Jesus’ tomb was empty on and after Saturday. We have strong evidence to show that Jesus was dead before he was laid into the tomb so that he could not walked out of the tomb himself. What else can explain the emptiness of the tomb?
Maybe someone stole Jesus’ body. If so, who could that be?
Can it be the officials, the priests, or some powerful persons? It can hardly be. If they had Jesus’ dead body, they would have put it in front of the public when Jesus’ disciples claimed that Jesus resurrected. Then the story of resurrection would be completely destroyed, and the officials would have happily suppressed the movement that the Christians brought about. There will be no Christianity, and this post would never appear.
Is it possible that Jesus’ disciples stole Jesus’ dead body, and faked the whole Resurrection story?
This is one of the earliest proposals against resurrection. It is first advocated by the priests in Jesus time as recorded in the gospel of Matthew.
Blaise Pascal, who invented the Pascal Triangle that high schoolers study in their math classes today, explained why he found such a proposal impossible. He said “…imagine these twelve men meeting after Jesus’ death and conspiring to say that he had risen from the dead. This means attacking all the powers (he means the political power that is ready to prosecute the Christians) that be. The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them had only to deny this story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death, and they would all have been lost.”
Pascal believes that it is quite unlikely that Jesus’ disciples would come up with a plan, faking Jesus’ resurrection, that put them to face against the politically powerful people. I think this is very reasonable, isn’t it? They were scared and fled from Jesus on the night when he was arrested. Can it happen that after a short while, they gathered around and decided to lie and put themselves in danger from the authorities?
Pascal’s second point is that the disciples’ lie, if they really invented the Resurrection story, could have easily been discovered because human heart is very weak, and it cannot keep a lie that they know is a lie when they are under intense pressure.
Charles Colson is one of the convicted Watergate felons. He and fewer than ten loyalists of Nixon, with the most powerful office in the world, could not hold the Watergate conspiracy for even more than two weeks! Colson described the break-down of the conspiracy that “after just a few weeks the natural human instinct for self-preservation was so overwhelming that the conspirators, one by one, deserted their leader.” He commented on the conspiracy theory that says Jesus’ disciples stole Jesus’ body and faked the Resurrection story as follows: “Nothing less than a witness as awesome as the resurrected Christ could have caused those men to maintain to their dying whispers that Jesus is alive and Lord.”
No. It is impossible that the disciples stole Jesus’ body from his tomb.
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