The Empty Tomb

"Indications are not lacking which permit the historian to conclude that the tradition of the discovery of the open and empty tomb is historically likely, but one will do so with great hesitation." -- Jacques Schlosser, quoted and endorsed by Dale Allison, 2021¹

"I no longer think that these are relatively certain historical data; on the contrary, I think both views (his burial and his empty tomb) are unlikely." -- Bart Ehrman, 2014²

Summary

The claim "the tomb was empty" is really several claims, and they do not stand or fall together.  This article takes them one at a time:  that Jesus was buried at all, what kind of burial it was, that Joseph of Arimathea buried him, that the place was known, that women found it empty, that guards were posted, and what the stolen-body story and the silence of Jesus' opponents can show.  It asks what each claim rests on, how old that evidence is, and what the best critics say against it.  It does not ask whether a resurrection explains an empty tomb.  That question needs the appearances, which belong to other articles.

1. Some burial is probable; what kind is less certain. The oldest Christian formula, which Paul quotes in about AD 54 and which is older than his letter, says Jesus "was buried" (1 Cor 15:4).³ The Greek verb means interment of some sort: in the ground, a cave or a tomb.¹ It rules out a body left on the cross or dumped unburied. It does not rule out a common or criminals' grave. Jewish law required the executed to be buried the same day (Deut 21:22-23), Josephus says Jews of his day buried even crucified men before sunset, and the bones of one crucified man were found in a family ossuary in Jerusalem.⁴⁵ Roman practice released bodies on request and sometimes refused them. Bart Ehrman's doubt is aimed at a "decent" burial "on the day of his execution in a tomb that anyone could later identify," not at every kind of burial.² The evidence that any of this happened to Jesus in particular is Christian.
2. Burial by Joseph of Arimathea is more likely than not, held with caution. The best reasons are that Mark makes him a member of the council that, in Mark's own story, condemned Jesus, and that "Arimathea" is an obscure town with no symbolic meaning.⁶ Against this, John Dominic Crossan points out that the story needed someone with the power to get the body from Pilate, and a pious councillor supplies exactly that, whether he was real or invented.⁷ No source outside the Gospels mentions Joseph. Raymond Brown calls Joseph's role "very probable" and adds that "high probability is not certitude."⁶
3. If Joseph or another known person buried him, the place was probably known. Jerusalem's walls enclosed less than one square mile, and crucifixions were public.¹ The Gospels' note that the women watched the burial may be a later link between the burial and the Easter story, as Brown argues.⁶
4. The women's discovery of the empty tomb is a tentative judgment. For it: Mark's short account is retold at greater length, with additions, in every later Gospel, and it makes women the only finders, at a cost the Christian texts themselves show (in Luke the apostles call the women's report "nonsense").³¹ Against it: it is first written down in Mark, about thirty-five to forty-five years after the events on the conventional date for Mark; Paul never mentions it; women's role in mourning and Mark's own literary aims could put women at a tomb in an invented story; and the ancient world was full of stories of missing bodies.²² Dale Allison judges the discovery "the stronger possibility" and holds it "with great hesitation."¹
5. Several popular arguments are weaker than they look. Matthew's guard story is probably not history, on the judgment of Brown and Allison alike, though Brown warns that "absolute negative statements" go beyond the evidence.⁶ The claim that its vocabulary proves an older source fails a word count of the Greek, though the count does not prove the opposite either. Matthew's report that Jews said the disciples stole the body is a Christian author's report of a hostile claim, of unknown age. The argument that opponents would have produced the body depends on links that no source documents, and Allison finds it "fairly well met" by the arguments against it.¹
6. The tomb alone does not settle its cause. The best skeptical alternatives are a quiet reburial (Jeffery Jay Lowder) and a legend that grew from belief. Neither has a source that says it happened to Jesus, but each has background support: reburial was lawful and Magness raises it as possible, and missing-body legends were common.⁸¹ The theft and gardener stories are later allegations whose factual basis is unknown. "The empty tomb, considered alone, does not explain itself."¹
7. Some things often cited do not help. The Nazareth Inscription is a general Roman decree against tomb robbing with no secure link to Jesus; its marble most likely came from Kos, and the link to a tyrant of Kos named Nikias is its analysts' proposed explanation.⁹⁹ The figure that "75 percent" of scholars accept arguments for the empty tomb comes from a survey whose list and coding rules are not given in the sources available here.¹⁰ The folded face cloth is in John alone; its historical weight depends on the assessment of that narrative.

Verdict.  The burial is the best-supported claim.  Joseph, a known site and the women's discovery are each judged more likely than not, but they form a chain:  the discovery needs a known tomb, and a known tomb is most secure if Joseph buried Jesus.  These judgments share sources and do not provide independent confirmations;  the combined reconstruction remains tentative.  On the evidence weighed here, a located tomb found empty by women is the best single reading of the earliest sources, held tentatively.  It does not by itself show what emptied the tomb.

Part 1: What each claim rests on

The usual apologetic list says "all four Gospels and Paul" attest the burial and the empty tomb.  For the burial that is true of the texts:  Paul's formula and all four Gospels say Jesus was buried.  For the empty tomb it is not:  the four Gospels narrate the discovery, and Paul never mentions a tomb.  Neither count says how many independent sources lie behind the texts.  The table sorts each claim by its earliest source and by whether later sources are independent of it.

Dates.  Paul wrote 1 Corinthians from Ephesus (1 Cor 16:8) a few years after founding the Corinthian church.  Acts 18:12 puts Paul in Corinth while Gallio was proconsul, most likely AD 51-52 on the Delphi inscription, as the sibling article Travel, Networks, and the Testability of Acts sets out.  The letter therefore falls about AD 53-55, on a chain that runs through Acts.  Paul says he passed the formula on when he preached to the Corinthians and had himself "received" it earlier (1 Cor 15:1-3).³  The Gospels carry no dates.  The common figures put Mark at about AD 65-75, Matthew and Luke in the 80s, and John in the 90s.  Each is an inference.  Matthew's and Luke's dates lean partly on Mark's, because they used Mark;  John's rest on other arguments, from tradition and from features of the text such as the correction of a rumour in John 21:23.  The firm external evidence sets only latest dates, as the sibling article When Were the Gospels Written? shows.  Ehrman's "some thirty-five or forty years after Jesus died" for Mark is the conventional view, not a measured fact.²  A date for Mark in the 50s or early 60s would shorten the gap by ten to fifteen years.  It would not change the kind of argument, because the question is still how the story reached Mark, not only when he wrote.

Dependence.  Matthew and Luke copied Mark:  they share runs of identical Greek far longer than memory produces, as the sibling article The Synoptic Problem measures.  Where they repeat Mark's tomb story, they are not two more witnesses.  What they add (Matthew's guard, Luke's visit by Peter) needs its own source, and its own test.  John shows no copying of that kind, but Mark Goodacre argues that John knew all three earlier Gospels,¹¹ and Allison calls John's independence in the tomb story "a live option," not a fact.¹  So the honest count is one written narrative of the discovery (Mark), one possibly separate narrative (John 20), and one early formula that mentions the burial but not the tomb (Paul).

Eyewitness claims are claims.  Mark names three women (16:1), Luke names three including Joanna (24:10), and John names Mary Magdalene (20:1).  Richard Bauckham argues that such names mark the people who told the story.¹²  That is a reasonable reading of why names were kept, and it is not proof that the named people were Mark's sources.  Allison puts it this way:  "historical names can enter unhistorical narratives."¹

Part 2: Was Jesus buried at all?

The skeptical case.  Ehrman states his conclusion with care:  "If the Romans followed their normal policies and customs, and if Pilate was the man whom all our sources indicate he was, then it is highly unlikely that Jesus was decently buried on the day of his execution in a tomb that anyone could later identify."²  His target is a decent, same-day burial in an identifiable tomb.  He gives three reasons.  First, Roman custom:  "the common Roman practice was to allow the bodies of crucified people to decompose on the cross and be attacked by scavengers as part of the disincentive for crime."²  Second, criminals "were, as a rule, tossed into common graves," and in a common grave "very soon one decomposed body could not be distinguished from another."²²  Third, Pilate's character:  Philo calls his rule one of "endless savage ferocity," and Ehrman doubts such a man would "break with tradition and policy when kindly asked."²  Crossan names two possible fates:  "his body left on the cross or in a shallow grave barely covered with dirt and stones, the dogs were waiting."⁷  Both men state their limits.  Ehrman:  "It is always possible that an exception was made, of course," and "it is too much to say definitively that Jesus was eaten by dogs."²  Crossan grants that "a crucified body could be given back to its family for burial."⁷

Which burial is in dispute.  "Was Jesus buried?" hides several different questions.  The possible fates run from least to most favourable to the empty-tomb story:

1. Left on the cross, or dumped unburied for scavengers.
2. Put in a common or criminals' grave, a pit or trench, perhaps after some time on the cross.
3. Buried the same day in a shallow grave, Crossan's second option.
4. Laid the same day in a rock-cut tomb, as Mark's Joseph does.
5. Laid in a tomb for the Sabbath and moved later.
6. Laid in a tomb that was known and later found empty.

Ehrman's argument is aimed at fates 4 and 6, and his common-grave reason points to fate 2.  Crossan's shallow grave is fate 3, in a form that leaves the body to the dogs.  Only fate 1 is a denial of burial.  This matters for the Christian evidence below, because the earliest formula says only "he was buried," and that is compatible with fates 2 to 6.

