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The Case of the Missing Corpse

Rev. Doug Pratt — April 4, 2010
 

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The Case of the Missing Corpse from Matthew 27 and 28

The Reading from Scripture

As evening approached, Joseph, a rich man from Arimathea who was one of Jesus’ followers, ⁵⁸went to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body. And Pilate issued an order to release it to him. ⁵⁹Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a long linen cloth. ⁶⁰He placed it in his own new tomb, which had been carved out of the rock. Then he rolled a great stone across the entrance as he left. ⁶¹Both Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting nearby watching.

⁶²The next day—on the first day of the Passover ceremonies—the leading priests and Pharisees went to see Pilate. ⁶³They told him, “Sir, we remember what the deceiver once said while he was still alive: ‘After three days I will be raised from the dead.’ ⁶⁴So we request that you seal the tomb until the third day. This will prevent his disciples from coming and stealing his body and then telling everyone he came back to life! If that happens, we’ll be worse off than we were at first.”

⁶⁵Pilate replied, “Take guards, and secure it the best you can.” ⁶⁶So they sealed the tomb and posted guards to protect it.

¹Early on Sunday morning, as the new day was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went out to see the tomb. ²Suddenly there was a great earthquake, because an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and rolled aside the stone and sat on it. ³His face shone like lightning, and his clothing was as white as snow. ⁴The guards shook with fear when they saw him, and they fell into a dead faint. ⁵Then the angel spoke to the women. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. ⁶He isn’t here! He has been raised from the dead, just as he said would happen. Come, see where his body was lying.
¹¹As the women were on their way into the city, some of the men who had been guarding the tomb went to the leading priests and told them what had happened.

¹²A meeting of all the religious leaders was called, and they decided to bribe the soldiers. ¹³They told the soldiers, “You must say, ‘Jesus’ disciples came during the night while we were sleeping, and they stole his body.’ ¹⁴If the governor hears about it, we’ll stand up for you and everything will be all right.” ¹⁵So the guards accepted the bribe and said what they were told to say. Their story spread widely among the Jews, and they still tell it today.
from Matthew 27 and 28, NLT

Your Basic “Whodunit”

In the tense thriller Murder at 1600, Wesley Snipes plays a D.C. homicide detective who is summoned to a crime scene at the most famous address in the world. The body of a young woman has been found in a second-floor bathroom at the White House, and with it a huge scandal erupts. What is unique about the plot of this film is the way it explores the conflict of jurisdiction between the police force and the Secret Service over who has control of the evidence and the investigation. Who is really in charge when a crime 
occurs in the Executive Mansion? Snipes plays the dogged detective who pushes through all the bureaucratic obstacles and nefarious plot twists to ultimately solve the case.

But what is not unique about this film is that the plot begins with the discovery of a body. That is, in fact, the standard, clichéd, nearly-universal opening of every “Whodunit”: we start with a corpse, and then we watch as the detective tries to identify suspects, motives, and weapons—and ultimately draws us to the answers that reveal the mystery. Everyone who has ever played the board game CLUE knows the routine. You cross off your list all the solutions that don’t work, and you end up with the winning combination: Colonel Mustard in the ballroom with the candlestick, or whatever.

A Mystery with a Unique Plot Twist

Today we’re going to revisit the greatest mystery in all human history. And there is something quite unique about it. In a dramatic upside-down plot twist, we find that the mystery of Easter Sunday is triggered not by the discovery of a dead body, but by the unexplained disappearance of one. We could label this “The Case of the Missing Corpse.” It’s worthy of the greatest mystery novelist or Hollywood screenwriter. Consider these elements that enhance the mystery of how that body could have vanished.

Friday evening: Several people are involved in the process of mummifying the body, wrapping it head-to-toes in yard after yard of linen cloth, so tightly that if the person had still been alive they would have been unable to move a muscle, and would have suffocated in moments. The body is then placed—under the eyes of multiple witnesses—in a tomb cut into a limestone cliff, with no other entrance, and a massive round stone (weighing easily a ton or more) is rolled downhill into a slot across the doorway. It would take a team of horses to move that stone uphill away from that entrance.

