Bart Ehrman’s “How Jesus Became God” (Part 8): No Empty Tomb and no Joseph of Arimathea

The earliest Christians didn’t claim Jesus was physically resurrected. There is no way to know if there was an empty tomb. There probably wasn’t even a tomb to begin with because Jesus probably was either never buried at all or was thrown into a mass grave with other people who were executed by the Romans. What happened was that some of Jesus’ disciples had visions of him after he was killed, and they had become convinced that he had been “resurrected” and was now exalted to heaven.

So goes the Gospel according to Bart Ehrman. Of course, the only problem with all of that is that there is no historical evidence for any of it. I find it rather funny that Ehrman goes to great lengths to emphasize his task as a historian (as we’ll see in this post), but what his entire argument concerning Jesus consists of is explaining away the validity of the actual first century sources we actually have, and then replacing it with his own fabricated tale about Jesus that is not attested to in any document or source whatsoever.

“As a historian,” Bart Ehrman rejects the historical sources we have and writes a book in which he makes things up.

Empty Tombs
One point Ehrman makes in chapter 4 of How Jesus Became God is that the empty tomb/resurrection accounts were not part of the original Christian message but were made up later on when the Gospels were written. In order to come to that conclusion, though, Ehrman reads the New Testament accounts in a rather curious way. Not to continue to bang the “Ehrman still reads like a fundamentalist” drum, but well, Ehrman still reads the Bible like a fundamentalist! Or more properly, like a former fundamentalist now turned skeptic who reads with a shocking level of wooden literalism.

Simply put, I cannot believe anyone who knows how to read would make some of the conclusions Ehrman makes.

Case in point, Ehrman claims to detect at progressive embellishment to the resurrection accounts: “Our earliest account of Jesus’ resurrection [i.e. Paul’s letters] discusses the appearances without mentioning an empty tomb, while our earliest Gospel, Mark, narrates the discovery of the empty tomb without discussing any of the appearances (Mark 16:1-8)” (142). And from there, in Matthew, Luke, and John, we have more detailed claims of the resurrection appearances to the women and the disciples. Thus, for Ehrman, “the stories of Jesus’s resurrection were indeed being expanded, embellished, modified, and possibly even invented in the long process of their being told and retold over the years” (143).

The problems with Ehrman’s claim are numerous. First of all, his claim that since Paul didn’t literally say, “Hey there was an empty tomb,” but only that Jesus was raised/resurrected, that meant that Paul wasn’t claiming that Jesus was actually physically resurrected. Ehrman would have us believe that Paul simply meant that Jesus had been “raised” in the sense he now had a “spiritual body” (whatever that means—and Ehrman doesn’t really explain it) and that he was now exalted in heaven.

But Paul was a Pharisee, and the Pharisees believed in an actual resurrection from the dead—not some ambiguous “we will be spirits in heaven” sort of thing, but the actual, physical resurrection of the formerly dead corpse of a body. If the dead body didn’t come back to life, then there was no overcoming of death—and the very concept of resurrection meant the physical overcoming of death. N.T. Wright wrote an entire book (The Resurrection of the Son of God) on just what resurrection meant to first century Jews. And what Ehrman claims about resurrection is not what Pharisaic Jews like Paul meant when they talked about resurrection. Therefore, when Paul said, “Jesus was resurrected,” there was no need to mention an empty tomb, because that was simply a given.

Secondly, Ehrman mischaracterizes the Gospel of Mark. Now, the earliest manuscripts we have of Mark end at 16:8, with the women fleeing the empty after being told by the angel that Jesus had been raised. Mark 16:9-20 is in later manuscripts—this has led some scholars to conclude that 16:9-20 were added later, and that the original Gospel actually ended at 16:8. Well, although that is possible, it is also possible that it just so happens that those verses were cut off from the earliest manuscript we have, or maybe it wasn’t finished—there simply is no way to know. But Ehrman tells his readers that Mark for certain didn’t include any resurrection appearances of Jesus, and that, therefore, “proves” this progression of embellishment of the early Christian resurrection claims.

