Paul and Jesus

We have to assume, since Joseph had taken responsibility for Jesus’ proper burial, that his intention was to fulfill this obligation as soon as possible after the Passover. When the Sabbath was over, on Saturday night, he would have his first opportunity to properly bury the body and presumably returned to the temporary unused tomb to remove Jesus’ body for permanent burial—hence the empty tomb. As a man of means, and a member of the highest Jewish judicial body, the Sanhedrin, this makes perfect sense. Based on Jewish law, he would not have placed Jesus in his own family tomb, but would have provided a separate tomb for Jesus.⁹

What Mark knows is that very early Sunday morning, just as the sun was rising, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Salome, most likely Jesus’ sister, came to the tomb with the intent of washing the body and anointing it with oil and spices.¹⁰ When they arrived the large blocking stone had already been removed but the tomb was empty, the body gone. This was precisely what one might expect given the circumstances of Joseph’s intentions and activities. But it was a total surprise to the women. They arrived fully expecting to be involved in the rites of a proper and final burying. That is why they arrived so early, so as not to miss Joseph, who they expected would return at first light Sunday morning—but they arrived twelve hours too late! What they did not consider is that Joseph had returned to the tomb the instant the Passover Sabbath day was over at sundown.

Mark says that when the women looked into the empty tomb they saw a young man sitting inside, who told them:

Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you. (Mark 16:6–7)

Here the line between history and theology is clearly drawn. That the tomb was empty fits what we know of the circumstances of Jesus’ temporary “burial” by Joseph of Arimathea, but that the women were told that Jesus would meet his disciples in Galilee is clearly a theological embellishment. It is Mark’s attempt to connect the empty tomb with subsequent appearances of Jesus. The link is quite weak, since Mark knows of no specifics of any appearances of the risen Jesus to the disciples in Galilee; otherwise he surely would have related them to round out the ending to his gospel. I think we have to assume that Mark tells us all he knows but what Mark knows he gets from Paul. Mark is following Paul here, since it is Paul who reports that Jesus first appears to Peter and the disciples, and in Mark’s account the young man sitting in the tomb specifies Peter by name (1 Corinthians 15:5).

Mark relates next that the women fled the tomb in fear and amazement and that they said nothing to anyone (Mark 16:8). The oldest, most authentic copies of Mark end abruptly here, at verse 8. The additions found in most translations of the Bible, where Jesus appears to various people mentioned in Matthew, Luke, and John, were interpolations added to later manuscripts of Mark by editors who could not imagine a gospel ending without appearances of Jesus.¹¹

Mark also knows an old tradition, not mentioned specifically by Paul, that the first time Peter and the disciples saw Jesus was in Galilee, in the north, not in Jerusalem the week of Passover. This is not a minor difference from Luke and John, as we will see. It is a blatant counter-story.

If we put Mark and Paul together we get the earliest and most reliable tradition—faith in Jesus’ resurrection began in Galilee with Peter and the apostles as the first to claim they had seen him.

Matthew and Luke, using Mark as their source, follow closely his account of the women finding Jesus’ tomb empty, though Matthew adds all sorts of supernatural elements, as noted previously. Both flatly contradict Mark’s statement that the women said nothing to anyone; in Matthew and Luke they run to tell the disciples (Matthew 28:8; Luke 24:9). All seem to agree, however, that the discovery of the empty tomb by the women that Sunday morning did not inspire anyone to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead. The assumption of everyone was that someone had removed the body.

The gospel of John offers an alternative empty tomb story that is not based on Mark, and although John is our latest gospel, this particular story seems to offer us a less theological account of the story, leading some historians to conclude it might represent a much earlier independent tradition:¹²