself. Yet the reasons for this are quite understandable. The oldest tradition of the tomb is a site in Jerusalem within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But this tradition goes back only to the reign of Constantine (306-337), which has left many sceptical of its authenticity.

It is worth noting, however, that some believe that the site might betray an older local tradition. When the tomb was first identified in the fourth century, it was found within the walls of the city beneath a Temple of Venus. This temple was itself connected with the foundation of ‘Aelia Capitolina’, the name of the Roman colony founded in Jerusalem by Hadrian in the wake of the Second Jewish War (135 CE).

Yet Jesus was known to have been crucified outside of the city walls. This means that someone searching for ‘Jesus’ tomb’ in the fourth century would probably not have looked within the city. Moreover, it was not until Herod Agrippa built a third wall (c. 41-44 CE) that the traditional site came to lie within the city walls. This may suggest a very early local tradition of Jesus’ tomb in the traditional site.⁷

At least one recent archaeologist of the sepulchre is convinced that the site is probably authentic.⁸ She notes that the area of the traditional site matches the descriptions of the tomb and surrounding area in both the gospels and apocryphal literature, which may preserve memory of the tomb. She is also persuaded by the fact of the tomb’s self-evidence to Constantine’s workmen: the tomb was found exactly where Constantine had been told, beneath a statue of Jupiter in the Temple.

Yet this will not compel all interpreters. While Hadrian may have a motive to build a shrine on top of what was known as the site of Jesus’ tomb, it does seem somewhat surprising we have no direct comment on this desecration. It may also be possible to explain the evidence in another way: the tomb was initially chosen as Jesus’ tomb, at some point early on, because it matched the gospels’ descriptions of the tomb.

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Thank you for reading part one!

If you enjoyed this post and want to read part two, in which I will be discussing arguments against the empty tomb, please consider supporting my work.

By becoming a supporter, you will also gain access to the full archive of my posts. This includes many other pieces on the resurrection from a historical perspective:

• Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? features my recent conversation with Dale Allison and Mike Licona as well as my recent lecture on the historicity of Easter.

• William Lane Craig on the Empty Tomb examines a classic case for the empty tomb offered by a popular philosopher of religion.

• Women Witnesses: Proof of an Empty Tomb? discusses the common argument that women’s testimony was considered unreliable in the ancient world, and therefore the accounts of their discovery of an empty tomb are reliable.

• Did Jesus Receive a Burial? looks at some arguments for and against Jesus’ burial in the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea, and explores some alternative scenarios.

• Vanishing Bodies, Ascending Gods examines ancient stories of ‘translation’, in which a person’s body goes missing from their place of death or burial.

• Ancient Apologetics for the Empty Tomb explores apologetic features in the canonical and extra-canonical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection.

• Why We Can’t Prove the Resurrection makes the case that Jesus’ resurrection is not the kind of event that can be proved by ordinary historical reasoning.

• Is the Turin Shroud Jesus’ Burial Cloth? unpacks the view that the world’s most famous relic is not Jesus’ actual burial cloth, but a medieval artefact.

• Seven Evidences for Jesus’ Resurrection is a two-parter which evaluates common arguments for the resurrection, such as the martyrdom of the disciples.

1. On the development of Joseph’s character, see Gerd Ludëmann, The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1994), 42.

2. See Carolyn Osiek, “The women at the tomb: What are they doing there?” HTS 53 n.1/2 (1997): 112-113.

3. See W.L. Craig, “The Historicity of the Empty Tomb of Jesus,” NTS 31 n.1 (1985): 39-67.

4. Hugo Mendez, The Gospel of John: A New History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025).

5. See Dale C. Allison, The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics: Polemics, History (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 344-345.

6. An alternative provenance is the Greek Island of Kos. See Kyle Harper et al., “Establishing the provenance of the Nazareth Inscription: Using stable isotopes to resolve a historic controversy and trace ancient marble production,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2020).

7. Gerd Theissen, Annette Mertz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide (London: SMC Press, 1999), 501-502.

8. Joan E. Taylor, “Golgotha: A Reconsideration of the Evidence,” 44 n.2 (1998): 180-203.