What the law and practice texts show.  Four kinds of evidence bear on the question, and they must not be blended into one.

1. Jewish law. Deuteronomy 21:23 commands that a hanged man's "body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall surely bury him the same day."³ Writing in the 70s, Josephus says Jews "took down those that were condemned and crucified, and buried them before the going down of the sun."⁴ He says this while describing the Idumaeans breaking the custom in AD 68, so it is a statement of what Jews normally did, in Josephus' own time, under Roman rule. It is not a statement about Pilate, and it does not say what kind of grave was used.
2. Roman exceptions. Philo, an Alexandrian Jew writing about AD 38, says he had "known instances" of crucified men "taken down and given up to their relations" on the emperor's birthday.¹³ Ehrman answers that this is "the exception that proves the rule," tied to a Roman holiday, not Passover.² He is right about the occasion. Philo still shows that a governor could release crucified bodies to relatives when he chose.
3. Roman law. The jurist Ulpian, writing about AD 200-220, says "the bodies of those who are condemned to death should not be refused their relatives," that Augustus had kept this rule, and that "at present" bodies are buried only "when this has been requested and permission granted; and sometimes it is not permitted, especially where persons have been convicted of high treason."¹⁴ A jurist writing nearly two centuries later cannot prove what Pilate did in AD 30. He does show that release on request was an accepted Roman practice by his day, and that it was sometimes refused, especially for high treason. He gives no rate of release or refusal.
4. One body. In 1968 the bones of a man crucified with a nail through his heel were found in an ossuary in a family tomb at Giv'at ha-Mivtar in Jerusalem. Joseph Zias and Eliezer Sekeles, who re-examined the bones, note that the man's family could not remove the bent nail without "completely destroying the heel bone."⁵ One crucified Jew of the period was therefore buried by his family, and his bones were later gathered into an ossuary. One case gives no rate. It cannot say how many crucified men were buried, who released this man's body, or whether he lay first in a temporary grave. It says nothing about Jesus.

Why the archaeological count is not a rate.  Crossan asked why, with thousands crucified near Jerusalem, only one crucified skeleton has turned up, and whether burial was therefore "the exception rather than the rule."¹  Two answers come from the evidence.  Nails were usually pulled out, and men tied rather than nailed leave no mark;  Byron McCane observes that without the knot in the wood "we would never have known that he had been crucified."¹  And the graves of the poor are the ones archaeology finds least:  Allison, following Jodi Magness, notes that pit and trench graves are "poor in finds" and more easily destroyed, so excavated burials come "disproportionately from the segment of the population ... least likely ... to have run afoul of Rome."¹  The same reasoning cuts against the defenders.  The remark, common in apologetic writing, that no criminals' burial pit has been found near Jerusalem shows only that none has been found.  Unexcavated or destroyed pits are what the common-grave theory predicts.  John Granger Cook, after surveying the Roman texts, writes:  "One cannot rule out the possibility that some crucified corpses were placed in open pits (puticuli), but Roman texts do not mention it."¹

What is specific to Jesus.  Everything above shows that burial was possible, lawful on request, expected by Jewish custom, and sometimes refused.  It does not show what happened to Jesus.  The Jesus-specific evidence is Christian:  the formula's "he was buried" (1 Cor 15:4), Mark's narrative, John's narrative, and the speech in Acts 13:29, where "those who dwell in Jerusalem, and their rulers ... took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb."³  No non-Christian source addresses Jesus' burial either way.  Three considerations bear on the Christian claim.

1. The verb. The formula's verb is ἐτάφη, "he was buried." Allison notes that the formula "died ... and was buried" nowhere in Jewish sources refers to anything but interment, that it "cannot have been used of a body left to rot on a cross," and that a body dumped for scavengers would be "not burial but its denial." In Paul's world "was buried" "entailed ... interment of some sort."¹ So the formula, which is older than Paul's letter, rules out fate 1. It does not say where, by whom, or whether the grave was a family tomb or a criminals' trench.
2. The plain burial. Mark's Joseph buys a linen cloth, takes the body down, wraps it and lays it in a tomb, with no washing and no anointing.⁶ Brown reads this frugal burial as the pre-Gospel form, which later writers made richer. The plainness counts against one kind of invention: a story made up to give Jesus an honourable burial would be expected to start honourable. It does not count against a story made up for another purpose, such as to give the women a tomb to visit, which need not be rich at all.
3. Pilate's interests. Passover crowded the city. Allison quotes the skeptic Gerd Lüdemann: "the release of Jesus' body and its removal from the cross might ... have suited Pilate, because this would a priori avoid unrest among the large number of visitors for the festival."¹ On the other side, Ehrman's own account of crucifixion makes the body on display "part of the disincentive for crime."² Releasing the body would cost Pilate some of that deterrent; refusing it during the festival might cost him some order. Both are reasons a governor could weigh. Neither is a record of what Pilate weighed.

Conclusion of this part.  Some burial is probable.  The formula's verb, Jewish law and custom, and the Roman texts that allow release on request all fit it, and the earliest Christian claim is that he was buried.  What kind of burial is less certain.  The skeptic's strongest point is that the notice on the cross read "THE KING OF THE JEWS" (Mark 15:26),³ a royal claim that Rome would treat as political.  No surviving record says under what law Jesus was condemned, and Ulpian, two centuries later, says only that refusal happened "especially" in high treason cases.  The defender's strongest point is that the earliest Christian formula, older than any Gospel, already says he was buried, and Jewish custom in Josephus' day buried even the crucified.  Burial does not yet mean a rock-cut tomb.  It could have been a criminals' grave dug by a council servant, as David Aus proposes.¹  Byron McCane, an archaeologist of Jewish burial, takes a middle position:  the Jewish leaders had "both the means and the motive to bury him in shame," and "By sunset on the day of his death, the body of Jesus lay within a burial cave reserved for criminals condemned by Jewish courts.  No one mourned."¹⁵  McCane's criminals' cave is inferred from later rabbinic texts (Mishnah Sanhedrin 6:5, Semahot);  no such cave has been excavated.  Whether the place was Joseph's tomb is the next question.

Part 3: Joseph of Arimathea

What each Gospel says.  The four accounts describe the same man four ways.

1. Mark 15:43: "Joseph of Arimathaea, a prominent council member who also himself was looking for God's Kingdom," who "boldly went in to Pilate." The Greek is εὐσχήμων βουλευτής, "a respected councillor." Mark does not call him a disciple.³
2. Matthew 27:57-60: "a rich man from Arimathaea named Joseph, who himself was also Jesus' disciple," who laid the body "in his own new tomb." Matthew does not call him a councillor.³
3. Luke 23:50-51: "a member of the council, a good and righteous man (he had not consented to their counsel and deed)."³
4. John 19:38-39: "a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews," joined by Nicodemus with "about a hundred Roman pounds" of myrrh and aloes.³

These are not contradictions.  A councillor can also be, or later become, a follower.  The descriptions do move in one direction:  from a pious councillor in Mark to a rich disciple with his own new tomb in Matthew and a secret disciple with a royal quantity of spices in John.  Brown, Allison and Lowder all read Mark's Joseph as a law-keeping Jew who was not yet a disciple, and Allison calls the later "he was a disciple" "likely a late guess without historical merit."¹  The point of the movement is not that one Gospel is wrong.  It is that the earliest form is the least flattering, and later tellers improved it.

The case that Joseph is historical.

1. A council member who does right. Mark has "the whole council" seek testimony against Jesus (14:55) and "all" condemn him (14:64). Brown argues that "a Christian fictional creation from nothing of a Jewish Sanhedrist who does what is right is almost inexplicable, granted the hostility in early Christian writings toward the Jewish authorities."⁶ Ehrman turns the same tension into an objection: on Mark's own account, Joseph "was one of the people who had called for Jesus's death just the night before."² The tension is real either way. For Brown it is a mark of something remembered; for Ehrman it is a sign the story does not make historical sense.
2. An obscure town. "Arimathea" is "a town very difficult to identify and reminiscent of no scriptural symbolism."⁶ That removes one common motive for invention, a symbolic place. It is not a general law that invented details are meaningful: storytellers can and do invent plain names and obscure places.
3. The tradition was being reshaped when the Gospels were written. Brown: "If Mark and John bear witness to a preGospel tradition about Joseph, so old that already by Gospel-writing time his identity is being modified, that tradition has to go back to the first decade or two of Christianity, which is a bit early for etiological creation."⁶ The argument has a condition, and it is stated in its first word. It needs John to carry a Joseph tradition independent of Mark, which Goodacre and others dispute (Part 1). If John knew Mark, the changes between the Gospels show that later writers modified the story; they do not show how long a story existed before Mark, or that it could not have been invented early.
4. Why remember his name at all? The Gospels leave many people nameless. Allison cites Matti Kankaanniemi: "something unexpected in Joseph's act inspired Jesus' followers to mention his name."¹ That is one explanation of the name. Allison himself also notes that "historical names can enter unhistorical narratives" (Part 1).

The skeptic Jeffery Jay Lowder, replying to William Lane Craig, accepts the case:  "As for (b), that Joseph of Arimathea is unlikely to be a Christian invention, I find Craig's argument persuasive."¹⁶  And:  "Like Craig, I think it is much easier to accept the historicity of Jesus' burial by Joseph of Arimathea than it is to explain away the burial story as pure legend."¹⁶  Lowder is cited for his reasons, which are Brown's and Craig's.  His agreement adds no evidence of its own.

The case that Joseph was invented.

