Now while they were on their way, behold, some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened. And when they had assembled with the elders and counseled together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, and said, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep.’ And if this should come to the governor’s ears, we will win him over and keep you out of trouble.” And they took the money and did as they had been instructed; and this story was widely spread among the Jews, and is to this day. (28:11-15)

Some years ago the Canadian author G. B. Hardy wrote a book about life, philosophy, and destiny entitled Countdown: A Time to Choose (Chicago: Moody, 1971). He noted that there are really only two questions to ask with regard to destiny: (1) Has anyone ever defeated death? and (2) If so, did he make a way for us to do it also? Hardy then explains that he found the answer to both questions in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that with that answer he also found salvation and eternal life (pp. 31-32).

But despite the fact that the resurrection is man’s only hope for eternal life, the majority of people, including many who have studied it thoroughly, have rejected it. In doing so, they not only forfeit the future life but are left without true meaning or significance in the present life. Rejecting the resurrection is spiritual suicide.

Furthermore, denying the resurrection goes against the very grain of the human heart and soul. Solomon wrote that God “has also set eternity in their heart” (Eccles. 3:11). Something within man is not satisfied with present earthly living. He instinctively reaches out for immortality, for a life that transcends his present life and that will continue after he dies. Throughout history countless religions and philosophies have proposed means for man to achieve immortality, to find a better life beyond the grave.

Yet, strangely, there seems always to have been more religious than irreligious people who consciously deny the only hope for immortality. And through the years many theories have been propounded for the explicit purpose of explaining away the resurrection, especially the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The “swoon theory” proposes that Jesus did not actually die but went into a deep coma, or swoon, from the severe pain and trauma of the crucifixion. While in the cool atmosphere of the tomb and with the stimulating aroma of the burial spices, He revived and was somehow able to unwrap Himself and escape after the grave was opened. When He showed Himself to the disciples, they erroneously assumed He had been raised from the dead.

That theory was not dreamed up until around 1600, by a man named Venturini. But the idea flies in the face of many eyewitness reports, not only by Jesus’ followers but also by His enemies. The Roman soldiers standing guard over Jesus at the cross were the first to report His death. They were experts at execution and would stand to forfeit their own lives if they allowed a condemned man to escape death. They were so certain He was dead that they did not bother to break His legs, and when the spear thrust brought forth blood and water, they had final proof of His death. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, with many women as witnesses and perhaps as helpers, worked with Jesus’ body for an hour or so as they wrapped it in the linen and spices. They would easily have sensed any spark of life still remaining.

For that theory to be true, Jesus would have had to survive the massive loss of blood from the scourging, the nail wounds, and the spear thrust. He would also have had to survive being wrapped tightly in the linen cloths that were filled with a hundred pounds of spices. Besides all of that, in His extremely weakened condition He would have had to endure more than forty hours without food or drink, manage to unwrap Himself, singlehandedly roll the stone away from the inside of the tomb, walk out unchallenged by the guards, and then convince His followers He had actually been dead and miraculously raised. He would have had to have developed the strength to travel countless miles in that condition to make the many appearances to His disciples over a period of forty days. Finally, He would have had to delude the apostles into thinking He entered a closed room without opening the door and ascended to heaven before their eyes. The absurdity of that theory is too obvious to be accepted by any clear-thinking person, believer or not.

The “no-burial theory” contends that there was actually no interment, that Jesus was never placed in the tomb and therefore would not have been in it on Sunday morning. His body was instead thrown into a mass grave for criminals, according to Roman custom. But neither the Jewish leaders nor the Roman guards would have bothered to secure and seal the tomb if they knew Jesus’ body was not inside. Not only that, but to disprove Jesus’ resurrection they would only have had to retrieve His body and put it on display.

The “hallucination theory” maintains that everyone who claimed to have seen the risen Jesus simply experienced a hallucination, induced by an ardent expectation of His resurrection. But Thomas was not the only believer who was slow to believe the Lord was alive again. Every gospel account makes clear that most of His followers, including the apostles, did not believe, either before or after the crucifixion, that He would be raised. Besides that, how could more than 500 people hallucinate in exactly the same way?

