How many entities in Jesus' tomb: 0, 1, or 2?

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Mike_from_NJ

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I want to focus just on one aspect of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, specifically the entities in the tomb (and maybe a little as to the movement of the stone).

Luke says there were 2 men standing beside the women.
Matthew says an angel was outside the tomb, rolled away the stone for the women to see, then showed that there were 0 men in the tomb.
Mark says there was 1 man sitting when the women walked in.
John says there were 0 men, then when Mary went back with Simon Peter and another deciple there were 2 men seated (one at the head and one at the foot where Jesus previously was).

There is no way that all four of these can be accurate. So how many holy entities were inside the tomb? 0, 1, or 2?
 
If you ever interviewed eyewitnesses about some surprising event, you would not find 4 variations on the same basic story to be unusual in the slightest.
 
Basically if there is no data corelation, then the evidence is void and the situation a redundant speculation.

As with the comment above, it’s difficult to assume deliberate deception, since anyone faking the account to add legitimacy would have simply doctored the other statements to line up with one another.

Chances are nobody quite remembered correctly at all considering the situation/mood at the time. After such a long time has passed, it’s pretty much impossible to say at all without a much wider pool of evidence.
 
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That simply doesn’t fly. The analogy I like to use is two people are in a car when they get hit by another car. It would make sense if one of the people said it was a brown car that hit them and the other said it was a gray car. It doesn’t make sense if one person said they were hit by a car and the other said they were hit by a horse.

Each of the Gospels give specific details. Matthew describes the angel sitting on the stone. Those that say there were more than 0 entities in the tomb describe the shining clothes they wore. They describe the wrappings Jesus left behind. But you’re asking that people who were face-to-face with angels who talked to them with them with the news of the resurrection would somehow confuse that with an empty tomb.

On top of that the Catechism says that all scripture is true in either a literal way or three figurative ways. These passages suggest such a claim is inaccurate.
 
I agree with several of your points. All we can do is speculate on the matter. I would also agree that we can’t assume deliberate deception. The best, in my opinion, that can be said on the matter is that because the four Gospels are mutually exclusive on this matter that 3 or 4 of the Gospels are at least partially incorrect.
 
Mike_from_NJ said:
That simply doesn’t fly. The analogy I like to use is two people are in a car when they get hit by another car. It would make sense if one of the people said it was a brown car that hit them and the other said it was a gray car. It doesn’t make sense if one person said they were hit by a car and the other said they were hit by a horse.
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What does and doesn’t make sense is completely a matter of your own opinion. People may well report that a horse hit them whether you think it makes sense or not, especially if they are shocked or surprised. I’m pretty sure showing up at a tomb that your friend is supposed to be lying dead in and all of a sudden it’s empty and there are angels and strange men would create shock and surprise.

When a journalist is later recording the story that he probably got third hand from somebody else then even more details might change.

I just picture people showing up at the tomb during the morning, some women, Mary Magdalene, the disciples coming along later, and all kinds of strange phenomena going on. I’m not really interested in establishing an exact timeline of when all this happened and where there were 1, 2, 3, 4 people in the tomb and how many angels, etc. Suffice it to say there were multiple witnesses.
 
I always look at discrepancies like this as several people looking at the same object and describing it in their own words. All of them can be true in the accounts listed in the OP. Just different moments in time…

