It has often been claimed by
sceptics (e.g. Vermès 2008) that Paul’s account of Jesus’ resurrection is not
in agreement with the narrative traditions in the other Four Gospels, which
also do not agree with each other, and that the apparent contradiction are
irreconcilable. A typical list of apparent discrepancies is as follows (listed
in Ehrman 2014, p. 134):
Who was the first person to go to
the tomb? Was it Mary Magdalene by herself? (John)? Or Mary along with another
Mary (Matthew)? Or Mary along with another Mary and Salome (Mark)? Or Mary,
Mary, Joanna, and a number of other women (Luke)? Was the stone already rolled
away when they arrived at the tomb (Mark, Luke, and John,) or explicitly not
(Matthew)? Whom did they see there? An angel (Matthew), a man (Mark), or two
men (Luke)? Did they immediately go and tell some of the disciples what they
had seen (John), or not (Matthew, Mark, and Luke)? What did the person or
people at the tomb tell the women to do? To tell the disciples that Jesus would
meet them in Galilee (Matthew and Mark)? Or to remember what Jesus had told
them earlier when he had been in Galilee (Luke)? Did the women then go tell the
disciples what they were told to tell them (Matthew and Luke), or not (Mark)?
Did the disciples see Jesus (Matthew, Luke, and John), or not (Mark)? 1 Where did
they see him?—only in Galilee (Matthew), or only in Jerusalem (Luke)?
Sceptics argue that the lack of
agreement between the details of the resurrection narratives in the Gospels,
together with their attribution to Jesus’ teachings that have an excellent Sitz
im Leben in the early church, suggest that the details are the invention of
the Gospels’ authors in accordance with their own agendas (Casey 1996, p. 192).
However, even if the authors did
have an agenda, having an agenda does not necessarily imply that the details
recorded by the Gospels’ authors are not credible. While having an agenda might
have caused these authors to invent these details to make their case more
convincing, it might also be the case that the authors did not invent the
details but were convinced by them, and thus they had the agenda to include
these details in their accounts—according to the needs of their audiences—to
convince others also. The sceptics’ assumption that ‘if a purported event
meshes well with an author’s redactional motive, then the author made up the
event’ is unjustified, for there is no reason why the occurrence of a given
event cannot dovetail with the author’s editorial purposes’ (Davis 2006, p.
54). The apparent lack of agreement indicates that the stories were not
carefully made up by a group of Christians conspiring to tell the story of
Jesus’ resurrection. Keener argues that, even at their latest possible date of
composition, the Gospels derive from a period relatively close to the events,
when testimonies that had been given by ‘eyewitness’ remained central to the
church, and at least Luke seems to have had direct access to eyewitness
corroboration for some of his traditional material *Luke 1:1-4; Keener 2003, p.
32). The apparent lack of agreement is what we would expect to find from
first-hand accounts of a shocking event given by eyewitnesses very soon after
the event. As Wright (2003, p. 612) argues,
The stories exhibit . . . exactly
that surface tension which we associate, not with tales artfully told by people
eager to sustain a fiction and therefore anxious to make everything look right,
but with the hurried, puzzled accounts of those who have seen with their own
eyes something which took them horribly by surprise and with which they have
not yet fully come to terms.
Consider this: If Tom, Dick, and
Harry witnessed a shocking event (e.g. a tsunami) and each o them was asked
individually to give an account shortly afterwards, they would not have
reported every single detail or in the same way. Rather, each of them would
emphasize different details as they told the story with excitement. This is
what we see in the Gospels, Wright (2003, pp. 611-612) argues,
The very strong historical
probability is that, when Matthew, Luke and John describe the risen Jesus, they
are writing down very early oral tradition, representing three different ways
in which the original astonished participants told the stories . . .
Irrespective of when the gospels reached their final form, the strong
probability is that the Easter stories they contain go back to genuinely early
oral tradition.
While the writers added in
different details to the earlier sources (e.g. Luke on Mark), they still
included plenty of details which are embarrassing to their case (e.g. women
finding the tomb, disciples at Emmaus not recognizing Jesus etc.). As attorney
Herbert Casteel (1992, p. 213) remarks these are ‘numerous details of the very
type that false accounts would be careful to avoid.’ (Andrew Loke, Investigating
the Resurrection of Jesus Christ: A New Transdisciplinary Approach [Routledge
New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies; Oxfordshire:
Routledge, 2020], 56-58)
. . . some of the details can be
understood as clarification rather than embellishments. For example, the
inference that the ‘young man’ in Mark 16:5-7 is an angel can be justified by
the context, which describes him as dressed in white and conveying divine
revelation. He does not simply report what he found, but gives it an
authoritative explanation and goes on to convey a message from Jesus himself,
recapitulating what he had said privately to the Twelve in Mark 14:28, and
conveying not comment but command (France 2002, pp. 675-679; compare the use of
‘young man’ for angel in Tob. 4:5-10, 2 Macc. 3:26, 33, etc., see Gundry 1993,
p. 990). Thus, the latter account in Matthew can be understood not as an
embellishment but a clarification; in other words, Matthew merely makes the
identification of the young man as an angel more explicit. Third, the inclusion
of more details dos not have to be regarded as embellishment, rather, it ‘could
simply be a matter of a later writer adding new and truthful traditions that
were known to his own community, purposely filling in the gaps’ (Habermas 2013,
p. 477). (Ibid., 59)
On the question of whether there were one angel (Mark 16:5 and
Matt 28:2-5) or two angels (Luke 24:4 and John 20:12):
Vermès (2008, p. 106) complains
that Mark 16:5 and Matthew 28:2-5 says that there is one man/angel. However,
Mark and Matthew do not say that there is only one. They probably wanted
to focus on the angel that spoke to the women. Shining the ‘literary spotlight’
in this way is a legitimate narrative device which is used by ancient
historians (see Licona 2016, p. 172; Licona notes that while Luke 24:4
describes ‘two men in dazzling lightening like clothing,’ Luke has angels in
mind since he goes on to call them ‘angels’ (24:22-23), and ‘white or shining
clothing in the New Testament are often the mark of a heavenly visitation’ (p.
173). One might object that Mark 16:5, Luke 24:3-4, and John 20:11-12 portray
the angels inside the tomb, while Matthew 28:2-6 portrays the angel sitting on
the stone he had rolled away from the tomb. Licona replies that Matthew 28:6
has the angel say, ‘Come! See the place where he was laid,’ which suggests
movements to somewhere else in this context (i.e. movement into the tomb)
(ibid.) (Ibid., 64 n. 14, emphasis in original)