The “telepathy theory” proposes that there was no physical resurrection, but rather God sent divine telepathic messages to Christians that caused them to believe Jesus was alive. But that theory, among other things, makes the God of truth a deceiver and the apostles and gospel writers liars. And if such mental images did come from God, they were defective and slow to produce the intended result, because in a number of instances Jesus was not recognized when He first appeared to individuals and groups who knew Him intimately.

The “seance theory” suggests that a powerful spiritualist, or medium, conjured up the image of Jesus by means of occult power and that His followers were thereby deluded into thinking they saw Him. But if that were so, how did they hold onto His feet, put a hand in His wounded side, and eat a meal with Him? Seances deal strictly in the noncorporeal and ephemeral and are not made of such physical and tangible things as those.

The “mistaken identity theory” is based on the assumption that someone impersonated Jesus and was able to dupe His closest friends and companions into thinking he was really their Lord come back to life. But the imposter would have had to have himself scourged, crowned with thorns, pierced in his hands and feet, and wounded in the side to make such an impersonation even close to convincing. He would also have had to mimic Jesus’ voice, mannerisms, and other traits to an unimaginable degree of perfection. He would have had to steal Jesus’ body from the tomb and hide it. He would also have had to be an insider among Jesus’ followers in order to identify and talk convincingly with the many people he met during the appearances. He would also have had to know exactly where to find the people on every occasion and been able to perform such illusions as materializing through walls and appearing and vanishing at will. And he would have had to be prepared in advance even of the crucifixion to do all of those amazing things, because the first appearance was early on resurrection morning.

The noted French philosopher Renan debunked the resurrection by foolishly claiming the whole idea was based on the hysterical delusions of Mary Magdalene (The Life of Jesus [New York: Carleton, 1886], pp. 356-57). But Mary was but one among more than 500 witnesses, all of whom testified to the same reality. In his book Risen Indeed, G. D. Yarnold advances the idea that the “material of which [Christ’s] earthly body had been composed ceased to exist, or was annihilated” ([New York: Oxford, 1959], p. 22).

Besides their own unique shortcomings, all of those theories fail to explain how the apostles could be transformed from cowards to heroes and how such a dynamic entity as the church could come into existence, produce thousands of followers willing to die for their beliefs, and manage to turn the world upside down if their faith was built on illusions and falsehoods.

Such unbelieving critics also fail to explain what happened to Jesus’ body. If the resurrection were falsified, in whatever way, the deceit could have easily and quickly been exposed by producing the dead body. But neither the Jewish leaders nor the Romans even attempted to make such a disclosure.

The “theft theory,” which contends that someone managed to steal the body and hide it, is the only one that attempts to explain the missing body. But the only ones who might have had a motive for stealing it were the disciples, in order to try to fulfill Jesus’ prediction that He would rise from the dead on the third day. That, as Matthew explains in the present passage, was the explanation promulgated by the Jewish leaders.

Yet Matthew’s narrative of this strange episode reveals that even that deceitful scheme became a rich and compelling apologetic not against but for the resurrection. He first describes the plot itself and then briefly tells how the proposed lie was propagated.

THE PLOT

Now while they were on their way, behold, some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened. And when they had assembled with the elders and counseled together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, and said, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep.’ And if this should come to the governor’s ears, we will win him over and keep you out of trouble.” (28:11-14)

They refers to the women to whom Jesus had just spoken and who were obediently on their way to give the disciples His message to meet Him in Galilee (vv. 5-10).

At this same time, behold, some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened. Only some of the guard went into the city of Jerusalem and reported to the chief priests, probably as representatives of the whole contingent, which may have numbered as many as a dozen. For all of them to have gone together would have attracted considerable attention, and word of their mission would surely have reached Pilate’s ear. Because it was still early on the third day after Jesus’ crucifixion, Pilate would immediately have had them arrested and probably executed, both for leaving their post while on duty and for failing to fulfill their assignment to protect Jesus’ body from theft (see 27:62-66). Presumably the rest of the guard remained at the tomb.

Because they were in the temporary service of the Jewish religious leaders, the soldiers wisely reported to the chief priests all that had happened at the tomb. They had much less to fear from the chief priests than from Pilate, and they probably hoped those leaders could somehow protect them from the governor.

