And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. (I Corinthians 15:17)

The literal bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the foundation stone upon which all of Christianity stands or falls. Jesus Himself staked the integrity of His Identity and Mission upon the Resurrection. The Apostle Paul declared that both Jesus’s Identity and Mission were vindicated by the Resurrection. Without the Resurrection, we are informed in Scripture that our faith is in vain and we are yet unredeemed.

In our last installment we considered Eight Necessary Assumptions that we must make before any meaningful discussion of the Resurrection can begin. All eight of these assumptions are even easier to prove beyond a reasonable doubt than the Resurrection itself.

It is an indisputable fact that on that first Resurrection morning, the tomb in which Jesus’s body was laid was found to be empty. Both Jesus’s followers and undoubtedly the Jewish and Roman authorities as well discovered that the body of Jesus of Nazareth was missing, the huge stone at the mouth of the tomb had been moved a distance away, and even the wrappings that had covered Jesus’s body were laying in order upon the stone slab as though His body had simply passed right through them leaving a hollow “shell” behind.

There can only be two types of explanations for the empty tomb of Jesus, either a natural explanation or a supernatural one. Over the years many have offered various natural speculations as to how the tomb of Jesus came to be empty on that first Resurrection morning.

1. The disciples of Jesus stole the body.

This was the fabrication cooked up by the Jewish religious leaders when informed by the soldiers of what had transpired while they were guarding Jesus’s tomb. Of course these leaders could not afford to have the story told them by the scared and shocked soldiers get out. So the soldiers were bribed with the assurance that the priests would intercede for them with Pilate should it become necessary. What other choice did the Roman contingent have at this point? To fall asleep on duty meant death. To lose what one was supposed to have been guarding also meant death. So the soldiers agreed with the priests, hopeful that they might not be so called to account by their superiors when the body of Jesus was found to be missing.

Though there were some of Jesus’s disciples that had a degree of paramilitary experience, and had possibly been engaged in guerilla raids against the Romans before connecting with Jesus, certainly all of Jesus’s disciples did not possess such training or experience. After ordering the tomb sealed with the Roman signet, which meant the death sentence to anyone breaking it, Pilate had at the request of the Jewish authorities granted a guard unit to be posted at Jesus’s tomb. Along with the twelve to sixteen Roman soldiers that generally comprised a guard unit, an unknown number of Jewish Temple soldiers also stood watch. There would have been two Roman soldiers standing on either side of the massive stone with the others on the ground sleeping in a fan-shaped pattern in front of the tomb. At intervals, the standing soldiers would be relieved during the night by others. To claim that the disciples of Jesus stole His body, one would have to also believe that:

1. The disciples could sneak quietly through however many Jewish soldiers were present without alerting any of them.
2. They would then have had to creep stealthily past the formation of sleeping Roman soldiers without alerting any of them.
3. Then they would need to approach the mouth of the tomb without alerting the two waking Roman soldiers standing guard.
4. In addition, the disciples would have to move an approximately two-ton round stone up an incline and secure it without the waking soldiers’ noticing, and without awakening any of troops sleeping on the ground.
5. Finally, Jesus’s body would have to be removed and carried away without any of the contingent of soldiers, waking or sleeping, being alerted to the presence of those robbing Jesus’s tomb.

These conditions render it impossible that Jesus’s twelve disciples, even with assistance from the “seventy,” could ever have actually stolen His body from the heavily guarded tomb without starting a war with Rome. Besides that, when the Jewish authorities later challenged the disciples of Jesus for preaching and healing in His Name, the question of what happened to His body was not raised. Why? Because these Jewish leaders knew that the body was gone and that the disciples were not concealing it somewhere.

An interesting account is found in an extra-Biblical document discovered in a collection at Constantinople in the nineteenth century A.D. Two letters from Caiphas, the High Priest who presided over the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, detailed his initial opinion of Jesus and the subsequent reversal of his position regarding Jesus’s Messianic claims. According to the second letter, Caiphas was pondering alone in his room when a light appeared in the corner of the room, and Jesus of Nazareth stepped out of that light. In brief, Jesus assured Caiphas of the necessity of the crucifixion and of His forgiveness for Caiphas’s part in it. At the close of this letter, addressed to the Sanhedrin, Caiphas offers his resignation as High Priest because, “the final sacrifice for sin has already been made.” Is this account true? I cannot prove beyond a doubt that it is, but if Jesus could appear after His Resurrection to Mary and the women with her, to Peter, to James, to the Twelve, to over five hundred followers at once, and then to the most fierce persecutor of His followers, Saul of Tarsus, why could He not also appear to the High Priest who was complicit in His death?

In light of what we know about Roman practice, and in light of clear statements from the Bible and from historical sources, it is impossible when taking all the available evidence into consideration to conclude that Jesus’s disciples could ever have stolen His body. Be Blessed!