How did the Sanhedrin explain the empty tomb?

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We must not think of each of the four evangelists as having private knowledge of the resurrection, separate from what the other evangelists knew. As Archbishop Peter Carnley (The Structure of Resurrection Belief ) writes:

The presence of discrepancies might be a sign of historicity if we had four clearly independent but slightly different versions of the story, if only for the reason that four witnesses are better than one. But, of course, it is now impossible to argue that what we have in the four gospel accounts of the empty tomb are four contemporaneous but independent accounts of the one event. Modern redactional studies of the traditions account for the discrepancies as literary developments at the hand of later redactors of what was originally one report of the empty tomb... There is no suggestion that the tomb was discovered by different witnesses on four different occasions, so it is in fact impossible to argue that the discrepancies were introduced by different witnesses of the one event; rather, they can be explained as four different redactions for apologetic and kerygmatic reasons of a single story originating from one source.

Only in Matthew's Gospel does the Sanhedrin seek to explain away the empty tomb. They bribed the guards, who had been placed at the tomb since Friday evening, to say that the disciples had come and taken away the body of Jesus.

However, scholars now know that the author of Matthew (it was originally anonymous and only attributed to the disciple Matthew later in the second century) relied on Mark's Gospel for most of the material he wrote about the life and mission of Jesus. If the author of Mark knew nothing about the guard placed at the tomb, and he clearly did not, then there was no guard. The Sanhedrin had no expectation that the disciples would take the body and therefore did not place a guard, and to portray them as having panicked when the body was missing was simply Matthew's literary device to indicate to his readers that the Jewish priests secretly believed that Jesus really had risen. The Sanhedrin made no attempt to explain the empty tomb.

First answer by Dick Harfield. Last edit by Dick Harfield. Contributor trust: 1102 [recommend contributorrecommended]. Question popularity: 2 [recommend question].