History tells us Jesus of Nazareth came out of that tomb nearly 2,000 years ago. Many eyewitnesses reported it. And their testimony is buttressed by other information we have.
2. The empty tomb. If Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, what happened to his body? That the tomb was empty cannot be denied. His Jewish enemies never denied it, and they didn’t have the body. They could have stopped Christianity immediately if they had just produced Jesus’s dead body upon the apostles first preaching his resurrection. The very fact of Jewish non-production proves conclusively that they didn’t take his body.
Did the apostles steal it? Well, there was a Roman guard stationed at the tomb to prevent that very thing. The Jews coaxed the guards later into saying that that the disciples came and stole Jesus’ body while they slept (Matthew 28:13), but this is farcical. Roman guards didn’t fall asleep on the job on pain of death. All their testimony tells us is of the utter close-mindedness of the Jews regarding Jesus’s resurrection. That shouldn’t surprise us because many people today deny obvious truths they don’t like and don’t want to conform their lives to. Joe Biden is the most famous and obvious example of that, but the number is incalculable.
The disciples didn’t steal the body. In fact, a resurrected Jesus was the farthest thing from their minds. He had specifically told them, more than once, that he would be raised from the dead, but the idea was so foreign to their concept of a Messiah that it never sunk in. The Jews of Jesus’s day—and that includes his apostles—were expecting a glorious, conquering King who would overthrow the Roman empire and restore the mighty days of a Davidic reign. Everything Jesus said and did was a mystery to them, including his resurrection. “We were hoping,” Jesus was told by the two men on the road to Emmaus, “that it was He who was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). But, alas, our hopes were disappointed and dashed. The disciples didn’t steal Jesus’s body because they never thought about doing so because they had no clue about Jesus’s true purpose on the earth. The Jews still don’t.
It could have all ended if somebody, anybody, had just produced Jesus’s body. When the message of Jesus’s resurrection was first preached by the apostles, they didn’t run off to Siberia or Outer Mongolia, where nobody could have access to challenging it, and proclaim His resurrection. They preached it in the very city where Jesus was crucified and buried. “Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day” (Acts 2:29). But not Jesus. Peter is, in effect, challenging the people on that day. “Go check out what I’m saying. Go out to his tomb. You know where it is. See if you can find his body.”
That day, 3,000 people believed him, and that number quickly multiplied. Countless people who had the best opportunity to know the facts—believed in the resurrection of Jesus.
Many people then, of course, did not believe the apostles, just like many people today don’t believe them. And...for the exact same reasons. Not lack of evidence, but lack of desire to submit their will to God’s. That is why people reject the historical truth of the resurrection of Jesus.
That tomb is still empty, and it still tells us of the resurrection of Jesus from the grave. More to come.