1. A dilemma solved. Crossan: "If they had power, they were not his friends; if they were his friends, they had no power. Mark 15:42-46 solves that dilemma by creating one Joseph of Arimathea."⁷ He spells out why Mark's Joseph fits: he is both "a respected member of the council," on the side of those who crucified Jesus, and "waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God," on the side of Jesus' followers, so that "Joseph is exactly what is needed to turn the vague hope that they would have buried him into a specific and definite event."⁷ And: "If you are creating a person, it is easy to give him a name as well."
2. Names for the nameless. Ehrman argues that tellers give names to unnamed figures and find "good guys" among the "bad guys": "what was originally a vague statement that the unnamed Jewish leaders buried Jesus becomes a story of one leader in particular, who is named, doing so."²
3. The creed and Acts do not name him. Ehrman argues that the formula's author, had he known of Joseph, "surely would have included it," to balance "he appeared to Cephas."² And Acts 13:29 has the Jerusalem rulers as a group bury Jesus, which Ehrman calls "a different tradition."²
4. A motive for credentials. R. Mahoney, cited by Brown, suggested that the disciples' absence from the burial "could have been reason for inventing a prominent Jew of unimpeachable credentials."⁶

Weighing them.  The invention case has a real motive and a real pattern.  The motive is the one Crossan names:  only someone with standing could ask Pilate for the body, so a story of an honourable burial needed a man with power.  A pious councillor who was "looking for God's Kingdom" solves that problem neatly, and he would solve it whether he was remembered or invented.  So the council membership that Brown finds awkward is, on Crossan's reading, exactly what the story required.  Neither reading is forced by the text.

1. The power motive and the awkwardness are both real. The motive explains why an inventor would give Joseph power. It does not explain as easily why Mark would make him a member of the very body that, in Mark's own story, "all" condemned Jesus, rather than simply a rich disciple, which is how Matthew, the next writer, describes him, without mentioning the council. That is the residue of Brown's argument. It is a matter of degree, not a proof: a council member was the most natural man with standing to imagine.
2. The creed argument. Allison notes that "he was buried by Joseph" cannot be written with ἐτάφη and a simple dative, to make an exact twin of ὤφθη Κηφᾷ, "he appeared to Cephas"; one would need the active ("Joseph buried him") or the preposition "by," and "In either case, the parallelism would be imperfect."¹ That answers only the demand for a neat verbal match. A formula could still have named the burier with another construction, so the grammar does not explain the silence. Allison's stronger point is about relevance: the formula also omits Pilate, Jerusalem and the cross, and it lists people who saw Jesus, not people who handled his body. On that reading Joseph's absence is unsurprising, and it is weak evidence either way.
3. Acts 13:29. The speech is Luke's, in the same two-volume work in which Luke himself tells the Joseph story (Luke 23:50-53). Luke saw no conflict between "the rulers buried him" and "a councillor buried him." Treating one member's act as the council's act is ordinary speech. The verse may also preserve an older, less specific memory, as Ehrman suggests. It does not count against Joseph, and it does not count for him.
4. Names for the nameless. The pattern is real. It shows that names could be added; it does not show when this one was. The first surviving narrative, Mark, already has the name and the town, but a name in the first surviving text does not exclude invention in oral or written tradition before Mark.

What the Joseph argument cannot do.  Popular apologetic writing often adds that a prominent named man "could be interrogated" by anyone who doubted the story.  No source records that anyone did, and Joseph appears in no source outside the Gospels.  On the conventional dating, Mark wrote decades later, perhaps outside Judea and around the war of 66-70.  Some readers may have had ways to ask about Joseph, through people who had lived in Jerusalem;  nothing shows that any did, or what they would have found.  So the interrogation argument is unproven, and the case for Joseph rests on the features of the story above, not on anyone's ability to check him.  Brown's verdict is "very probable," with the warning that "high probability is not certitude."⁶  Allison's is "likely," with "the evidence is imperfect" and "It remains possible that someone made up the story."¹  This article's judgment is lower than Brown's:  more likely than not, because the awkward council membership and the obscure town are better explained by memory than by the power motive alone, and that preference is modest.

Where Joseph put the body.  If Joseph buried Jesus, the next question is where.  Matthew says Joseph's own new tomb.  Brown notes that "the fact that the tomb was Joseph's appears only in the late layers of Gospel development; the very early tradition does not identify the tomb."⁶  Jodi Magness, an archaeologist of Roman Palestine, reconstructs the scene this way:  in ordinary circumstances Jesus "would have been buried in a pit grave or trench grave," but there was no time before the Sabbath, so Joseph laid him in his own rock-cut tomb, "an exceptional measure due to the circumstances."⁸  Allison and Magness both raise the same possibility:  Joseph may have meant the tomb to be temporary.¹  That proposal is the root of the reburial theory in Part 9.  It is a reconstruction that fits the evidence, not a datum.

Part 4: Paul's formula and Paul's silence

The text.  Paul writes:  "For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received:  that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve" (1 Cor 15:3-5).³  In Greek the four clauses each begin with ὅτι, "that":  ἀπέθανεν, ἐτάφη, ἐγήγερται, ὤφθη, "he died, he was buried, he has been raised, he appeared."¹⁷

How old is it?  Apologists often say the formula dates "within two years" of the crucifixion.  The texts allow less precision than that, and each step below is an inference that should be named.

1. Before Paul's preaching in Corinth. Paul opens the chapter by reminding the Corinthians of "the Good News which I preached to you, which also you received" (15:1), and then says he "delivered" the formula to them (15:3).³ So he passed it on when he first preached there, about AD 50-51 on the Acts chronology above. The phrase usually translated "first of all," ἐν πρώτοις, does not by itself say this. It is commonly taken to mean "as of first importance," as Allison translates it.¹ The early date comes from the reminder in 15:1, not from that phrase.
2. Older than Paul's use of it. Paul says he "received" it. That verb alone does not name a human source. In 1 Cor 11:23 the same pair, "received ... delivered," introduces the Lord's Supper tradition, and there Paul says he received it "from the Lord."³ In Galatians 1:12 he insists that his gospel did not come "from man" but "through revelation of Jesus Christ."³ So the reason to think the formula came from earlier Christians is not the verb. It is the wording: the lines use expressions Paul "otherwise employs rarely or not at all," such as "according to the scriptures," "the twelve," the perfect tense "has been raised," and the run of "that ... and that ... and that."¹ The Aramaic name "Cephas" for Peter points the same way.¹ This is the standard form-critical argument, and it is a good one. Robert Price argued instead that the whole of 15:3-11 is a later insertion, partly because of the tension with Galatians 1:12; Allison says Price "unpersuasively argues" the point.¹
3. Where and when Paul received it is unknown. Galatians 1:18-19 says that "after three years" Paul went to Jerusalem "to visit Peter" (Greek ἱστορῆσαι Κηφᾶν), stayed fifteen days, and saw James.³ That visit is a plausible occasion, since the formula names Cephas and James. No text says he learned it there. Allison is blunt: "Nor can we determine whether Paul learned the tradition from authorities in Jerusalem ... or from the church in Damascus or from the church in Antioch or from some other community," and he may have heard part of it even before his conversion, while persecuting the church.¹ He quotes the claim that "Paul received the list from Peter and James" and answers, "How Strauss and Habermas know this escapes me."¹
4. What the visit does show. Paul knew Peter and James and spent two weeks with Peter. Allison, quoting Eduard Schweizer, draws the fair conclusion: whatever its exact origin, the tradition "can, at least, not contradict what he heard then," and "it is implausible that it never occurred to him ... to ask anything about the latter's experiences."¹ That gives a check by people named in it, not a recorded moment of transmission.
5. Absolute dates. Galatians gives intervals, "after three years" (1:18) and "after a period of fourteen years" (2:1), not dates.³ To turn them into years one needs an anchor. Paul's escape from Damascus, when "the governor under King Aretas" sought to arrest him (2 Cor 11:32-33), gives a latest date on the usual identification of this king with Aretas IV, who died about AD 40.³ The usual reconstruction also counts back from Paul's stay in Corinth, which depends on Acts' Gallio scene, and it must decide which of Acts' Jerusalem visits Galatians 2 describes and whether the intervals overlap. The sibling article Travel, Networks, and the Testability of Acts works through those choices. On them, Paul's conversion falls in the early to mid 30s, and his first Jerusalem visit a few years later.

So the formula is older than Paul's preaching in Corinth, probably reached him in the 30s, and contains content that was older still.  That is a strong result without the "two years."  The critic Richard Carrier, who denies that Jesus existed as a historical man, agrees on the core:  "the Corinthian Creed, at least verses 3-5, definitely existed and was the central "gospel" Christians were preaching in the early 30s A.D."¹⁸  His reasons are that the wording is not Paul's own and that Paul claims the earlier apostles confirmed it.  Carrier also rejects the common apologetic claim that "received ... delivered" is technical rabbinic language, and he suspects verses 6-7 were added later.  His agreement shows that a writer hostile to the Christian case accepts an early date for verses 3-5.  It does not show that every critic does.

What "buried ... raised" implies.  A burial followed by a raising pictures a body put into the ground and a body brought out of it.  Allison puts it this way:  "Paul's belief that Jesus "was raised" implies that he "was raised (from a grave)," just as surely as Paul's remark that Jesus "was born" (Phil. 2:7) implies that he "was born (of a woman).""¹  N. T. Wright's survey of Jewish and pagan usage finds that "'Resurrection' meant embodiment; that was equally so for the pagans, who denied it, as it was for the Jews, at least some of whom hoped for it."¹⁹  So the formula is good evidence that the first Christians believed Jesus' body had been raised.  That is a claim about belief.  It is not evidence that anyone inspected the grave.

