By DOUG SHAVER
August
2006
The author of Matthew's gospel, and no other canonical author, includes a
story about the priests bribing the guards of Jesus' tomb to say the disciples
had stolen his body while they were sleeping. For Craig, the story is a key
piece of evidence supporting the historicity of the resurrection, and so he
devotes an article to defending its factuality. As with practically everything
else on his site, the primary purpose of his defense is to reassure those who already believe the
story that the skeptics' arguments against its factuality are worthless. This article is a textbook case of question-begging. The basic strategy is to show that, given any
particular claim by a writer, it cannot be false if everything else the writer says is true because if
it were false, the writer would be contradicting himself, and since the gospels are true they cannot
have any contradictions. Of course he does not say this in so many words, but the believers among
his readers will get the message, and no one else has to, so far as Craig could care.
The story does appear in one source outside the New Testament, the apocryphal Gospel According to Peter, and Craig supports some of his arguments by highlighting some differences between Matthew's and Peter's versions. He begins, for instance, by suggesting they both must have a basis in fact because they are so different. The apocryphal account, he says, "may well be independent of Matthew, since the verbal similarities are practically nil." Well, yes, it may be. Or it may not be. Verbal similarity is evidence of dependence, but dissimilarity does not imply independence. Peter obviously was not copying from Matthew's text, but that does not mean he provides independent corroboration. It could just mean that he heard the same story Matthew heard and put his own spin on it. Or it could mean that Peter heard a different version of the story even though his version and Matthew's version had a common origin, and that would be regardless of whether the origin was factual or imaginative.
As Christians usually retell the story, the guards assigned to the tomb were Roman soldiers. As Craig notes, Matthew does not exactly say so, but Peter's gospel does.
Pilate says [according to Matthew], 'You have a guard; make it as secure as you can.' It is not clear if this means that Pilate gave them a Roman guard or told them to use their own temple guard. The Gospel of Peter uses a Roman guard, but this is probably read into the tradition and may be designed to emphasize the strength of the guard.
Let us note that, since Peter's gospel was not canonized, Craig has no problem supposing that its author might have gotten some facts wrong. If Matthew, though, had said the guards were Romans, then we would be obliged to believe without question that they were Romans. Fortunately for Craig, Matthew was ambiguous on that point.
But, what difference does it make whether it was a Roman guard or a Jewish guard? It goes to the plausibility of the guards' willingness to claim they had fallen asleep. This was an offense that could have gotten them executed if they'd been Romans. Craig suggests therefore that we can reasonably suppose it must have been a contingent of Jewish guards. Pilate's response to the priests, "You have a guard; make it as secure as you can," is thus construed to mean, "I'm not going to waste my manpower. You priests have your own guards. Use them if you're so worried about security." But in that event, Pilate was essentially refusing their request, and as Craig observes, one then must wonder why Matthew bothered to include it in his narrative. Craig suggests an answer that is not quite a real answer: "[I]f the Jews really did go to Pilate, then perhaps this detail was remembered." Meaning what? That Matthew had some obsession about including every scrap of trivia he had ever heard about Jesus? But there are plenty of places in the gospel where Matthew omits details about which it cannot be credibly argued that no one would have remembered them.
Matthew's ambiguity is puzzling, though, only under a presupposition that every incident reported by a canonical writer must really have happened. If the story was fabricated, then the problem goes away. As Craig himself points out, "legends know no psychological limits." Matthew has a polemical point to make about Jewish perfidy, and to make his point it doesn't matter whether the guards were Jewish or Roman. All that matters is that the Jews were responsible for the guards' presence and that they collaborated with the Romans to ensure their presence.
Craig's defense of the story's authenticity is, to put it simply, inadequate. That the story has an apologetic purpose, he notes, "does not therefore mean that it is unhistorical." And that is true, but it does answer the question: "If it didn't really happen, then why did Matthew say it happened?" Craig assumes that the only possible apologetic purpose would be "answering the allegation that the disciples stole the body," but this begs the question of whether any such allegations were ever made. We have only Matthew's word for it that there were, and the claim that such allegations were made would have suited Matthew's apologetic purposes just fine.
Craig next responds at length to what he calls a "theological objection" to the story, having to do with the resurrection being witnessed by unbelievers. Since the bottom line of his argument here is a defense of scriptural consistency, we need not concern ourselves further with it.