Saturday: A professional security detail—probably a half-dozen or more experienced soldiers—are posted around the clock on regular shifts, their swords drawn and at constant alert.

Sunday: At daybreak some force more powerful than dynamite blasts open the tomb right under the eyes of the guards, who are knocked unconscious by the shock. At least four (and maybe more) separate eyewitnesses observe the stone rolled away; they actually enter the tomb and see that the body is gone, yet with all the linen wrappings still intact—as if the body passed upward or disapparated without unwrapping a single strand. These witnesses start spreading the news of what they’ve seen, and it races through the city like fire through a lumber yard.

But the most striking proof that the body really did disappear is found in the failure (or inability) of the Roman and Jewish authorities to produce it. They had every reason to do so, if they had access to it. To put the body of Jesus on public display in the center of Jerusalem would not only have vindicated their conspiracy in executing an innocent man (See, we told you he was just a common troublemaker), but also would have silenced forever the rumors of his resurrection and crushed before it was even born the movement—the Christian church—that ultimately spread across the world.

The disappearance of the body of Jesus of Nazareth was a gigantic embarrassment to the government, and resulted in an aggressive cover-up.

Becoming Detectives

Let’s investigate this mystery as if we were detectives—like Wesley Snipes, the sharp homicide investigator determined to cut through the official cover-up and get to the real facts in Murder at 1600. Let’s sift through the evidence, consider all the alternatives, and follow where reason and logic lead us.

There are three common explanations that have been offered—from the very day of that occurrence nearly 2000 years ago down to our own times. Here are the theories.

THEORY #1

The followers of Jesus made it all up, or hallucinated 
when they thought they saw Him alive.

In other words, all the accounts in the four biographies of Christ are wrong, all the eyewitnesses were liars (or were delusional), and there is nothing to the reports. “Just move along, please. Nothing worth looking at here.” But it’s not so easy to dismiss. There are a number of serious problems with this theory.

First, we have reports from multiple sources that hundreds of eyewitnesses were on record as having seen Christ alive again. Surely a hallucination—whether drug-induced, sleep-induced or even grief-induced—doesn’t occur simultaneously in that many people!

Secondly, while people may concoct a fabrication or lie, it’s very unusual—if not psychologically impossible—for all of them to die clinging to that conspiracy, when recanting would let them off scot-free. Yet that’s what happened. Historical records indicate that nearly every one of the core disciples, and many other believers as well, were martyred for their insistence that Christ had risen.

Finally, the most telling argument against the idea that it was all a lie or fantasy is what we talked about earlier: the inability of the Jewish leaders and Roman occupation forces to produce the body—which would have eliminated Christianity forever. If Jesus’ body was still in the same tomb, and they knew where He was, why didn’t they prove it?

THEORY #2

The followers of Jesus stole the body.

This has the benefit of explaining why the authorities never could produce it. But it has a serious flaw as well: the presence of an armed guard around the clock at the gravesite. Anyone who has read the account of the fear and cowardice of the 11 remaining disciples on the Thursday night Jesus was arrested and the Friday when He was executed knows they were incapable of such a bold and brazen armed attack. Why, every one of them had run away to save his own skin! Who could imagine them taking on a crack squad of Roman soldiers, routing or killing them, and then managing to move that immense stone out of the way?

This story, that a bold daylight heist had been pulled off by the most improbable gang of grave robbers, seems absurd when we look at it closely—though the Temple bureaucrats tried to peddle it to the public.

THEORY #3

Jesus didn’t really die on the cross but just passed out.

This is what is commonly known as the “swoon theory”: Jesus didn’t really die, but just passed out; He then awoke a few hours later, somehow managed to unwrap Himself from the linen cloth, freed Himself from an escape-proof mausoleum, and began to travel around looking like he’d enjoyed a refreshing night’s sleep.