Included in all the things that had happened were the earth-quake, the rolling away of the stone, the blazing angel sitting on the stone, and the empty tomb. The soldiers knew those happenings had a super-natural origin, and it was that knowledge that caused them first to shake violently and then freeze in catatonic fear. They did not try to explain what they saw but simply reported it as best they could. It is possible that, because of the guards’ report, the chief priests learned of Jesus’ resurrection even before the disciples did.

But despite that firsthand, unprejudiced testimony and their own awareness that Jesus claimed He would rise from the dead on the third day, the chief priests showed no interest in verifying the guards’ story. It did not really matter to them whether or not Jesus was raised, just as it did not matter that Jesus had performed marvelous miracles before their own eyes. Some of the chief priests had stood beneath the cross, taunting Jesus and saying, “Let Him come down from the cross, and we shall believe Him” (27:42). But their duplicity was now exposed, because the resurrection was a greater miracle than coming down from the cross would have been, and yet they did not believe. As Abraham told the rich man in Jesus’ parable, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:26). The heart that is hardened to God will not be persuaded by any miracle or by any amount of evidence, no matter how compelling. The chief priests were so evil, self-willed, and spiritually blind that they shut their eyes to every confirmation of Jesus’ claims. The god of this world had totally blinded their eyes (2 Cor. 4:4).

The Jewish leaders had been trying to get rid of Jesus since the time He was an infant. Herod tried to eliminate Christ by slaughtering all the male babies in his province in order to remove Him as a supposed threat to his throne. The religious leaders had accused Him of working miracles in the power of Satan, of being an associate of sinners, of breaking God’s law by healing on the Sabbath, and of blasphemy for claiming to be the Messiah and God’s Son. They perverted both biblical and rabbinical justice in order to convict Him, employed blackmail to get Him crucified, used armed force to try to keep His body in the grave, and now engaged in bribery to hide the truth of His resurrection.

The soldiers’ news brought alarm, fear, and confusion to the religious leaders, but it did not bring repentance or faith. They were without excuse. They were informed about the resurrection and did not try to deny it. Their only concern was to keep that news from their fellow Jews, fearing that many would accept Him as the Messiah and that their own influence, power, and wealth would be severely diminished.

The first reaction was to quickly convene the Sanhedrin, and when they had assembled with the elders, they counseled together as to how they might best obstruct the spreading of the news the soldiers had brought. Counseled together was a formal phrase used of official decisions (see also Matt. 12:14; 22:15; 27:1, 7), and at this meeting the Sanhedrin decided on a three-point resolution: to bribe the soldiers, to spread a lie about the body, and to protect the soldiers from possible reprisal by Pilate.

The amount of the large sum of money is not specified, but because there were possibly a dozen guards to be bribed and the Sanhedrin was desperate, it probably was a considerable sum. Argurion (money) literally means silver, and is the same word used in Matthew 26:15 for the bribe given to Judas to betray Jesus. Because they had so much at stake, the Sanhedrin did not hesitate to pay a high price for the lie to be spread.

The second part of the resolution was a plan to disseminate the falsehood as widely as possible. Because the soldiers were at the tomb and had their own reasons for spreading the lie, they were the obvious candidates for the job. The soldiers were therefore instructed to say, “His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep.” Both the guards and the Sanhedrin knew full well that was not true, otherwise they would not have had to devise such a false and preposterous story. The purpose of the lie was to hide the truth.

Those soldiers became the first persons to preach that antigospel falsehood. They were pagan, materialistic, self-indulgent, and hardened to every sort of evil. Telling what to them was a trivial and insignificant lie was a small price to gain the Sanhedrin’s favor and protection.

The third part of the Sanhedrin’s resolution offered protection to the soldiers. “If this should come to the governor’s ears,” the chief priests reassured them, “we will win him over and keep you out of trouble.” As already noted, the soldiers knew that if Pilate thought Jesus’ body was stolen while they slept, their lives would be forfeit.

