Resurrection: The Conspiracy Theory

 

Did the Disciples Steal Jesus’s Body from the Tomb?

Any one of us would be hard-pressed to talk about what it’s like to live now without mentioning how conspiracy theories have wreaked havoc on our popular imagination. And therein lies the paradox of our time. We have more information at our fingertips than at any time in human history, yet, we are often less confident in what is the truth and what is a lie than ever before.

So, what does that have to do with the Resurrection?

At the closing of Matthew 27, the chief priests and Pharisees urged Pilate to make Jesus’s tomb as secure as possible. They remembered our Lord’s words that he would be resurrected from the dead after three days. The disciples will steal Jesus’s body, the chief priests and Pharisees insisted. “Take a guard. Go, make the tomb as secure as you know how,” Pilate told them.

But Jesus did rise again on the third day. The guards that were watching his tomb “shook and became like dead men,” Matthew records (28:4). Still, they had to report to the chief priests. They went into the city and told them what they saw. In response, the chief priests paid them off and told them to tell everyone that the disciples had stolen the body while the guards slept. “So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.”

Why the Conspiracy Theory is Just That—Conspiracy

As the philosopher Peter Kreeft and numerous other writers have written persuasively about, the Conspiracy Theory rests on shifting sand and is simply absurd.

If they were lying, the apostles had to be deceivers. Neither is likely and not a single one of them ever—even as they were being tortured unto death—confessed that they had been lying.

If they were lying, why did the apostles fervently preach the Gospels? As Peter and John said to the Sadducees, “…we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:17).

If they were lying, what was their motivation for it? What did they gain? “They were hated, scorned, persecuted, excommunicated, imprisoned, tortured, exiled, crucified, boiled alive, roasted, beheaded, disemboweled and fed to lions—hardly a catalog of perks,” Kreeft writes.

If they were lying, why was this never exposed by the apostles’ enemies? Those who opposed the disciples were powerful—they could have exposed fraud on this earth-shattering scale—but they didn’t.

And perhaps most simply—if they were lying, how did they remove Jesus’s body without waking anyone on guard?

A Different Instruction

After the guards are told to go and spread the lie that the disciples stole Jesus’s body during the night, Matthew’s account of the Gospel of Jesus Christ closes with a very different commission:

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age (Matthew 19-20).

Go and tell them of me. Go and baptize them in my name. Go and teach them to obey my commands.

“I am the way and the truth and the life.”—John 14:6

Charles Snow