This theory reveals a phenomenal lack of basic medical knowledge. A critical care physician and med school professor wrote a detailed article in a professional medical journal a few years ago analyzing the consequences to a healthy 33-year old male of the kind of torture inflicted on Jesus. The scourging with cat-of-nine tails administered first, prior to his sentencing to the cross, would have caused substantial blood loss and dehydration; many criminals in the ancient world never survived such a flogging, and others were maimed for life by it.

Following that, He was forced to carry the heavy burden of His cross to Calvary, then was nailed through His wrists and feet (more blood loss) and suspended on that cross. Normally, crucifixion would result in death by asphyxiation within 4-6 hours. To hurry things along (or to be merciful and put them out of their misery), the executioners would break the legs of the condemned men, hastening the collapse of their lungs as they would no longer be able to lift their weight enough to grab a breath. But Jesus died quicker than the usual time, due to all He’d been through.

When a spear was shoved into His heart, it produced a flow of both blood and water—a sure medical sign that His actual cause of death was congestive heart failure, the buildup of fluid in His chest cavity. How anyone could survive a spear to the heart—followed by the mummification process of traditional Middle Eastern burial—is impossible to imagine.

Even if Jesus had been rushed from the cross by ambulance to a modern Jerusalem General Hospital and hooked up to heart and lung machines, His multiple wounds cleansed and stitched, and IV’s started, He still could not have survived the ordeal. To imagine that He somehow revived Himself without anyone’s help, and then looked even better than before, is impossible.

All three of these commonly-advanced theories about the “mystery of the missing corpse” have unsolvable flaws in them … which brings us to the alternative. The only conclusion that fits all the evidence—including the circumstantial evidence, the physical evidence and the testimonies of witnesses—is that, in fact, Jesus Christ became alive again after being truly and clinically dead and buried, without any medical aid, without any rescue effort, and beyond all expectations. It’s such a stunning, surprising conclusion. And yet that is where logic and research lead us.

Why Do Some Resist the Obvious Conclusion?

Why have so many bright people down through the centuries been so unwilling to accept what is the only solution to this mystery? Because, quite frankly, its implications are profound and world-changing. If we accept this conclusion, then it changes everything. How?

• It means that the Man who could do this must be the greatest man who has ever lived—the only One who has ever gone “mano a mano” with death and won. The Old Testament tells the story of the teenager David, a scrawny kid with a rubber arm, who managed to defeat a giant named Goliath who had 3 feet and 300 lbs. on him. But that victory was nothing compared to the greatest upset of all time on Easter, when a man beat Death!
• This great hero said publicly—many times—before His execution that He was going to die and then rise again for us, in order that we might all be able to share in His victory and apply its benefits to us. Because He lives now, we too have hope and confidence of ultimate eternal life.
• The condition for sharing in the spoils of His victory is quite simple. Jesus was very clear: He asks us to place our faith and confidence in Him, to acknowledge Him as our Lord—simple, perhaps, but not easy for many. As human beings, it’s hard for us to figuratively “bow our knee” to another … just as it’s also hard for us to admit we’re not strong enough by ourselves to face the ultimate foe and must depend on a great hero to fight that battle for us. 

This mystery—the great puzzle of the missing corpse on Easter morning—is a profound one that has dramatic consequences for each of us. And because the conclusion we each draw will affect our eternal destiny, it’s far too important to leave to someone else to decide for us. We each need to make that decision for ourselves.

What will You Choose to Believe?

What do you believe is the truth about what really happened on Easter? Is it all a hoax? Did some unscrupulous people pull off a spectacular heist? Was His death a mirage—just a fainting spell? Or was that grave empty in that Jerusalem cemetery because the power of God burst out and triumphed over the greatest of enemies? It’s your choice, your call.

In the board game of CLUE you announce your solution, and then everyone finds out if you are right or wrong. That’s also what happens the moment we die: we each will find out if we’ve made the right choice. Will you bet on Christ’s resurrection being a fraud? Or will you bet that He is alive forever—and thus able to deliver everything He’s promised? Choose wisely.