In addition, although Ehrman clearly glosses over it, even if Mark originally ended with 16:8, there still is a declaration that Jesus had been resurrected, and more importantly the mention of an empty tomb, thus emphasizing that the resurrection was, indeed, a physical resurrection of the formerly dead body.

Finally, Ehrman also mischaracterizes the resurrection appearances in Matthew, Luke, and John as “embellishments” that happened “over a long process,” for Matthew and Luke were written probably no later than about 10 years after Mark—that hardly constitutes “a long process.”

A Burial? Joseph of Arimathea?
So, Ehrman’s claim that an actual physical resurrection and an empty tomb wasn’t part of the original Christian proclamation is simply not credible. The next thing that Ehrman claims that isn’t credible is his claim that Jesus probably wasn’t even buried, and that Joseph of Arimathea was a fabrication. How does he come to such a conclusion? In the same way he came to the conclusion that the early Christian proclamation didn’t involve claims of a physical resurrection and an empty tomb—with a lot of wooden literalism and unsubstantiated speculation.

The reason why Ehrman doubts there was a Joseph of Arimathea who really buried Jesus is because Mark 14:55-64 declares that “the whole Sanhedrin” said Jesus was deserving of death. Thus, according to Ehrman, if that was the case, then how can we believe that Joseph then changed his mind later that day and volunteered to bury Jesus?

Apparently, Ehrman thinks that when Mark said, “The whole Sanhedrin,” that literally meant every single member of the Sanhedrin, and even took the time to interview every single member to verify his claim that literally the whole Sanhedrin said Jesus was deserving of death. Clearly, this is just silly, for Mark clearly says in just the next chapter that Joseph of Arimathea (a) was a member of the Sanhedrin, and that (b) he went to Pilate to ask for the body to bury Jesus. Are we to believe that Mark was so bone-headed that he literally meant that every member of the Sanhedrin called for Jesus’ death, and then proceeded to contradict what he had just said a mere one chapter later?

Or maybe would should consider that by saying “the whole Sanhedrin,” Mark was using a bit of hyperbole—writers sometimes do that.

In addition to what he says about Mark, Ehrman once again points to Paul’s comments in the creed-like statement in I Corinthians 15:3-8 and claims, “the early creed knows nothing about Joseph. And Paul also betrays no knowledge of him” (153). Again, such reasoning is incredibly faulty and hopelessly literalistic. For Ehrman, because Paul doesn’t engage in a full, blow-by-blow narrative account in which he names every single person mentioned in the resurrection accounts in the Gospels, that must mean Paul had no knowledge of any of it. Apparently, Ehrman feels that a creed should include every bit of ancillary information that a full Gospel account contains. And if it doesn’t, then he will dismiss the whole thing.

Ehrman also nitpicks in another area that defies logic. He notes that since Luke uses Mark, it shouldn’t be surprising Luke mentions Joseph of Arimathea. But then Ehrman essentially says, “Oh, but then what about Peter and Paul’s speeches in Acts, specifically in 13:28-29?” For in those verses, Paul says “they” buried Jesus! Well then! Ehrman seizes upon what any competent readers would see as simply a generalized statement and claims that this is indication of a “pre-Lukan tradition” that Luke incorporated into his writing of Acts that claimed Jesus was buried by a group of Jews (i.e. the Sanhedrin as a whole) into a common grave for criminals, and not by Joseph of Arimathea in a separate tomb.

Thus, Ehrman would have us believe that Luke, as with Mark, was so thick-headed that he simply cobbled together various sources without giving a thought to how they clearly were contradicting each other. But the fact is that Ehrman needs to make such a questionable claim in order to come up with a reason to dismiss the clear historical claim that Jesus was, indeed, buried by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb.

