(part 3)

State of the field concerning these four facts

According to Mark Allen Powell, the chair of the Historical Jesus section of the Society of Biblical Literature, ‘The dominant view is that the passion narratives are early and based on eyewitness testimony’ (Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68 [2000]: 171). Specifically, with respect to the burial, Kendall and O'Collins note Bultmann, Fitzmeyer, Porter, Gnilka, Hooker, ‘and many other biblical scholars’ who recognize a historically reliable core in the account of Jesus' burial by Joseph of Arimathea. They observe that ‘every now and then’ the burial story is dismissed as unhistorical, for instance by John Dominic Crossan; but notwithstanding, ‘The standard recent commentators on Mark (Ernst, Gnilka, Haenchen, Harrington, Hooker, Pesch, Schweizer, etc.)...do not invest him with the kind of creativity needed to invent the burial story...’ (Daniel Kendall and Gerald O'Collins, ‘Did Joseph of Arimathea Exist?’ Biblica 75 [1994]: 240). O'Collins and the renowned New Testament scholar Raymond Brown both confirmed that only a small minority of scholars who have published on the subject would deny the historicity of Jesus' interment by Joseph of Arimathea. Similarly with respect to the empty tomb, already by the late 1970s Jacob Kremer, an Austrian specialist in the resurrection, was able to report, ‘By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb’ (Die Osterevangelien--Geschichten um Geschichte (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1977), 49-50).

The role of women in discovering that the tomb was empty has been especially persuasive to scholars. According to Raymund Schwager, ‘it has recently become usual to assess positively the women's role at the death of Jesus and on Easter morning,’ in contrast to the legend hypothesis (Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche [1993]: 436). As for the post-mortem appearances and the disciples' coming to believe that Jesus was risen, well, no one doubts those facts. For as Paula Frederickson (no conservative!) says, ‘The disciples' conviction that they had seen the Risen Christ... [is] historical bedrock, facts known past doubting’ (Jesus of Nazareth [New York: Vintage, 1999], 264).

It's also not hard to find what you call ‘neutral’ or ‘opposition’ scholars who accept these four facts. Some of those already mentioned above fit that description. As examples of neutral scholars, take Pinchas Lapide and Geza Vermes, who are Jewish scholars who defend the historicity of these four facts. Vermes writes, ‘When every argument has been considered and weighed, the only conclusion acceptable to the historian must be that...the women who set out to pay their last respects to Jesus found to their consternation, not a body, but an empty tomb’ (Jesus the Jew, p. 41).

As an example of an opposition scholar, take Bart Ehrman, who writes, ‘The resurrection of Jesus lies at the heart of Christian faith. Unfortunately, it also is a tradition about Jesus that historians have difficulty dealing with. As I said, there are a couple of things that we can say for certain about Jesus after his death. We can say with relative certainty, for example, that he was buried. I say with relative certainty because historians do have some questions about the traditions of Jesus' burial... Some scholars have argued that it's more plausible that in fact Jesus was placed in a common burial plot, which sometimes happened, or was, as many other crucified people, simply left to be eaten by scavenging animals (which also happened commonly for crucified persons in the Roman Empire). [Ehrman is referring here to radical critics like John Dominic Crossan, whose skepticism about the historicity of the burial has been widely rejected, as mentioned above. Ehrman will now reject it, too.] But the accounts are fairly unanimous in saying (the earliest accounts we have are unanimous in saying) that Jesus was in fact buried by this fellow, Joseph of Arimathea, and so it's relatively reliable that that's what happened. We also have solid traditions to indicate that women found this tomb empty three days later. This is attested in all of our gospel sources, early and late, and so it appears to be a historical datum. As so I think we can say that after Jesus' death, with some (probably with some) certainty, that he was buried, possibly by this fellow, Joseph of Arimathea, and that three days later he appeared not to have been in his tomb’ (Bart Ehrman, From Jesus to Constantine: A History of Early Christianity, Lecture 4: "Oral and Written Traditions about Jesus" [The Teaching Company, 2003].)

Perhaps the most objective evidence for the current lay of the land in New Testament scholarship concerning these four facts would be a bibliographical survey of the relevant literature. Such a survey has, in fact, been conducted by Gary Habermas (‘Experience of the Risen Jesus: The Foundational Historical Issue in the Early Proclamation of the Resurrection,’ Dialog 45 (2006): 288–97). In a survey of over 2,200 publications on the resurrection in English, French, and German since 1975, Habermas found that 75% of the scholars surveyed accepted the historicity of the discovery of Jesus' empty tomb. Belief in the disciples' experiencing post-mortem appearances of Jesus is virtually universal."