As the events of Jesus carrying his cross. Some say Simon of Cyrene helped him then John comes along and says Jesus carried it himself… I just believe that John went to get Mary, the mother of Jesus and while he was getting her–Simon helped. By the time John and Mary got there Jesus was carrying the cross by himself. That’s what John saw… doesn’t mean Simon didn’t help at a time John wasn’t looking…
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
What does and doesn’t make sense is completely a matter of your own opinion.
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In this case it doesn’t make sense because the four stories are mutually exclusive. They share some elements, but other elements can’t all be true when reading the Gospels horizontally.
People may well report that a horse hit them whether you think it makes sense or not, especially if they are shocked or surprised. I’m pretty sure showing up at a tomb that your friend is supposed to be lying dead in and all of a sudden it’s empty and there are angels and strange men would create shock and surprise.
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Not only are people confusing two people for no people, but they each have their various angel(s) say different things. It’s more a Mad Lib than a series of testimonies.
When a journalist is later recording the story that he probably got third hand from somebody else then even more details might change.
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This doesn’t sound like something guided into being by The Holy Spirit. How many false statements are allowed per verse in the Bible?
I just picture people showing up at the tomb during the morning, some women, Mary Magdalene, the disciples coming along later, and all kinds of strange phenomena going on. I’m not really interested in establishing an exact timeline of when all this happened and where there were 1, 2, 3, 4 people in the tomb and how many angels, etc. Suffice it to say there were multiple witnesses.
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I disagree strongly on the last sentence. We can not suffice it to say that this event occurred nor can we suffice it to say that there were multiple witnesses.
 
I don’t see how each of these events can all describe events, just at different moments in time. Three of the Gospels say Mary arrived and the stone was already rolled away. The fourth says the stone wasn’t rolled away when Mary arrived and that an angel then rolled it away. Each of them describes the moment that Mary and the other women first enter the tomb differently. The only way they could all be true describing different moments would require the women to enter the tomb, leave, get amnesia, and repeat that process three more times.
 
The two men were angels. Where there’s two there’s always one.
 
The four gospels were written for four different audiences. Matthew - the Jews; Mark - the Romans; Luke - the Greeks; and John for the emerging church. And the gospels were most likely composed not by the Apostles themselves, but by followers, call them scribes, who wrote down what they remembered from the oral version of events. And it must be remembered that the writers of the New Testament were men who believed that Jesus was coming back for them, IN THEIR LIFETIME. There was no need for the first person reporting you are desiring. The gospels were written probably at least 20 years after the events they describe, and by second or third hand sources.
What we do believe is that all four say the Christ was NOT in the tomb. That is the key thing. How many people were in or around the tomb is irrelevant. Possibly the authors relate events at different times. It is why we RC’s believe that what is necessary is a teaching Church that not only composed the Bible, but is the lens through which we understand scripture. There are any number of errors/discrepancies in the written word. Take the story of the “good thief” appearing in the gospel of Luke. It is different in the other three. Probably because Luke related the incident that the other writers paid little or no attention to. Or that Luke was privy to some incident that he related in a way not done by the others. Focusing on tangental/ancillary events as some kind of proof of the erroneous nature of the events described, is a waste of time.
 
I am not saying that because the Bible contains at least 3 falsehoods regarding the empty tomb that the resurrection could not have occurred. It’s possible that one of the versions is correct and the resurrection happened. What it does do is cast some doubt not only on the resurrection but on the Bible as a whole.

There are numerous other items in the Bible that feature internal conflicts, but as anyone who has been on CAF for any length of time goes the broader the topic the less focused the conversation can become. I chose a very specific portion of the Bible to both keep things close together as well as because Christian and non-Christian alike do agree that the passages can’t all be true.

One thing non-believers are told regularly is that through reason one can determine that the god of Christianity is real. I want to show that things like this are often hinderances to such a goal. The explanations that come about when trying to rationalize that something is simultaneously false and true, both crafted by God and riddled with numeous, obvious doesn’t help the case towards reason as a tool toward Christianity. The non-believer is told to presuppose what is true and to outright ignore any problems that come from study. Presuppositionalism will never lead one to truth.
 
The passage in Mark that has one figure (sometimes considered to be Jesus) does not say there was at least one person sitting in the tomb. What that figure said in Mark doesn’t match what was said in the other passages. When the angel moves the stone in Matthew and tells the women to look inside and see it was empty, it doesn’t say there was no one inside but there could have been people inside.
 