The "spiritual body."  Paul also writes that the body "is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body" and that "flesh and blood can't inherit God's Kingdom" (1 Cor 15:44, 50).³  Some readers take this to mean Paul expected a new, non-physical body, so that Jesus' corpse could have stayed in the ground.  Two features of the Greek count against that reading.

1. The contrast is σῶμα ψυχικόν against σῶμα πνευματικόν, "a soul-ish body" against "a spirit-ish body."¹⁷ Both are bodies. The same adjective ψυχικός describes the "natural man" of 1 Cor 2:14, a person, not a substance. Wright argues that adjectives ending in -ικος "have ethical or functional meanings rather than referring to the material or substance of which something is composed," and that "psychikos would have been exactly the wrong word" for "physical."¹⁹
2. Paul's verbs are about change. The body "sown" is the body "raised": "this perishable body must become imperishable" (15:53). Allison concludes that Paul believed in "a radical metamorphosis" in which the body "would not be destroyed but "changed into something supremely better"," and that "whether or not he knew a story about Jesus' tomb, such a story would not have been foreign to his theology."¹

Scholars who read Paul's πνεῦμα through Stoic physics, such as Troels Engberg-Pedersen, take the risen body to be made of a fine heavenly stuff.  Even on that reading, Allison notes, the old body is "transformed into another sort of body," not left behind.¹  These are arguments about what Paul believed, and they show only that an empty-tomb story would fit his theology.  The Pauline question as a whole belongs to the sibling article Paul's Letters as Historical Evidence.

What the formula does not show.  It says Jesus was buried.  It does not say where, by whom, that the grave was found empty, or that women found it.  Allison:  "While Paul is no witness against the story of an empty tomb as found in the gospels, he equally cannot be called on to support any of the specifics of that tradition or even, with any confidence, its pre-Markan existence as a narrative."¹  The speech in Acts 13:29-37, which has Paul say Jesus was "laid in a tomb" and "saw no decay," is Luke's narration of a speech, written decades later.  It is not a second Pauline witness and must not be counted as one.

Paul's silence, both ways.  Ehrman:  "Paul never says anything about anyone discovering an empty tomb, and he doesn't mention any resurrection appearances to women—either here or in any other passage of his writings."²  That is true.  Its weight is limited by the form of the text, and the limits run both ways.

1. The formula is a compressed list. It omits Pilate, the cross and Jerusalem. Allison: "It is an argument from silence regarding a very compressed statement, one mostly bereft of details."¹
2. Christian formulas never mention the tomb. James Ware, quoted by Allison: "No formula, creedal fragment or creed known to us from the ancient church contains any reference to the empty tomb."¹ The Nicene Creed says "he rose on the third day" from bishops who knew the Gospel stories well.
3. On the other side, Paul argues at length in 1 Cor 15 that the dead will be raised, and an empty tomb found by known people would have been a natural point to make. He does not make it. That is a real silence, even if a short formula explains part of it.
4. The silence of the Corinthian doubters is no help either way. Those who denied a resurrection of the dead (15:12) never, as far as Paul's answer shows, said that Jesus' body was still in its grave, but Paul's answer is the only record of what they said.

The honest conclusion is that Paul's silence is weak evidence against an empty-tomb tradition, and the formula is weak evidence for one.  The formula's real contribution is early evidence for a burial and for belief in a bodily raising.

Part 5: The women

What Mark says.  Women watch the crucifixion "from afar":  "Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome" (15:40).  Two of them see "where he was laid" (15:47).  After the Sabbath, three come with spices, find the stone rolled back, and meet "a young man ... dressed in a white robe" who says, "He has risen!  He is not here.  See the place where they laid him!"  Mark's Gospel then ends:  "They went out, and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come on them.  They said nothing to anyone;  for they were afraid" (16:8).³

Verses 9-20, which add appearances, are not part of the earliest recoverable Mark.  Bruce Metzger's textual commentary sets out why:  they are "absent from the two oldest Greek manuscripts" (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus), "Clement of Alexandria and Origen show no knowledge" of them, and Eusebius and Jerome say they were missing "from almost all Greek copies of Mark known to them."²⁰  The committee concluded that "the earliest ascertainable form of the Gospel of Mark ended with 16.8," and dated the longer ending "perhaps from the first half of the second century."²⁰  Nothing in this article relies on 16:9-20.

Were the women at the burial?  Mark says two of them watched it, and Matthew and Luke follow Mark.  John has no women at the burial.  Brown thinks the women's presence at the burial is "probably a back-formation from their presence in the empty-tomb tradition":  storytellers who knew the women went to the tomb assumed they had seen it filled.⁶  Richard Bauckham argues the opposite from the names themselves:  Mark has three women at the cross and the tomb but only two at the burial, which suggests the lists track who was known to have seen what.¹²  Either reading is possible.  The burial-watching detail is therefore weaker than the discovery itself and should not carry the "they could not have gone to the wrong tomb" argument alone.

What ancient sources say about women as witnesses.  The popular form of the argument says women's testimony "was not admitted" and that "no one would invent" women witnesses.  The sources are more mixed than that.

1. Against. Josephus, in the 90s, adds to Moses' law of witnesses: "But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex."²¹ In Greek: γυναικῶν δὲ μὴ ἔστω μαρτυρία διὰ κουφότητα καὶ θράσος τοῦ γένους αὐτῶν.²² The Mishnah, compiled about AD 200, lists men disqualified from testifying with the rule that "any testimony for which a woman is unfit, these too are unfit" (Rosh Hashanah 1:8), and says "the oath of testimony is practiced with regard to men but not with regard to women" (Shevuot 4:1).²³ Sifre Deuteronomy reads the "two witnesses" of Deuteronomy as "male witnesses, rather than women."²⁴
2. For. The same Mishnah lets a widow remarry on one witness's word that her husband died, and lists among acceptable sources "a woman's testimony," a practice it traces to Rabban Gamaliel the Elder, the first-century teacher of Acts 5:34 (Yevamot 16:7).²³ It also believes a woman's statement about her own marital status (Ketubot 2:5). Carolyn Osiek argues that the Jewish rule was "an exemption, not an exclusion": women were not compelled to bring accusations, which "does not apply to our case."²⁵ She also notes that Josephus' rule is "not included in the biblical law codes."²⁵
3. Attitudes, not courts. Allison grants that Josephus is speaking of courts, but argues that "his justification for the ruling—women are victims of levity and temerity—expresses an attitude many males held near the turn of the era."¹ Richard Bauckham, who argues for the women as real witnesses, puts the point with care: "While this did not result in a consistent male policy of disbelieving women, it is hard to believe it would not affect judgments of credibility especially when what the women were reporting would take some believing anyhow."²⁶ Allison's evidence for the attitude is a single writer's stated reason, and Bauckham's is a judgment about how an attitude would work. Neither measures how a particular audience in the first century weighed a woman's report.

So the honest form is not "women could not testify."  The evidence shows two separate things.  First, a cultural fact:  a strand of Jewish law and opinion, from Josephus to the later rabbis, treated women as unfit witnesses in many legal settings, and the same attitude shows up in Christian texts and pagan mockery.  Second, a literary fact:  later Christian writers added male witnesses to the tomb story.  How much these facts bear on whether the story was invented is a further question.  No source ranks women against other possible witnesses, Mark's readers were not a Jewish court, and different audiences will have weighed a woman's word differently.

The embarrassment argument and its limits.  Wright states the strong form:  "women were simply not acceptable as legal witnesses," and "If they could have invented stories of fine, upstanding, reliable male witnesses being first at the tomb, they would have done it."¹⁹  The first sentence is too absolute, as the Mishnah shows.  The second assumes that whoever invented the story wanted above all to persuade outsiders with prestigious witnesses.  That is one possible aim, not a known one.  Ehrman answers that the argument "suffers, in short, from a poverty of imagination."  He gives four reasons women could be in the story even if it were invented:

1. "we are not talking about a Jewish court of law ... We're talking about oral traditions about the man Jesus."
2. Women storytellers, prominent in the early churches (Romans 16), may have told the story with women in it.
3. "Preparing bodies for burial was commonly the work of women, not men."
4. In Mark the male disciples never understand; a story in which only women learn the truth suits Mark's design.²

These are not empty possibilities.  Each rests on something documented.  Osiek and Kathleen Corley show that women prepared and mourned the dead in Mediterranean practice, so a story of women at a tomb has a natural setting.²⁵  Corley proposes that the Easter tradition grew out of women's funeral laments and third-day rites, as part of "an argument for the nonsupernatural origins of early Christian communities."²⁷  Mark's Gospel does end with the men absent and the women afraid and silent (16:8), which fits his picture of disciples who fail.  Taken together, mourning custom and Mark's design can explain why a story, invented or not, would send women alone to the tomb on the third day:  the men are scattered or in hiding, and the women go to do what women did.

Why some weight remains.  Three features are not fully explained by those reasons.

