Sometimes the principle of the dog that did not bark is useful, and this is one of those cases.
**Both the Jews and the Romans would have had a strong incentive to disprove the new “cult” of the Nazarene carpenter. ** If these people were going around saying that Jesus had risen from the dead, all the Jews or Romans would need to do is produce the body. And they would have had the power, the authority to produce the body, that much is unquestioned. So why didn’t either the Jews or the Romans produce the body of Jesus and kill this dangerous cult in its infancy?
To say that the disciples stole the body ignores the report that the Romans guarded the tomb, and ignores the fact the those same disciples suffered and in some cases died for what they would then have known to be a lie of their own making.
The bolded is shown to be not true with the following Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V
The differences between society then[years 0 - 100] and now cannot be stressed enough. There didn’t exist such things as coroners, reporters, cameras, newspapers, forensic science, or even police detectives. All the technology, all the people we have pursuing the truth of various claims now, did not exist then. In those days, few would even be able to check the details of a story if they wanted to–and few wanted to. Instead, people based their judgment on the display of sincerity by the storyteller, by his ability to impress them with a show or simply to persuade and “sell” his story, and by the potential rewards his story had to offer.[11] At the same time, doubters didn’t care to waste the time or money debunking yet another crazy cult, of which there were hundreds then.[12] And so it should not surprise us that we have no writings by anyone hostile to Christianity until a century after it began–not even slanders or lies. Clearly, no doubter cared to check or even challenge the story in print until it was too late to investigate the facts.[13]
references:
[10] “On Superstition,” Moralia 168C. Seneca also wrote a work on superstition that does not survive but for a few quotes in book 10 of Augustine’s City of God, and it reveals similar hostility to elite religion from the masses, and the craziness of popular religious opinions.
[11] Most relevant to this fact is Graham Anderson’s Sage, Saint and Sophist: Holy Men and Their Associates in the Early Roman Empire (1994); but consider Paul’s mode of argument in his letter to the Galatians as an example of how assertions of authority mattered more than a presentation and analysis of witnesses and evidence.
[12] Consult. n. 10 above for the only two examples of pagan tracts devoted to debunking popular cults. Their form of argument is relevant: they did not conduct historical investigations to refute factual claims of distasteful cults, but argued against them solely on ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical grounds. This was the usual way skeptics dismissed cults like Christianity–a detailed investigation wasn’t worth their time. For example, in the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan (Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96-7), the interrogation of a few local cult members in Asia Minor led Pliny to conclude that Christianity was such a “depraved superstition” that he saw no reason to investigate it further. The exception proves the rule: we have no real parallels for what Lucian did in his story Alexander the False Prophet, and even that was a matter of coincidence: Lucian, by chance a keen-minded Epicurean and prolific and talented writer, just happened upon the scene of a new pagan cult as it was beginning. Similar coincidence drove him to write skeptically on The Death of Peregrinus (both are available in Lionel Casson’s Selected Satires of Lucian, 1968).
[13] Matthew alone records a supposed skeptical attack of Jews, namely the charge that the body of Jesus had “really” been stolen (28:11-15; cf. 27:62-6; 28:4). But this appears in no Jewish writings, of the first century or even later, and as a Christian story it is suspect: it involves reporting secret conversations that no Christian could have been witness to, and Matthew does not explain how he heard of those events. He only says “This story [of theft] was spread around among Jews until today.” But apparently, not in print. There are many reasons to doubt the veracity of this report: e.g. my analysis of the guarding story in
Section VIII of
Probability of Survival vs. Miracle, and my papers on theft (see
Summary). However, as I note there, an ad hoc charge of theft could well have been an intuitive response to the story when the story adopted an empty tomb motif, whenever that was (in my opinion, probably after the Jewish War concluded in 70 A.D.), and in that respect Matthew may simply be inventing a story to “debunk” a new charge raised by the adoption of a new empty tomb story a generation or two after the religion began (so that what he thinks or claims is “until today” is really just “today”).