No matter who a person is speaking to if A happened then he or she is going to tell whomever that A occurred, not that not A occurred. Take my analogy at the top of the thread. The two people in the car will say they got hit by a car whether talking to a policeman, a judge, a reporter, an insurance company, or a friend. Sure, a person may stress certain details when talking to one person versus another; but they won’t give conflicting details based on the audience.

And that’s the key. It’s not a matter of leaving out information but giving information such that either all but one is true or none are true. A person telling the story wouldn’t tell another that the stone had already been rolled away, yet tell a third person that they saw an angel roll the stone away. The idea of difference audiences mean some were told 0 angels, 1 angel, or 2 angels withers under the very mildes of scrutiny.

There’s an old joke where four college student friends who all took the same class missed an exam through their own fault. They agree to say they were driving to class and got a flat tire. They go to the professor and tell him their story. He agrees to give them a make up test. The next day he gives each of them their test in separate classrooms. The test seems normal and the boys think they’re homefree until they see one extra question: “Which tire had the flat?”

That’s not analagous to what is going on here. As I mentioned in an earlier post I don’t believe there was any intentional falsehood in the Biblical stories (although I certainly don’t rule them out). They likely come from a single originating source, but that in no way means the source is even a little bit true. The stories of Heracles are believed to have originated from that of a man who actually lived in Greece. The joke I referenced shows that details matter. Brushing aside that which conflicts with a desired narrative is neither convincing nor truth-seeking.

Also take into consideriation that in this particular case we have four storytellers. There are several items, even in the New Testament, which are only told by one of the Gospel writers. We don’t have the luxury of comparing and contrasting in those cases, so how do we know what is and what is not true. By some of the people here the Bible allows for significant amount of false information into its writings. Believers have to rely on presupposition to try and convince others that while yes the empty tomb versions conflict wildly and the Bible can’t agree on who Peter denied Jesus to we can be assured of its accuracy on other matters.
 
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These are slightly different accounts in the early Church, it’s nothing major. The fact that we find 2 (possibly 3) independent empty tomb traditions in the New Testament points to the historicity of the empty tomb.

All in all, the accounts agree that it was women who discovered the empty tomb very early in the day. That much we can know for certain.
 
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This is something I forgot to mention in my response to joeybaggz: The fact that the number of angels differs and what they say differs is not a minor issue and certainly not an “irrelevant” one. It’s the angels that tell the women (and in just one of the four gospels two of the deciples) that Jesus’ body wasn’t stolen but it was a miracle.

These differences wouldn’t hold muster in the lowest court of law, yet here were are to ignore them not because of how minor they are but because they get in the way of a desired outcome.
 
Mike_from_NJ said:
What it does do is cast some doubt not only on the resurrection but on the Bible as a whole.
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The Bible is written under divine inspiration. We do not take every word in it literally. I and a couple other posters have given reasonable explanations for what may have happened that morning that resulted in slightly different accounts of basically the same event, which was Jesus’ friends arrived to find an empty tomb with supernatural beings greeting them. Whether there was one angel or two men or the stone was rolled away by the angel in front of them or already rolled away when the people arrived, is not really important to the main concept which is that Jesus was risen and not in the tomb. On this crucial main point, all the Gospels agree.

I do not see the slight difference in details, which might have come due to multiple excited eyewitnesses telling different stories that were then passed down second and third-hand to the authors of the Gospels, as being that important in view of the main event. This is like asking if there was one Roman soldier or three Roman soldiers beating Jesus when he was scourged. It’s simply not that important. You, on the other hand, seem to think we need to have the Bible reflecting the literal truth of every detail or else the Bible is called into question. This is not necessary as our faith is not founded on whether every single word in the Bible is an accurate depiction of the minor details of actual events.
 
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Mike_from_NJ said:
These differences wouldn’t hold muster in the lowest court of law, yet here were are to ignore them not because of how minor they are but because they get in the way of a desired outcome.
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Jesus is risen from the dead - RISEN FROM THE DEAD - and you’re quibbling over whether somebody saw one angel or two and the exact words they said?
Do you not see that this is very petty stuff when someone has just risen from the dead?
 
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