1. The cost is visible in the Christian texts themselves. In Luke the apostles hear the women and "These words seemed to them to be nonsense, and they didn't believe them" (24:11), and Luke and John then send Peter to check (Luke 24:12, 24; John 20:3-10).³ Late in the second century the pagan critic Celsus mocked the claim that the risen Jesus showed his wounds: "who beheld this? A half-frantic woman, as you state."²⁸ Celsus is mocking Mary Magdalene as witness to an appearance, not to the empty tomb, but his point shows how a woman's report could be used against the story. The story kept the women anyway.
2. Later tellers added men. Later writers supplied male confirmation, suggesting that they felt the women's report needed support. That fits a received story whose witnesses were felt to need support. It also fits ordinary apologetic improvement of an invented story, so it is not decisive.
3. Mark's women are named. Mark 15:40, 15:47 and 16:1 give the names, and the lists differ slightly, which Bauckham reads as a record of who saw what. Named women do not prove the story; Allison's warning that "historical names can enter unhistorical narratives" applies.

Allison's own reason is a probability judgment, not a proof:  "Jesus' followers were probably not abetting their public cause with a hard-to-credit story in which women ... are the featured eyewitnesses."  He calls it "not a bad argument."¹  That is the fair level.  The women's role is evidence of modest weight for a received story.  It is not an authenticity machine.

Why the men are absent.  The common skeptical answer is that the male disciples had fled to Galilee, so storytellers had only the women to use.  Allison answers from the texts.  Mark's own messenger tells the women to "tell his disciples and Peter," which assumes the men were still within reach in Jerusalem;  Luke and John put them there;  and legends do not respect such facts anyway:  "It is the hallmark of legends—as those who argue against the historicity of the empty tomb insist—to disregard facts."¹  The skeptic can reply that Mark's design, not a fact about the men's location, explains their absence.  Both readings fit Mark.

Mark 16:8:  two readings.  "They said nothing to anyone" can be read two ways.  A reading common among critics since the nineteenth century takes it as Mark's explanation of why the empty-tomb story was not known earlier.  Michael Goulder's version, quoted by Allison:  "You know what women are like, brethren: they were seized with panic and hysteria, and kept the whole thing quiet.  That is why people have not heard all this before."¹  Allison replies that the silence follows the messenger's command to tell the disciples about Galilee, not a command to announce the empty tomb, and that the Greek joins it with "and," not "but."¹  On his reading the verse fits Mark's pattern of fear in the face of revelation.  Both are interpretations of one verse.  Allison's point weakens the cover-story reading, since a cover story would more naturally have the women fail to report the empty tomb itself, but it does not refute it.

Paul's list has no women.  The formula's witnesses are Cephas, the Twelve, the five hundred, James and the apostles (1 Cor 15:5-7).  Ehrman takes this as a sign that Paul knew no tradition of women at the tomb.²  It can also reflect the formula's purpose:  it lists appearances, and the people on it were the community's leaders.  The absence is consistent with either reading and settles neither.

Conclusion of this part.  The cultural evidence is real but mixed:  women's testimony was restricted in Jewish law and disparaged by some writers, and accepted in other settings.  The literary evidence is real:  later Gospels added men.  Mourning custom and Mark's own design give an invented story good reasons to put women alone at the tomb, so the women's presence does not show the story was received rather than made.  What remains is modest:  the story kept witnesses whose word Christians themselves had to defend, and later writers reinforced it rather than replacing them.  Allison's summary, that the involvement of Mary Magdalene and the other women "commends itself as nonfiction," is a judgment this article shares at the level of "more likely than not," not more.¹

Part 6: Four tellings of the discovery

What stays the same.  In every account, women, with Mary Magdalene named first or alone, come to the tomb early on the first day of the week, and find it open and the body gone.  In Mark they then say nothing;  in the other three the news reaches the male disciples.  That core is what the historical argument is about.

What differs.  The differences are real, and forcing them into one sequence helps no one.

The table's quotations are from the World English Bible.³  The accounts also differ in why the women came.  Mark's women buy spices "that they might come and anoint him" and ask on the way, "Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb for us?"  Luke's bring spices but voice no worry about the stone.  Matthew's women come "to see the tomb."  John gives Mary Magdalene no stated purpose, and in John the body was already wrapped with about a hundred pounds of spices at the burial (19:39-40).³

Two kinds of difference appear.  Some are differences of detail:  the number of women named, the hour, how many messengers, why the women came.  Differences like these are compatible with several tellings of one event.  They are also what literary redaction produces, and since Matthew and Luke copied Mark, much of the variation here is editing, not independent memory.  They do not by themselves corroborate the common core.  Others are additions that serve a purpose:  Matthew's earthquake and guards, Luke's and John's men who confirm the women's report, John's face cloth.  These show development, and those added details need support of their own before they can be used as evidence.  Some differences may be real contradictions:  whether the messenger was inside or sitting on the stone, whether the women ran to tell or said nothing.  Harmonizing them by inventing unrecorded visits or steps is not a historical method.  The core claim, that women went to the tomb on the first day and found it open and empty, is the part shared by Mark and John;  how much it gains from John depends on John's independence (Part 1).

The guard.  Only Matthew has it.  Brown, who refuses to dismiss it merely because it contains an angel, still finds "a major argument against historicity that is impressive indeed":  "the presence of the guard there would make what they narrate about the tomb almost unintelligible."  His reason is that in the other three Gospels "the only obstacle to their entrance that is mentioned is the stone," and none of them explains how the women hoped to get past soldiers posted to prevent entry.⁶  He adds that in Matthew the chief priests understand Jesus' prophecy of rising when his own disciples do not.  He ends cautiously:  "Absolute negative statements (e.g., the account has no historical basis) most often go beyond the kind of evidence available to biblical scholars," and "there is neither internal nor external evidence to cause us to affirm historicity."⁶  Allison is blunter:  the guard narrative "is sheer fiction."¹  William Lane Craig has defended it;²⁹  Brown calls that defence "unsuccessful in my judgment."⁶  This article follows Brown's level of judgment:  the guard is probably not historical, and that is a probability, not a demonstration that Matthew invented it.  Apologists who cite the guard as proof that the tomb could not have been robbed are resting on the least secure detail in the tomb tradition.

The vocabulary argument for an older guard source.  Craig's 1984 paper argued that the guard story contains "many words which are hapax legomena for the New Testament: epaurion, paraskeue, planos/plane, koustodia, asphalizo, sphragizo," and his 2008 reply to Allison repeated:  "several words or expressions which are unique in all the New Testament, such as "on the next day," "the preparation day," "deceiver," "guard (of soldiers)," " to make secure," "to seal." ... The expression "on the third day" is also non-Matthean; he always uses "after three days.""²⁹³⁰  A count of the Greek tests each part.  It counts single words by their dictionary form, and phrases only as the same words in the same order.

The counts come from the SBL Greek New Testament as tagged by MorphGNT, and the script that makes them is in this article's research folder.³¹  Read as a claim about the whole New Testament, Craig's list fails:  only one word, the Latin loanword κουστωδία, is unique.  Read as a claim about Matthew, it is true:  each of the seven words occurs in Matthew only in this story.  That is probably the form the argument should take.  It proves little either way, because words a writer uses only once are what any new subject produces:  a story about a guard and a seal needs the words "guard" and "seal."  The third-day claim is backwards:  where Mark's passion predictions say "after three days," Matthew changes each to "on the third day," and in the guard story "after three days" is in the priests' mouths.  The story also carries Matthew's own habits:  "took counsel" with συμβούλιον and λαμβάνω occurs in the New Testament only in Matthew, five times including this verse, and "until today" is his idiom.  None of this shows that Matthew had no older source.  It shows that the vocabulary does not demonstrate one, and that whatever source he had, the story as written is in his own style.

Peter's visit and the linen.  Luke 24:12 has Peter run to the tomb and see "the strips of linen lying by themselves."  The verse is missing from the "Western" form of the text, one of nine such omissions that Westcott and Hort once preferred as original;  the discovery of the Bodmer papyri carried the fuller text back to the second century and weakened that view.²⁰  The UBS committee kept it with its lowest confidence rating, regarding it as "a natural antecedent to ver. 24," and explained its likeness to John 20 "as due to the likelihood that both evangelists had drawn upon a common tradition."²⁰  If that is right, Luke and John did not copy each other here, but both drew on one older report that disciples went to the tomb and saw grave cloths.  That makes the report older than either Gospel;  it does not make it two witnesses.  John alone adds the face cloth "rolled up in a place by itself" (20:7).  The popular argument that thieves would not have stopped to fold a face cloth rests entirely on this one detail in the latest Gospel, told in a scene where the beloved disciple "saw and believed" (20:8).  It cannot serve as independent evidence.

The stone.  Mark's and Luke's verbs for moving the stone have often been read as rolling a round stone.  Allison, citing Amos Kloner, notes that "the vast majority of tombs in and around Jerusalem were, before 70 CE, closed with square blocking stones," and that round stones "were rare and are found only with elaborate tombs for the rich."¹  The detail cuts both ways:  a round stone would fit Matthew's rich Joseph, or it would be a later upgrade of the burial;  the verbs may also describe moving a square block.  Nothing hangs on it.

Part 7: "His disciples stole him"

The text.  Matthew ends his guard story:  the chief priests bribed the soldiers, "saying, 'Say that his disciples came by night and stole him away while we slept.' ... So they took the money and did as they were told.  This saying was spread abroad among the Jews, and continues until today" (Matt 28:13-15).³

The popular argument.  Apologists call this "enemy attestation":  Jewish opponents did not say the body was still in the tomb;  they said it was stolen, which concedes it was gone.  Habermas and Licona put it this way:  "When the boy tells his teacher that the dog ate his homework, this is an indirect admission that his homework is unavailable for assessment."³²

What the passage actually is.  It is not a Jewish document.  It is a Christian author's report, written perhaps fifty years after the events, that a hostile story was circulating among Jews in his own day.  No first-century Jewish text that makes the claim survives.  Three questions follow.

