The Gospel of Mark is our earliest reference to the detail of the tomb of Jesus being empty. Does that mean that Mark invented the empty tomb? Richard Carrier thinks so.
Being the first to mention something does not make one the inventor of a concept. The earliest textual reference that we have of “Pharisee” is Philippians 3:5 but no one claims that Paul invented the concept of the Pharisees.
Richard Carrier has an article on his website titled Why Did Mark Invent an Empty Tomb? I am not going to respond to every point but I do want to show that I Carrier’s argument is not near as strong as he thinks it is.
Carrier claims:
We actually have evidence that Mark fabricated the story; not just a complete lack of evidence that he didn’t.
This is not actually true.
Paul and the Empty Tomb
A major part of Carrier’s argument is based on the silence of 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 concerning the empty tomb.
Now I want to make clear for you, brothers and sisters, the gospel that I preached to you, that you received and on which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I passed on to you as of first importance what I also received—that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as though to one born at the wrong time, he appeared to me also.
For some skeptics, Jesus Mythicists or otherwise, this silence is a death blow to the claims that the early Christians believed that Jesus was physically raised. But I just don’t get it.
If I told you that my Uncle Bob died in the hospital and that he spent a couple of days in the morgue but that he was raised from the dead and even visited us at our home, would that statement make sense even if I did not specify the morgue was now empty? Would you not assume the morgue was empty (at least of Uncle Bob) when I said he was “raised”?
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is describing the resurrection of Jesus in the context of the general resurrection, which was an existing Jewish belief. Jews believed something very specific by a person being raised, and that is that their physical body would be reanimated in some way.
It could be argued that the chapter of 1 Corinthians 15 refutes Jesus Mythicism by paralleling the resurrection of believers with the “first fruits” of the resurrection of Jesus. How would that work if Jesus did not exist?
Mark and the Empty Tomb
Carrier then turns to the last chapter of Mark itself.
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought aromatic spices so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, at sunrise, they went to the tomb. They had been asking each other, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled back. Then as they went into the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has been raised! He is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples, even Peter, that he is going ahead of you into Galilee. You will see him there, just as he told you.” Then they went out and ran from the tomb, for terror and bewilderment had seized them. And they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.
Carrier sees in this an actual confession that Mark made this up. Carrier states: “Mark himself gives us a clue that he is fabricating when he conveniently lets slip that no one witness to it ever reported it—evidently, ‘until now.’”
Presumably this is Mark 16:8. I should state that we do not know if the Gospel ended at Mark 16:8 or if there originally was more to the Gospel of Mark.
But even as it is, the natural reading of this is that the women did not tell anyone what happened during their journey to meet up with the disciples to give the report they had been given.
I had never encountered a claim that Mark 16:8 meant that this story was never told by the women until Mark shared it here. That is a very unnatural reading.
I would also point out that Mark does not say that the women never told anyone that the tomb was empty. It seems more to be about that Jesus was risen. We have already seen from 1 Corinthians 15 that it was well known among Christians that Jesus had been buried and raised.
Matthew and the Empty Tomb
Carrier moves on from Mark to Matthew in an attempt to strengthen his claim that Mark invented the empty tomb. Carrier states:
It clearly hadn’t occurred to Mark when composing the empty tomb story that it would invite accusations the Christians stole the body—much less that any such accusations were already flying!
Carrier sees it as rather suspicious that Mark does not include a detail that Matthew does. The fact that Mark does not seem to consider the idea of claims of a stolen body points to the empty tomb as Mark’s creation.
Except it does not. For one thing, Mark was an intelligent person. If he did invent the empty tomb, he could have imagined such claims of stealing the body. But there is a bigger problem for Carrier.
Anyone who has studied the Gospels closely knows that Mark often gives shorter versions with less details than the other Gospels. That is Mark’s style and it has been recognized for centuries. Compare Mark’s narrative of the temptation of Jesus with that of Matthew and Luke’s.
To see some sort of hint of invention in Mark not commenting on concern for stolen bodies betrays an ignorance of how Mark writes. Mark likes to keep the facts to a minimum.
Other Arguments
Then Carrier goes on to show there is no evidence pointed to the actual empty tomb as evidence for Jesus being risen. This is a bit bizarre. The desire to connect historical sites with worship as pilgrimage sites is later but says nothing about historicity.
In terms of an apologetic, since Jesus was buried in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, it is likely that it did not remain empty for long. It probably was filled up with the bodies of Joseph’s family. I doubt it remained empty to prove a theological point, especially with all the Roman trouble around Jerusalem.
Carrier attempts to find the origin of the empty tomb in the Psalms. It is true that the early Christians did use certain Psalms to describe the resurrection, but the focus in those Psalms was not on an empty tomb. It gets worse.
Carrier attempts to make his point by quoting rabbinic Jewish texts. That would seem to make sense except the Mishnah was written in the third century and the Midrash Rabbah Leviticus is from the fifth to the seventh centuries. New Testament scholars avoid using these later texts to understand the New Testament.
Carrier attempts to show pagan parallels as well, something I have responded to in numerous posts on this site and will not repeat here. I will simply say that finding something like the resurrection of Jesus in the ancient myths is not near as easy as Carrier makes it out to be. Look for example at what Plutarch actually says about Osiris and not just the summary Carrier gives.
Concluding Thoughts
Did Mark invent the idea of the empty tomb? I was not sitting beside Mark as he was writing his Gospel, and so I can not say for sure. What I can say is that Mark was not the first to write about the resurrection of Jesus. Those who wrote about the resurrection wrote within a Jewish context, one that understood “raising” quite literally as a dead body coming back to life.
If you want to read more on this, I recommend N.T. Wright’s Resurrection of the Son of God.
What I can say is that there is a reason why Carrier’s writings are not accepted by mainstream (not just evangelical) biblical scholarship. He begins with the assumption that Jesus did not exist, that there was no physical resurrection, and therefore no empty tomb. He then scrambles to find evidence, creating wild interpretations, and using sources that post-date the New Testament.