By threatening to make an unfavorable report to Caesar, the Jewish religious leaders had usually managed to have their way with Pilate. They knew he would not risk trouble with Caesar over the disposition of a Jewish corpse. If the Sanhedrin came to the soldiers’ defense, the governor probably would give them no more than a reprimand.

By that resolution the Jewish leaders willfully rejected Christ, despite the evidence, and that spiritual obstinacy gave testimony to the apostasy of Israel’s leaders.

THE PROPAGATION

And they took the money and did as they had been instructed; and this story was widely spread among the Jews, and is to this day. (28:15)

The soldiers gladly took the money, overjoyed that they not only would not be punished but would even be rewarded. They were therefore more than willing to do the Sanhedrin’s bidding and did as they had been instructed.

Matthew then comments that this story was widely spread among the Jews, and is to this day. Matthew wrote his gospel some thirty years later, about A.D. 63, the time to which this day refers. The tomb guards were the first to spread the falsehood, but the Sanhedrin doubtlessly began spreading it among the Jews by many other means as well.

The Sanhedrin’s lie was still common among the Jews of the second century. The church Father Justin Martyr wrote in chapter 103 of his Dialogue with Trypho, “You [Jewish leaders] have sent chosen and ordained men throughout all the world to proclaim that a godless and lawless heresy had sprung from one Jesus, a Galilaean deceiver, whom we crucified, but his disciples stole him by night from the tomb . . . and now deceived men by asserting that he has risen from the dead and ascended into heaven” (The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973], p. 253). That same falsehood can be heard even today.

But as wicked and self-serving as the Sanhedrin’s plan was, it fit perfectly into God’s much greater and sovereign plan. God did not want unbelievers to proclaim the true gospel, even had they wanted to. The Lord would not send out messengers to preach the resurrection who did not believe in the One who was raised. In His eternal wisdom, God permitted those guardians of the grave, who could have spread the factual, historic truth of the resurrection, to become victimized by the corrupt Jewish leaders. The resurrection of the Son of God would be proclaimed only by those whose hearts were committed to the risen Savior and Lord.

Evidence for the resurrection is supplied by the very story that denies it. And because it came from Jesus’ enemies rather than His friends, it should be all the more convincing to skeptics. Intending to conceal the truth, the Sanhedrin and the soldiers actually reinforced it.

Although the explanation that the disciples stole Jesus’ body accounts for the missing corpse, in some ways it is even more absurd than the other negative theories mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.

In the first place, if their story had been true, the Jewish leaders could surely have found the stolen body with little difficulty. They had the resources of hundreds of men, including military men, and even the power of Rome behind them in this instance. It would have been utterly impossible for eleven unlearned and unsophisticated men to have succeeded in eluding a search for any length of time. The simplest way to have disproved the resurrection was to locate the body and put it on display for all the world to see. Yet there is no evidence that the Sanhedrin even attempted to find the body they claimed the disciples had stolen. The failure of the Sanhedrin to make such a search is strong evidence that they themselves actually believed Jesus was raised.

Another obvious flaw in the Sanhedrin’s lie was the basic idea itself. To suggest that the disciples stole the body was to show complete ignorance of those men’s state of mind at the time. They had not believed Jesus’ many predictions of His resurrection, and, now that He had been crucified, they were hopelessly dejected and afraid. If anything, they had even less belief in His resurrection after His death than they had had before.

When the women reported Jesus’ resurrection to the eleven apostles and the other believers with them in Jerusalem, “these words appeared to [the apostles] as nonsense, and they would not believe them” (Luke 24:11). Their personal prejudices and human understanding, common to most Jews of that day, prevented them from accepting the idea of the Messiah’s death, thereby making belief in His resurrection impossible. Those men did not have the least motive for stealing Jesus’ body. Because He had been given an uncommonly fine burial by Joseph and Nicodemus—a much better burial than the disciples could have afforded—what better place for His body to remain than in the garden tomb? The apostles had no reason to counterfeit a resurrection they did not even believe in themselves. How could it be that the men who fled for their lives while Jesus was still alive would, after His death, suddenly muster the courage and ingenuity to steal the body and then boldly start preaching and teaching in the name of a Jesus they knew was dead?