1. Did Matthew's opponents really say this? Probably, but for reasons that need stating. An author can invent an opponent's line in order to refute it, so the mere presence of the accusation proves nothing. What makes a real rumour likely is that the accusation is the obvious reply to a claim of an empty tomb, so that Christians telling the story would soon meet it; that Matthew presents it as current ("until today") rather than as a past event he could shape freely; and that later sources (below) show Christians still answering it. Whether Matthew's readers could check the rumour among their Jewish neighbours is not documented, and the phrase "until today" is Matthew's own idiom (Matt 11:23; 27:8), so the sentence is his comment, not a quoted source.
2. How old is the rumour? Unknown. Allison: "The chief problem with this oft-repeated proof is that we do not know the age of the refutation in Mt. 28:11-15." It may go back to the first weeks; "But maybe it appeared for the first time between the composition of Mark and Matthew."¹
3. What does the rumour presuppose? At most, that the people who said it did not, in that exchange, produce or point to the body. A counter-story can arise in reply to a Christian claim without its tellers knowing anything about the tomb. If Christians said "the tomb is empty," the shortest answer was "then the disciples took the body," and that answer works whether or not the speaker knew where the body was. So the rumour is conditional evidence. If it reached back to Jerusalem in the first months, and if the people who started it could have checked, it would carry real weight; neither condition is shown.

The later reports.

1. Justin Martyr, about AD 155-160. Writing to a Jew named Trypho, Justin says the Jews sent "chosen and ordained men throughout all the world" to say that Jesus was "a Galilaean deceiver, whom we crucified, but his disciples stole him by night from the tomb, where he was laid when unfastened from the cross."³³ Justin knew Matthew, and "by night" and "stole" are Matthew's words. His report may be independent knowledge of Jewish polemic, or Matthew retold. It cannot be tested.
2. Tertullian, about AD 197-202. Picturing the Last Judgment, Tertullian addresses the enemies of Jesus: "This is He whom His disciples secretly stole away, that it might be said He had risen again, or the gardener abstracted, that his lettuces might come to no harm from the crowds of visitants!"³⁴ The gardener is not in Matthew, which suggests a counter-story with its own details. But John 20:15, where Mary takes the risen Jesus for the gardener, is a possible source, and Tertullian is writing satire. Either way it is a second explanation of the missing body, so the theft story was not the only one in circulation by his day.
3. The Gospel of Peter. Here the elders ask Pilate for soldiers "lest his disciples come and steal him away and the people suppose that he is risen from the dead."³⁵ Brown and Wright treat the text as later than the canonical Gospels and dependent on them, and Wright notes that Crossan's contrary reconstruction "has won few supporters."⁶¹⁹
4. The Toledot Yeshu, a medieval Jewish counter-gospel, has Jesus' enemies display the body, according to Allison.¹ It is centuries too late to bear on the first generation, but it shows that a Jewish counter-story could claim to know where the body was.

Conclusion of this part.  The theft story is good evidence that, by Matthew's time, some Jewish opponents explained the empty-tomb claim by theft rather than by pointing to a grave.  It does not record what all opponents said, it is not the only counter-story that survives, and it is not a record of a search.  Its age is unknown, its earliest witness is a Christian, and its later witnesses may depend on that Christian.  Its possible weight is real:  if it began in Jerusalem soon after the first claims, it would show that those best placed to answer did not answer with a body.  Nothing now shows that it began that early.

Part 8: Could the authorities have produced the body?

The argument.  The first Christians proclaimed Jesus' resurrection in Jerusalem, where he had been executed and buried.  If his body was in a known tomb, his opponents could have shown it and ended the movement.  The argument holds that they did not, and that they turned to persecuting the preachers instead.  John Stott, the Anglican writer, put it this way in Basic Christianity:  "They could produce the remains of the body and publish a statement of what they had done.  Instead, they were silent and resorted to violence."  He concluded:  "The authorities' silence is as eloquent a proof of the resurrection as the apostles' witness."³⁶  Habermas and Licona state it more sharply still:  "It would have been impossible for Christianity to get off the ground in Jerusalem if the body had still been in the tomb."³²

What the argument needs.  It is only as strong as each of its links.

1. A claim made in Jerusalem, at a time when the body could still be checked. Paul attests that within a few years of his conversion Cephas and James led a community in Jerusalem (Gal 1:18-19; 2:9).³ The specific scene of public preaching at Pentecost, fifty days after Passover, comes from Acts 2, which Luke wrote decades later. The first claims need not all have come at Pentecost. On the Gospels' account the women's report came on the third day, and the claims could have spread privately before any public preaching. So the opportunities to check run from days to years, and the argument has to be weighed across that whole range, not at one date. The Jerusalem community is secure; the date and form of its first claim are not.
2. A known tomb. This needs the burial by Joseph, or at least a burial whose place someone knew (Parts 2-3).
3. Interest and means. The authorities had to care enough to look, and be willing to open a tomb. Allison asks whether disinterring and displaying a corpse would have been "impious and against Jewish custom," and whether leaders who knew Jesus was dead would treat a small sect as more than "a minor, transient nuisance."¹
4. An identifiable body. This depends on time, place and conditions, none of which is recorded.

Decay and identification.  Critics answer that by the time anyone proclaimed the resurrection publicly, a body could not be recognized.  The evidence on this is weaker than either side usually admits.

1. The Mishnah. Its rule for identifying a dead man, so that his widow may remarry, allows testimony only from "the face with the nose," and "only up to three days." In the same passage Rabbi Judah ben Bava objects that "not every man, not every place and not every hour is the same."³⁷ This is a cautious legal rule, written down about AD 200, for a court that needed certainty before letting a woman remarry. It is not a measurement of when faces become unrecognizable, and the objection beside it says conditions vary.
2. Modern decomposition research. A study for the National Institute of Justice followed 96 donated bodies at three research facilities in Tennessee and Texas. The bodies lay outdoors, in sun or shade, "unclothed and caged," with wire mesh to keep scavengers off "but to allow access by insects."³⁸ The authors report as an example that "in the summer in southeast Texas a body will stay in the Fresh stage of decomposition 2-3 days."³⁸ "Fresh" is a scoring category defined by skin colour and texture; its end is not a test of whether a face can be recognized, and the study did not measure recognition. The study's main finding is that the standard formula relating temperature and time to decay "should not be used."³⁸
3. The differences. Those were unclothed bodies exposed outdoors to insects. Jesus' body, on the Gospels' account, was wrapped in linen and laid in a rock-cut tomb in early spring. Decay research measures progress against accumulated temperature, so a cool tomb would slow it, and a closed tomb would keep out many of the insects the study's cages let in; wrapping changes the picture again; John's large quantity of spices, if historical, is another unknown. None of these has been measured for this case.

So no figure can be computed for when Jesus' face would have become unrecognizable, and the argument cannot be priced at any particular day.  Decay could have complicated recognition by the time of public preaching weeks later.  A check on the third day, the time the Gospels give for the women's visit, would generally face fewer problems from decay than one weeks later;  the actual conditions remain unknown.  And identification never depended on the face alone.  Habermas and Licona reply that "a corpse's hair, stature, and distinctive wounds would have been identifiable, even after fifty days."³²  Stature, probably.  Wounds in the soft tissue of hands and feet are much less certain after seven weeks.  The place would also count:  if the tomb was known and held only Jesus, as Luke and John say, the place identified the body.  That condition is the Gospels' claim, not independent evidence.  If the body lay with others, Allison argues from the Mishnah's rule that relatives later gathered an executed man's bones "in their own place" that such bodies were kept so as to allow identification.¹  That shows what the rabbis expected around AD 200;  it does not show how every criminal's grave was kept in AD 30.  A common grave raises a further problem.  Ehrman argues that there, "very soon one decomposed body could not be distinguished from another."²

Why the argument is weaker than it sounds.  Allison lists the defeaters that are hard to remove:  believers convinced by visions may never have checked the grave;  opponents may not have cared;  and a body produced weeks later would have been denied.  "Nobody back then could run dental records or check DNA," and when the Rastafarian messiah Haile Selassie died, believers kept denying it "even into the 1990s, after his bones had been identified."¹  He also turns the argument's silence around:  no source says opponents went to the tomb and found it empty, and none says they produced "anybody's bones" either.  His verdict:  "Here is a case in which the arguments yea are fairly well met by the arguments nay."¹

What survives.  An argument from silence is not a documented search.  Nothing records that the authorities looked for the body and failed, or that they looked at all.  What the evidence does show is narrower:  the first community made its claim in the city of the burial, and the earliest counter-story we have, reported by a Christian at an unknown date (Part 7), is about how the body went missing, not about where it lay.  That fits a vacated tomb somewhat better than an occupied one.  It is weak evidence, not proof, because the silence has other explanations.

Part 9: Natural explanations, tested against what survives

An alternative must be judged against what survives Parts 2-8, not against every Gospel detail.  It would be circular to refute a theft theory with Matthew's guard, or a wrong-tomb theory with John's folded face cloth.  What survives is a chain of tentative judgments, not a set of established facts:  some burial (probable);  burial by a council member (more likely than not);  a known place (likely, if so);  a report that women found it empty (tentative);  and, by Matthew's day, a dispute about where the body went.  Each later link leans on the earlier ones, so the combined reconstruction is no more secure than its least secure step.

