Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? by William Lane Craig Read Free Book Online Page A

Klausner’s proposal in 1922 that Joseph of Arimathea placed Jesus’ body in his tomb only temporarily, because of the lateness of the hour and the proximity of his own family tomb to the place of Jesus’ crucifixion. Klausner goes on to say that Joseph moved the corpse later to the common graveyard reserved for criminals. Unaware that Jesus’ body had been displaced, the unwitting disciples, finding the tomb empty, inferred that Jesus was risen from the dead.

    Although no scholars defend Klausner’s hypothesis today, I have seen attempts on the Internet to revive it. Its weaknesses are evident in light of what I have already said about the other theories:
    1. Explanatory scope: The Displaced Body Hypothesis tries to explain the empty tomb, but says nothing about the post-mortem appearances and the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Independent hypotheses must be adopted to explain the full scope of the evidence.
    2. Explanatory power: Obviously, Klausner’s hypothesis has no explanatory power with regard to either the appearances or the origin of the Christian faith. What about the empty tomb? Here the hypothesis faces a rather obvious problem: Since Joseph, as well as any servants helping him, knew what they had done with the corpse, the theory is at a loss to explain why they didn’t correct the disciples’ blunder once they began to proclaim that Jesus had been raised from the dead—unless, that is, one resorts to contrived conjectures to save the day, that Joseph and his servants suddenly died after moving the body!
    Sometimes, people will object by saying that the disciples couldn’t have been corrected, because Jesus’ body would have decomposed beyond recognition. Therefore, it would have been futile for the Jewish authorities to point to the real location of Jesus’ corpse; however, it’s also not true. Jewish burial customs typically involved digging up the bones of the deceased after a year had passed and placing them in an ossuary.

    So gravesites, even for criminals, were carefully noted. And certainly, the body of a crucified man would have been identifiable from the injuries he sustained. In any case, the objection misses the central point: The earliest Jewish/ Christian disputes about Jesus’ resurrection were not over the location of his grave or the identity of the corpse, but over why the tomb was empty. So, the alternative to the resurrection was theft. Had Joseph of Arimathea displaced the body, the Jewish/Christian controversy would have taken a very different course than the one it took.

    3. Plausibility: The Displaced Body Hypothesis is implausible in a number of ways. In so far as we can rely on Jewish sources, the criminals’ graveyard was located less than six hundred yards from the site of Jesus’ crucifixion. Jewish regulations, moreover, required that executed criminals be interred immediately on the day of their execution. Therefore, Joseph both could and would have placed the body directly in the criminals’ graveyard, thereby precluding any need to move it later or defile his own family tomb with the corpse of a criminal. In fact, Jewish law actually forbade moving a body later, unless it was to the family tomb of the deceased. Joseph had adequate time prior to sunset for a simple burial, which probably included washing the corpse and wrapping it up in a sheet with dry spices.

    4. Less contrived: The theory is a bit contrived in ascribing to Joseph motives and activities for which we have no evidence at all. It becomes very contrived if we have to start inventing things like Joseph’s death in order to save the hypothesis.
    5. Disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs: The Displaced Body Hypothesis is disconfirmed by what we know about the Jewish burial procedures for criminals, which were mentioned in the third point.
    6. Exceeds other hypotheses in fulfilling conditions 1—5: Again, no historian shares this estimation of the theory’s