In 1876 a plot was hatched
by some Chicago gangsters which promised to make them rich beyond their wildest
dreams. The plan was to steal the coffin that contained the corpse of President
Abraham Lincoln. The grave robbers were
going to break into the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, IL, steal the body
of Lincoln and hold it ransom for $200,000 in gold from the U.S.
government.
Since there were no guards
on duty, this seemed like an easy heist. However, what followed was a comedy of
errors. When the thieves arrived, they had trouble picking the padlock on the
outside of Lincoln’s tomb. Undeterred, they broke it off with a file. However,
once inside the tomb chamber the criminals could not lift the 500-pound cedar
and lead coffin. The thieves only moved the coffin 15 inches before they were
spooked away when one of the men dropped a pistol and it fired off!
The gangsters bolted straight
back to their saloon in Chicago. Unbeknownst to the criminals, their
organization had been infiltrated by a double agent from the Secret Service. The
agent reported everything the gang had been doing back to his superiors. A few
days after the botched grave robbery all the inept criminals were arrested.[1]
Around Easter you will
hear the skeptic try to explain away the resurrection by saying something like,
“Jesus’ body was not raised from the dead it was stolen by his disciples.”
However, this theory is way more ridiculous than the laughable attempts of those
Chicago gangsters to steal Lincoln’s corpse.
First, we need to
understand that this flimsy explanation has already been tried and found
wanting. Several times during his ministry, Jesus predicted that he would rise
from the dead (John 2:19-22; Matt. 12:39-40). When the Pharisees heard Jesus’
predictions they wanted to make sure that when He was executed, there was no
threat that anyone would try deceive the masses with a hoax by stealing the
body. So, the Jewish authorities petitioned the Roman governor Pilate to protect
the tomb of Jesus with a detachment of Roman soldiers (Matt. 27:62-65).
The Roman soldiers were rigorous
and disciplined, to abandon their post or be derelict in their duties meant capital
punishment. In fact, to ensure there was no failure the Roman army broke up
guard duty into shifts. Every four hours, fresh soldiers would replace those on
duty.
This meant that stealing
the body of Jesus was off the table because no one would want to go toe-to-toe
with the most feared army on Earth. No one risks their life to perpetuate a
hoax.
Of course, when the female
followers arrived at the tomb on Easter they found that the soldiers had
scattered like a bunch of boy scouts who thought they’d seen the boogey man
(Matt. 28:2-4).
Matthew records that when
news of Jesus’ resurrection began breaking the Jewish authorities bribed the
Roman guards tasked with guarding the tomb and told them to say that the reason
Jesus’ body was missing was because the disciples came in and stole him away
while they were sleeping (Matt. 28:11-15). This is a terrible cover story for
the soldiers because, not only does it admit that they fell down on the job, but
it makes no sense for how could they know it was the disciples who stole Jesus’
body if they were snoring? Moreover, if you think about it, this concocted
cover up is a tacit admission that the tomb was really empty!
Second, adherents of the
stolen body hypothesis have some big problems to explain away. For example, why
would the disciples steal the body of Jesus to perpetuate a lie? They simply lacked
motive when you consider that every apostle, expect John, died horrifically as
martyrs. They had nothing to gain by lying. Plenty of people die for things
they think are true, but nobody dies for something they know to be a lie. As
John Stott said, “A man is prepared to die for a conviction, but not a
concoction.”
Charles Colson served as
special counsel to the Nixon presidency. However, he was caught and imprisoned
for his cover up of the Watergate scandal. He eventually converted to Christ because
of the persuasive eyewitness testimony of the resurrection. In one of his books
he made an insightful comment:
“My personal experiences in the Watergate scandal
convinces me of the historic proof of the resurrection . . . I was charged with
being part of the of the conspiracy to cover up the Watergate break-in. What
most Watergate buffs have failed to note, however is that the conspiracy succeeded
for less than three weeks . . . Think of it the most powerful men around the
president of the United States could not keep a lie for more than three
weeks. And you’d have me believe that
the three apostles—powerless, persecuted, exiled, many martyred, their leader
Peter crucified upside down—these common men gave their lives for a lie,
without ever breathing a word to the contrary? Impossible.”[2]
Christianity could not
have exploded into existence in the city of Jerusalem, they very site where the
crucifixion took place, if the audience knew that the claims about Jesus’
resurrection were exaggerated or false.
Everything the apostles were preaching could have been easily disproven
by simply producing the body of Jesus, but no one has ever been able to do
that.
Finally, if Jesus never rose
from the dead then who appeared to Paul, James and the other 500 eyewitnesses
(1 Cor. 15:3-8)? In other words, the stolen body theory cannot explain the many
post-resurrection appearances of Christ. I agree with Josh McDowell, who
converted from atheism to Christ based on the weight of evidence in support of the
empty tomb. He wrote: “Think of the psychological absurdity of a little band of
defeated cowards cowering in an upper room one day, and a few days later
transformed into flaming evangelists that no persecution could silence. To try
and attribute such a radical transformation to a miserable fabrication they
were trying to foist upon the world would take more faith to believe than the resurrection.”[3]
[1] Thomas
J. Craughwell, “A Plot to Steal Lincoln’s Body,” U.S. News & World Report, 24 June 2007 <https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2007/06/24/a-plot-to-steal-lincolns-body>
[2]
Chuck Colson, The Faith (Grand Rapids,
MI: Zondervan, 2008), 93.
[3]
John McDowell, More Than A Carpenter (Wheaton,
IL: Tyndale House, 1977), 66.