And thus, after straining logic here, Ehrman then advances to putting forth the dubious claim that since the later followers of Jesus made up the resurrection appearances in Matthew, Luke, and John, they then had to make up the story of Jesus being buried in a tomb—and then they had to make up the story of Joseph of Arimathea to bury Jesus. As Ehrman says, “what was originally a vague statement that the unnamed Jewish leaders buried Jesus becomes a story of one leader in particular, who is named, doing so” (155).

Let’s be clear: there is no historical evidence for any of that. Ehrman has made up his own tall-tale to take the place of the actual claims found in the actual sources we have that he has dismissed based on some really questionable logic.

A Couple More Things About the Empty Tomb
Near the end of chapter 4, Ehrman finally gets around to addressing the standard challenges to views like his, namely, if there wasn’t a resurrection and empty tomb, then how can one explain the establishment of Christianity to begin with? Or more specifically, if Jesus wasn’t raised, how can one explain the empty tomb?

Now, most know about the attempted alternative explanations (i.e. the swoon theory, the disciples stole the body, the Romans moved the body, the women went to the wrong tomb), and most know that there are some major problems with every one of them. And that does create a conundrum for skeptics: all other attempted explanations really aren’t convincing. Ehrman though finds a convenient way around all this when he says, “…historians who do not believe that Jesus was raised from the dead should not feel compelled to come up with an alternative explanation for why the tomb was empty. Apologists typically have a field day with such explanations” (164).

Translation? “If we reject the validity of the explanation given in the historical documents that tell us of Jesus, we shouldn’t have to come up with an alternative explanation, because it’s obvious the ones we’ve come up with are crap.”

Despite that cop-out, Ehrman really does nevertheless try to give an alternative explanation—this whole post has been about it: his claim is that Jesus wasn’t buried in the first place. As he writes, “But all this is beside the point, which is that we don’t know whether the tomb was discovered empty because we don’t know whether there was even a tomb. Our earliest witness, Paul, does not say anything about it” (165). Of course, as we’ve seen, such a claim isn’t really being honest.

Conclusion
At the end of his chapter, Ehrman throws one more thing out there in attempt to argue that the early Christians didn’t really believe in a physical resurrection and empty tomb: he appeals to Gnosticism—the heretical movement that arose in the 2^nd century. He writes, “Some early Christians believed that Jesus was raised in spirit but that his body decomposed. Eventually, this view came to be prominent among different groups of Christian Gnostics. We see evidence of its presence even in the communities of the authors who produced our canonical Gospels” (168).

What “evidence” do we see of this in the canonical Gospels? Well, John has Jesus “prove” he was raised bodily; in Mark, there is an empty tomb; in Matthew, Jesus has his disciples touch him; and in Luke, Jesus tells them he has flesh and bones, unlike a ‘spirit,’ and then eats with them. Therefore, according to Ehrman, since the Gospels that were written in the 60s-90s talk about a real physical resurrection of Jesus, that should be taken as evidence of early “Christian” Gnostics in the earliest of the early Church who were preaching that Jesus wasn’t physically resurrected.

And how does Ehrman know that there were early Gnostics in the early Church, even though Gnosticism wasn’t even a real thing until the 2^nd century? Simple: “The Gospels that made it into the New Testament—as opposed to a number that did not—stress that the resurrection was indeed the resurrection of Jesus’s physical body. These debates may have been raging in early Christian communities from the beginning” (169).

In other words, he speculates (without any evidence whatsoever) that there may have been other early Gospels that didn’t talk about a physical resurrection, and he fails to tell his readers that those so-called Gnostic Gospels that we do have all came from over 100 years later than the canonical Gospels.

Ehrman is so desperate to show that the earliest Christian witness didn’t involve belief in a physical resurrection that he routinely dismisses the actual sources we do have, makes things up out of whole cloth to take the places of those historical sources we have, and then appeals to later Gnostic writings to justify his speculative and baseless claims.