Three kinds of support should be kept apart.  Direct evidence is a source that says the event happened to Jesus.  Later allegations are claims made by someone long afterwards, such as the theft rumour or Tertullian's gardener.  Background support is evidence that such things happened, or could happen, in that world:  laws, customs, rates, parallel stories.  No explanation, natural or not, has direct evidence beyond the Christian sources themselves.  Several natural explanations have real background support.

The serious alternatives.  Three entries are serious;  the others are possible but have little to recommend them over the rest.

1. Legend. Allison calls this the strongest case against the tomb: early Christians "had the imaginative ability to fabricate fictions on the basis of theological convictions," and "a missing body was a not uncommon topos for gods and heroes in the Mediterranean world."¹¹ His list runs from Enoch and Elijah to Romulus, Aristeas and Apollonius. These parallels are real background evidence: they show that a story of a missing body was an available way to say someone had been taken up or vindicated. They do not show that Mark's story depends on any of them. Against the legend stand the features of Mark 16:1-8 discussed in Parts 5 and 6: it is short compared with the later Gospels, it has no Scripture citations or answers to objections, and it makes women the finders. It is not free of theological content: the white-robed messenger and his announcement are the point of the scene. Allison judges the arguments for the tomb "concrete and evidential" and the arguments against "hypothetical and suggestive."¹ That is a judgment, and a reasonable skeptic may weigh it differently.
2. Reburial. Lowder's hypothesis keeps the burial, keeps the women and keeps the empty tomb, and explains them without a miracle. Magness writes that after the Sabbath "there was no prohibition against removing the body from the tomb ... and reburying it elsewhere," and that "it is therefore possible that followers or family members removed Jesus' body."⁸ Its weakness is that it has no source, and it needs the people who moved the body never to have corrected the preaching, or never to have been heard if they did. That is possible, since nothing is known of Joseph after the burial. Allison lists it among conjectures of which "No one can confirm any of these conjectures, much less nudge them into the realm of the likely."¹
3. A common or criminals' grave. This is the alternative most directly supported by background evidence about Roman and Jewish practice, and it fits the formula's "was buried." Its cost is that the Joseph story and the women's discovery must both be later developments. How heavy that cost is depends on the judgments in Parts 3 and 5, which this article holds only at "more likely than not."

Possibility is not evidence, in either direction.  Ehrman argues that "any of these views is more plausible than the claim that God raised Jesus physically from the dead," and gives his reason:  "A resurrection would be a miracle and as such would defy all "probability.""²  That is an argument about miracles in general, not about the tomb.  It explains why a skeptic will prefer a natural cause without direct evidence to a miracle;  it supplies no Jesus-specific evidence that any particular natural cause happened.  C. D. Broad, quoted by Allison, states the skeptic's position fairly:  "the failure of alternative explanations does not just leave the miraculous explanation standing alone; it leaves it with an indefinite number of other explanations which our lack of all detailed knowledge ... prevents us from formulating."¹  The reverse also holds:  an empty tomb, if it was empty, does not explain itself, and this article does not weigh the evidence that bears on its cause.  That evidence, the appearances and what the first witnesses did afterwards, belongs to the sibling articles on hallucination theories, the swoon theory, twin and impostor theories and whether the apostles died for their claims.

Part 10: Evidence that does not help, and one site that partly does

The Nazareth Inscription.  A marble slab bought in Paris in 1878, with a note that it was "sent from Nazareth," carries an edict of "Caesar" threatening death for anyone who has "cast forth the persons buried there, or with malicious deception has transferred the bodies elsewhere."⁹  It has often been linked to the Christian claim about Jesus' tomb.  The decree is a general law against violating tombs.  It names no person and no place, so even if it stood in Galilee it would show only that Rome punished tomb violation, not that anyone had violated Jesus' tomb.  In 2020 Kyle Harper and colleagues matched the marble's carbon and oxygen isotopes to the upper quarry on the Greek island of Kos.  Their own conclusion calls the result "preliminary" and Kos "a likely source," not a certain one.⁹  The quarry tells where the stone was cut, not where the edict was set up:  Harper and colleagues themselves note that marble used in Palestine had to be imported, and raise "the intriguing possibility" that this marble "traveled to Palestine" along trade routes that linked Kos and Galilee.⁹  They then propose, as "A parsimonious explanation," that Augustus issued the edict after the people of Kos broke into the tomb of their former ruler Nikias in the 30s BC, and they conclude that "the violated tomb and removed corpse in question on the Nazareth Inscription are not those of Christ, but Nikias."⁹  The isotopes support a Kos origin for the stone;  the Nikias link is the authors' proposed historical explanation.  The fair conclusion is that the inscription has no secure connection to Jesus and is not evidence about his tomb.

Percentages of scholars.  Habermas reports that "approximately 75% of the surveyed scholars accept one or more arguments for the historicity of the empty tomb.  The remaining 25% accept one or more arguments against the early church's knowledge of an empty tomb."¹⁰  The figure cannot be checked from the sources available here.  The 2006 essay that gives it does not list the scholars, the selection rule or the coding rules.  Its corpus is described as more than 1,400 sources in 2004 and "well over 2000" in 2006.³²  The 2005 journal article that reports the survey itself was not available, so whether it supplies those details could not be checked.  The categories are "accept one or more arguments," which is not the same as concluding that the tomb was empty.  Habermas and Licona themselves exclude the empty tomb from their "minimal facts" because it "is not accepted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject."³²  Allison's comment on head-counting applies:  "Certainly polling is no proxy for argument."¹  This article cites scholars for their reasons, not their votes.

The Talpiot tomb.  In 2007 a documentary claimed that a tomb found in East Talpiot in 1980, with ossuaries inscribed with names such as "Yeshua son of Yehosef, Marya, Yoseh," was Jesus' family tomb, so that his body was never missing.  The tomb is a real first-century find, and physical evidence of that kind could in principle bear on the question.  The problem is the identification.  The statistician Andrey Feuerverger, who computed how unusual the cluster of names would be, noted in his abstract that the names "match those of New Testament (NT) figures, but were otherwise in common use,"³⁹ and stressed that his result depends on assumptions "far from universally accepted."³⁹  The discussants of his paper attacked those assumptions from several sides.⁴⁰  With common names and contested assumptions, the find does not securely identify Jesus' remains.

The empty-tomb veneration argument.  Murray Harris argued that early Christians gave "no particular attention" to Jesus' tomb, which would be remarkable "unless his tomb were empty."  Gerd Lüdemann drew the opposite conclusion from the same silence:  the tomb was unknown.  Allison shows that both moves rest on an argument from textual silence and concludes, "Without more data, I cannot see that the argument from a lack of veneration much helps us."¹

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  One argument partly survives.  The Gospels put the tomb outside the city, near the place of execution, in a garden (John 19:41).  The church's site was a disused quarry with first-century rock-cut tombs.  Martin Biddle, who studied the site, notes that "all scholars seem agreed" that the area "was outside the city until the construction of the Third Wall by Herod Agrippa in AD 41-4."⁴¹  Shimon Gibson and Joan Taylor's study of the site dates the tombs and the later Roman fill the same way.⁴²  Eusebius says the tomb lay buried under a pagan shrine, which Constantine's men dug away in the 320s, when "contrary to all expectation" the cave was found.⁴³  Jerome, writing about 395, says a statue of Jupiter stood over the place of resurrection "from the time of Hadrian to the reign of Constantine."⁴⁴  Allison judges there is "a fair chance" the church marks the site, which he takes to imply a continuous memory of the place.¹  Biddle is more cautious:  Eusebius "gave no reasons for this confident assertion," and "there is no way of knowing which if any are true."⁴¹  The site fits the Gospels' description;  its identification rests on a fourth-century tradition whose basis is unknown.  A known tomb site would support Part 3, but it would not show the tomb was empty.

The shroud and other relics.  Claims that the Shroud of Turin shows a body that left without disturbing the cloth assume that the shroud is Jesus' burial cloth, which is a separate and disputed question.  They are not used here.

