Warfield on the Evidential Value of the Empty Tomb

Early in his career, Warfield produced an essay entitled “The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Fact.” It was written for the The Journal of Christian Philosophy, vol. III., 1884, 305-318.

Here are some of the points raised by Warfield which focus upon the empty tomb—an essential fact of Christianity. Did the disciples forget where Jesus was buried and went to the wrong tomb? Where did the body go? Was it stolen? Although I’ve addressed Warfield’s comments about the empty tomb, the essay is well-worth reading in its entirety since Warfield also deals with the eyewitness accounts and historical circumstances surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus. What follows are selections from Warfield’s response to well-known critical biblical scholars of his day, David Strauss (1808-1874) of the Tübingen School, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1786-1834), the father of Protestant liberalism,and Ernest Renan (1823-1892) who, among other pursuits, was interested in the early development of Christianity. All three were well-known resurrection skeptics.

Warfield addresses Strauss’s “sorry hypothesis” that the disciples couldn’t remember where Jesus had been buried.

Is the admitted fact that Christ’s earliest followers were all convinced that he rose from the dead, adequately explained by the supposition that they were the victims of a delusion? We must remember that the testimony of eye-witnesses declares that Christ rose on the third day; and that we have thus to account for immediate faith. But, then, there is the dead body of Jesus lying in the grave! How could the whole body of those men be so deceived in so momentous a matter with the means of testing its truth ready at their hand? Hence, it is commonly admitted that the grave was now empty. Strauss alone resorts to the sorry hypothesis that the appearances of the risen Christ were all in Galilee, and that before the forty days which intervened before the disciples returned to Jerusalem had passed, the site of the grave (or dunghill) had been wholly forgotten by friend and foe alike.

Strauss’s argument is easily parried by one simple question. How was it that Christ’s grave was empty the first Easter?

But, there is that unimpeachable testimony of eye-witnesses that the appearances began on the third day; and the equally assured fact (Rom. vi. 4; 1 Cor. xv. 4), that the body was not thrown on a dunghill but that there was a veritable grave. So that the empty grave stares us still in the face. If Christ did not rise, how came the grave empty? Here is the crowning difficulty which all the ingenuity of the whole modern critical school has not been able to lay aside. Was it emptied by Christ’s own followers? That would have been imposture, and the skeptics scorn such a resort: moreover, the hypothesis that the apostles were impostors has been laid aside already (in the preceding paragraph). Was it, then, emptied by his enemies? How soon would the body have been produced, then, to confront and confound the so rapidly growing heresy! Or, if this were not possible, how soon would overwhelming proof of the removal of the body have been brought forward! Then, how was that grave emptied?

Did Jesus really die? What about Schleiermacher’s “swoon theory.”

Shall we say that Jesus was not really dead, and reviving from the swoon, himself crept from the tomb? This was the hypothesis of Schleiermacher. But not only is it in direct contradiction with the eye-witness testimony (1 Cor. xv. 3; 2 Cor. v. 15; Rom. xiv. 9, et saepe [and often]), which is explicit that Christ died; but it has been felt by all the leaders of skeptical thought to be inadequate as an explanation. Strauss has himself executed justice on it. It not only casts a stigma on the moral character of our Lord; but it is itself laden with absurdity. “It would have been impossible thus to mistake a wounded man, dying from exhaustion, for the Messiah of Jewish expectations, or then to magnify this into a resurrection from the dead.” A dying man in hiding, the center of Christianity’s life! This fill with enthusiasm and death-defying courage the founders of the Church! Besides all which, the hypothesis makes the apostles either knaves or fools, neither of which, as the skeptics admit, is possible truth. Hence, they themselves unite with us in rejecting as wholly absurd this dream of Schleiermacher. Once more, then, how can we account for the empty grave? We hazard nothing in asserting that this one fact is destructive to all the theories of Christ’s resurrection which have been started in the nervous effort to be rid of its reality. That empty grave is alone enough to found all Christianity upon.

Did they merely see a vision? Renan’s vision hypothesis . . .

But, suppose for a moment, we assume the impossible, and allow to Strauss that the site of the grave was already lost. What then? The disciples were still convinced that Christ had risen. How shall we account for this invincible conviction? The only possible resort is to the worn-out vision-hypothesis. Renan draws a beautiful picture of Mary Magdalene in her love and grief fancying she saw her longed-for Lord; and a not so beautiful one of the abject and idiotic credulity of the disciples who believed her, and then, because they believed her, fancied they had seen him themselves. But will all this fine picturing of what might have been, stand the test of facts? That grave stares us in the face again: if the body was still in it, there was no place left for visions of it as living and out of it; if not in it, how came it out? But laying aside this final argument as premised, even then the theory cannot stand. There was no expectation of a resurrection, and hence no ground for visions.

This is a great essay and worth reading in its entirety