When the apostles finally came to believe in the reality of Jesus’ resurrection, there was no stopping their proclamation of that grand and beautiful truth. Those who had shortly before been skeptical cowards became unflinching zealots in their proclamation of the risen Christ. But they had no such zeal immediately after the resurrection, because they did not even believe it, much less have a desire to proclaim it.

It was highly implausible that all of the soldiers would have gone to sleep long enough for the disciples to have moved the stone and stolen the body, and even more implausible that the noise from moving the stone would not have awakened a single soldier.

The Roman military divided the night into four watches of between two and three hours each. A certain number of the men would keep watch while the rest slept, keeping up the rotation until dawn. Three hours was not a long period of time to stay awake, especially if one were under threat of imprisonment or death for sleeping on watch.

Perhaps the most patently absurd problem with the proposed lie was that, had the soldiers all been asleep, how could they have known who stole the body? And if some onlooker had told the soldiers what happened, why did they not immediately search for the thieves and try to retrieve the body rather than run to the chief priests to report their failure?

The testimony of Jesus’ enemies was in some ways even more astounding than that of His friends would be. It was because the soldiers and the Sanhedrin could not deny that the tomb had been supernaturally opened and Jesus supernaturally released that the lie was concocted. Had the resurrection been a hoax, it would have been an easy one to expose.

Some commentators have suggested that the disciples were the first to bribe the soldiers, asking them to report the empty tomb story to the Sanhedrin. But as just mentioned, the disciples had no motive for doing such a thing. Besides that, where would they have come up with enough money to make a bribe attractive to the soldiers?

Other people have suggested that the disciples cleverly distracted the soldiers and sneaked the body out while the guards were not looking. But had they found such courage, how did they manage to draw all the soldiers far enough away to prevent their hearing the giant stone’s being moved? And how did they manage to keep the grave cloths just as they had been when covering Jesus’ body. Had the disciples tried such a maneuver, they would have been in the utmost hurry to get Jesus’ body out as quickly as possible. They had no reason to take off the wrappings, because the body would already have started to decompose. In addition to that, the body would have been much easier to carry while wrapped.

Why, we might ask, did Matthew sound such a negative note on the climactic event in Christ’s work almost at the end of his gospel account? Brief as the passage is, it is still longer than his final few words about the Great Commission.

The answer would seem to be twofold. First, the account serves to demonstrate Israel’s full and final apostasy as a nation, of whom those Jewish leaders were representative. They denied Jesus’ resurrection just as they had opposed everything else He said or did. Second, the efforts of those enemies is perhaps the strongest human testimony to the reality of the resurrection, causing it to have the exact opposite effect from what was intended.

Matthew’s account simply but forcefully shows that any explanation but the actual bodily resurrection of Jesus contradicts the facts and offends reason. The truth of the resurrection is so absolute that even a lie against it helps prove it. Whether the testimony is from Jesus’ friends or His enemies, the same conclusion is inevitable. No other historical event is so thoroughly attested by sound evidence as is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Simon Greenleaf, famous nineteenth-century professor of law at Harvard wrote, “All that Christianity asks of men . . . is, that they would be consistent with themselves; that they would treat its evidences as they treat the evidence of other things; and that they would try and judge its actors and witnesses, as they deal with their fellow men, when testifying to human affairs and actions, in human tribunals. . . . The result. . . will be an undoubting conviction of their integrity, ability and truth” (Testimony of the Evangelists, Examined by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1965; reprint], p. 46).

Paul declared, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved; for with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation” (Rom. 10:9-10). Salvation is equal to eternal life, to deliverance from sin, and to godly hope. Salvation determines a person’s destiny in the presence of God in the glories of heaven forever. And salvation belongs only to those who believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and who confess Him as Lord and Savior and thereby identify themselves with Him.

The hymnist Robert Lowry wrote the following beautiful lines that are sung in the popular Easter hymn “Christ Arose”:

Death cannot keep his prey,

Jesus, My Savior!

He tore the bars away,

Jesus, my Lord!

Up from the grave He arose,

With a mighty triumph o’er His foes;

He arose a victor from the dark domain,

And He lives forever with His saints to reign.

He arose! He arose!

Hallelujah! Christ arose!