Objections and responses

From the skeptic's side

1. "Crucified men were left for the birds. Jesus was never buried." Often true of crucifixion in general, and Rome sometimes refused burial, especially for treason. But Roman practice also released bodies on request (Philo; Ulpian, much later), Jewish custom in Josephus' day buried even the crucified, one crucified Jew of the period was buried by his family, and the earliest Christian formula says "he was buried." Ehrman himself allows that "it is always possible that an exception was made."² A burial of some kind is the better-supported option. It need not have been a tomb (Part 2).
2. "Mark wrote decades later, perhaps in another country. How would he know?" The question is fair. Allison lists signs that Mark used an older source: the women's names in 16:1 differ from the list in 15:47, the language includes words Mark does not use elsewhere, and 16:7 interrupts the story.¹ Ehrman himself writes, "my suspicion is that Mark inherited the story from his tradition."² An older tradition is not thereby true, and how much older it is cannot be measured. It moves the question from Mark's own invention to the origin of the tradition he used.
3. "Paul believed in a spiritual resurrection and never heard of an empty tomb." Paul's "spiritual body" is still a σῶμα, and his verbs describe the transformation of what is sown, not its abandonment (Part 4). Whether Paul heard of an empty tomb is unknown. His silence is real, and it is weakened but not removed by the compressed form of the formula. It is weak evidence either way.
4. "Stories of missing bodies were everywhere, and Christians made up stories." This is the strongest objection, and this article grants its force. The missing-body stories are real background evidence, and Allison judges that early Christians could and sometimes did "fabricate fictions on the basis of theological convictions."¹ Whether a particular Christian story, such as Matthew's guard, is such a fiction is a judgment about that story, and the judgment that the guard is probably unhistorical is a probability, not a demonstration (Part 6). The reply is not that invention was impossible. It is that Mark's story differs from the later, more developed versions: it has no proof texts, no guard, no male witnesses and no appearance, and it ends in fear and silence. Those differences are relative to the later Gospels; Mark's story is still a crafted narrative with a heavenly messenger at its centre.
5. "The tomb story was invented to prove a physical resurrection against Christians who believed in a spiritual one." Ehrman argues this: "The later the Gospel, the more the attempt to "prove" that Jesus was raised bodily, not simply spiritually."² That trend is real in Luke and John. Mark's version, the earliest, shows it least: no one touches Jesus, no one eats with him, and the body is simply absent. That counts against an invention whose aim was to prove a physical resurrection, if such an author would have shown the body. It does not count against an invention with a simpler aim, such as giving narrative form to the belief that God had raised Jesus. A simple symbolic story of an empty tomb and a messenger would look much like Mark's. The question is which origin explains Mark's particular features better, and on that the evidence is close.
6. "The women are there because women mourned the dead, or because women told the story, or because Mark wanted the men to fail." Each of these has documentary support, and together they can explain why a story, invented or not, would send women alone to the tomb (Part 5). They weaken the embarrassment argument considerably. What they explain less well is why later tellers felt the need to add men, and why a story told to outsiders kept witnesses that critics could mock. That leaves the women's role as evidence of modest weight.
7. "Pilate was a brute. He would not grant a favour to a council member." Philo's and Josephus' portraits of Pilate are hostile and partly rhetorical, as the sibling article Roman Law and Crucifixion shows. Releasing the body had costs and benefits for Pilate: it gave up part of the display that served as deterrence, and it might have eased tension in a crowded festival city. Neither side of that balance is recorded. Mark's own word "boldly" (τολμήσας) suggests the outcome was uncertain, which is how a writer would describe a request that might have been refused.¹
8. "Joseph is exactly the character the story needed." Crossan's point is sound as far as it goes (Part 3). A powerful sympathizer solves the story's problem whether he was real or invented. The case for Joseph rests on the residue: Mark makes him a member of the body that, in Mark's own story, condemned Jesus, from an obscure town, and later writers kept reshaping him. That residue supports "more likely than not," not more.

From the Christian side

1. "All four Gospels and Paul attest the empty tomb." Paul never mentions the tomb. Matthew and Luke copy Mark, and John may know Mark. The honest count is one narrative, one possibly separate narrative, and one formula that mentions the burial (Part 1).
2. "Paul's creed dates to within two years of the crucifixion." The formula is early. It is older than Paul's preaching in Corinth, probably reached Paul in the 30s, and was older than that when he received it. Where and when he received it is not recorded (Part 4). "Within two years" is one estimate, not a finding.
3. "The enemies of Jesus admitted the tomb was empty." The claim is reported by Matthew, a Christian, at an unknown date after the events. A counter-story can arise in reply to a claim without any knowledge of the tomb, and an author can report an opponent's argument in order to answer it (Part 7). If the theft story goes back to Jerusalem's first months, it has real weight; that is not shown.
4. "The guards make theft impossible." The guard story is probably not historical (Part 6), and the argument should be dropped. The case for the empty tomb does not need it.
5. "Joseph was a famous council member who could have been questioned." Joseph is unattested outside the Gospels, and no source records anyone questioning him or anyone who knew him. The case for Joseph rests on the features of the story, not on anyone's ability to check him (Part 3).
6. "Thieves would not have left the grave clothes folded." That detail is in John alone; its historical weight depends on the assessment of that narrative.
7. "No one could have recognized the body anyway, so the authorities' silence proves nothing." This is the skeptic's version, and it also overreaches. No study fixes a day after which a face becomes unrecognizable, and conditions in a closed rock-cut tomb differ from the outdoor cadavers of modern research. An early check would generally face fewer problems from decay than one weeks later (Part 8). Decay weakens the produce-the-body argument at later dates; it does not dispose of it.
8. "Even skeptical scholars accept the empty tomb." Some do, for reasons; some do not, for reasons; and some change their minds, as Ehrman did. The Jewish historian Geza Vermes wrote in 1973 that every interpretation of Easter rests on "the one disconcerting fact: namely that the women who set out to pay their last respects to Jesus found to their consternation, not a body, but an empty tomb."⁴⁵ By 2008 he called the evidence "bits of circumstantial evidence, if they can be called evidence," while still calling the tomb story "clearly an early tradition" and concluding that "none of the six suggested theories stands up to stringent scrutiny."⁴⁶ The Roman historian Michael Grant reasoned that "if we apply the same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other ancient literary sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was indeed found empty."⁴⁷ Lowder accepts the burial by Joseph and tentatively the empty tomb of Joseph, then proposes a reburial and recommends agnosticism.¹⁶ A concession is worth exactly its reasons.
9. "An empty tomb proves the resurrection." It does not. It would show that the body was gone. Why it was gone is a separate question, which needs the evidence of the appearances.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. How often did Judean governors release the crucified? No count exists. The texts show that release happened and could be refused, especially for treason; they give no rate. One skeleton cannot supply one either.
2. What was Jesus condemned for, in Roman law? The notice "The King of the Jews" makes a political charge plausible. No record names the law or the procedure, and Ulpian's "high treason" is a later jurist's category.
3. How should the chain be combined? Burial, Joseph, a known place and the women's discovery are judged one at a time, and each later judgment depends on the earlier ones. No honest method turns these verbal judgments into a single number. The combined claim is no more secure than its least secure step.
4. Is Acts 13:29 an older burial tradition? It has "those who dwell in Jerusalem, and their rulers" bury Jesus. Ehrman reads it as earlier than Joseph; Luke, who wrote both passages, evidently saw no conflict. The question is open.
5. Was the tomb meant to be temporary? Magness and Allison both raise the possibility that Joseph used his tomb only because the Sabbath was coming. If so, the reburial hypothesis has a natural starting point. No source settles it.
6. Why did Joseph bury only Jesus? If the motive was Deuteronomy 21, the two men crucified with him needed burial too. The Gospels are silent, and Allison leaves the question open.
7. How old is the theft polemic? Nothing dates it before Matthew. A first-century Jewish source for it would change the weight of Part 7 considerably.
8. When was the resurrection first claimed, and to whom? Acts' Pentecost scene is fifty days after Passover, but the first claims may have been earlier and private. The produce-the-body argument changes strength with the date, and the date is not known.
9. Is John 20 independent of Mark? Goodacre argues John knew the Synoptics; others find John's tomb story separate. Much of the "multiple attestation" argument for the discovery, and Brown's dating argument for Joseph, turn on this.
10. Sources not obtained. James Crossley's 2005 article against the empty tomb; Habermas's 2005 survey article, which would show whether the method behind the 75/25 figure was published; Magness's 2005 article on ossuaries and her 2011 book on Jewish daily life; Craig Evans's essays and books on Roman burial law; John Granger Cook's 2011 article and 2014 book on crucifixion and burial; Amos Kloner's 1999 article and the Kloner and Zissu survey of Jerusalem tombs; and Peter Kirby's 2002 article. Cook's key sentence is quoted here through Allison. These may sharpen the arguments on both sides.
11. The Holy Sepulchre. The reported dating of mortar in the tomb to about AD 345, from the 2016-2017 restoration, has not been published in a form that could be checked here. It would confirm Constantine's work, not the first-century identification.
12. Women's lament traditions. Kathleen Corley's chapter arguing that women's funeral practice generated the Easter story was not available beyond its introduction. Her argument deserves a fuller test than this article could give it.

Verdict

The tomb tradition is not a single fact.  Taken claim by claim:

1. Jesus was buried: probable. The earliest formula says so, and its verb means interment of some sort. Jewish law demanded burial, and Roman practice allowed it on request. The evidence that it happened to Jesus is Christian. The main doubt is that a man condemned as "King of the Jews" faced a political charge of the kind for which Rome sometimes refused burial. The kind of burial, family tomb or criminals' grave, is less certain than the fact.
2. Joseph of Arimathea buried him: more likely than not, held with caution. A council member who does right in a story where the council condemns Jesus, and an obscure town, are better explained by memory than by invention, but Crossan's power motive explains much of the same evidence. No outside source names him.
3. The place was known: likely, if Joseph or another known person buried him. The women's watching of the burial may be a later link.
4. Women found the tomb empty: more likely than not, held tentatively. The best evidence is the earliest narrative's form and its women finders, kept despite the cost; the best objections are missing-body legends, Christian story-making, women's mourning role and Mark's own design, and the gap before Mark.
5. The guard: probably not historical.
6. The theft rumour: real by Matthew's day, of unknown age, and conditional evidence only.
7. The Jerusalem argument: suggestive, not demonstrative. How well the body could have been identified depends on the date, the place and conditions that are not recorded.
8. The cause: not settled by the tomb. No explanation, natural or miraculous, has direct evidence in the tomb material beyond the Christian sources themselves, and several natural explanations have background support. The evidence that bears on cause lies in other articles.

These judgments share sources and form a chain;  they cannot be counted as independent confirmations.  On the evidence a historian can use, the best single reading of the earliest sources is that Jesus was buried in a known tomb and that some of his women followers found it empty.  That reading is tentative, not established.  It rests on a small number of early texts read carefully, and it leaves the question of what happened to the body to other evidence.

Sources