Craig concedes that there are two "rather more serious difficulties with the story." One is that it appears in none of the other canonical gospels. The other is the implication that Jesus predicted his resurrection and the Jews knew he had while the disciples did not know. Craig's response to the first is a convoluted mishmash of speculation pegged to conjectures about the trajectory of Christian-Jewish relations during the first century, intended to make it seem plausible that Luke and John would never have heard the story. Having gone through all that, though, he insists that we have no reason to suppose that they would have mentioned it even if they had known about it.
And the evangelists often inexplicably omit what seem to be major incidents that must have been known to them (for example, Luke's great omission of Mk. 6. 45 - 8. 26) so that it is dangerous to use omission as a test for historicity.
But he is arguing in a circle again. Any incident of Jesus' life that must have been known to the evangelists must have really happened. That follows from the usual meaning of "known." Absent any inerrantist assumptions, it remains reasonable to suspect that Mark, Luke, and John said nothing about the guards because they never heard about any guards, and that they never heard about any guards because there never were any guards. This is not to argue that their silence proves there were no guards. It is only to argue that their silence is grounds for reasonable doubt.
To the second "serious difficulty," Craig begins with a warning that "we must be careful not to exclude a priori the possibility that Jesus did predict his resurrection." Very well, we shall not assume that he could not have done that. But Craig needs to prove that it is unreasonable to doubt that he did. One reason for doubt is that according to the gospels, the disciples after his death acted as if they expected him to stay dead. It is hard to see why they would have been so despairing if he had assured them that he would return to life in three days, considering all the other miracles they had witnessed including his bringing other dead people back to life. Of course some uncertainty would not have been surprising, but according to the stories, these men were purely convinced that it was all over. Craig says that this argument "fails to reckon with the clear statements of the gospels that the disciples could not understand how a dying and rising Messiah could be possible (Mark 8.32; 9.10). The concept was utterly foreign to them . . . ." But the gospels don't explain why the disciples' messianic preconceptions would have completely negated the overwhelming evidence they had that, if Jesus said he would return back to life three days after dying, there was a very good chance that he would do exactly that.
And if the disciples didn't believe his prophecy, then why did the Jewish authorities take it seriously? Well, according to the story, they didn't, really. Matthew says they knew he had made the prophecy, but their only concern was that the disciples would steal the body and then claim that the prophecy had been fulfilled. There is no suggestion that they thought any resurrection might really happen. For some reason, though, Craig apparently thinks it expedient to concede the possibility that it was not any prophecy they were concerned about. "It is possible that the actions of the Jews were not motivated by any knowledge of resurrection prophecies at all," he says, "but were simply an afterthought to prevent any possible trouble that could be caused at the tomb by the disciples during the feast." But Craig can afford to be generous here, because it hardly matters why the priests wanted the tomb guarded. What matters from the perspective of Christian dogma is that whatever their motivation, the priests put a guard on the tomb and then had to bribe the guards to lie about what happened while they were there. Those are the elements that Craig must prove to be factual.
He begins by discounting the possibility that the story was concocted to prove that the disciples could not have stolen the body. And, as he observes, if that were its purpose, "then the story is not entirely successful, for there is an obvious time period during which the disciples could have stolen the body undetected." Quite so, and that is probably why, to my knowledge, no skeptic has ever suggested that that was why the story was invented. This is just yet another of countless examples of apologists demolishing arguments that nobody is making. They are very good at that. What they are not so good at is demolishing arguments that real skeptics really make.
Going now for his killer argument, Craig asserts, "perhaps the strongest consideration in favor of the historicity of the guard is the history of polemic presupposed in the story." But the polemic is not presupposed. It is alleged. "The Jewish slander that the disciples stole the body was probably the reaction to the Christian proclamation that Jesus was risen," says Craig. That is quite probably so, assuming that we must believe everything Matthew wrote. But Craig is supposed to be proving that, not assuming it. Craig tries to argue that Christians could not have invented the story because "everyone, especially their Jewish opponents," would have known it was a falsehood. But that would depend, if the story was invented, on when and where it was invented. Even most conservative scholars accept the consensus that Matthew's gospel was not written until nearly 80 CE, almost 50 years after the crucifixion. How many people would still have been around with firsthand knowledge that there were no guards at the tomb? How many of them were living in the communities where Matthew's gospel was being circulated? How many people, anywhere in that part of the world, were even aware of that book's existence before every last possible witness to its events was dead? The Christian documentary record contains no unambiguous references to the gospels before the middle of the second century. Some earlier documents do include quotations attributed to Jesus that also show up in the gospels, but there is no good reason to assume that everything Jesus said was unknown to the entire Christian community before the gospels were written. This is not an argument against their early composition. It is an argument against any presupposition about Christians everywhere being aware of their existence anytime during the first century.
Next: perspective on miracles.