William Lane Craig Seems To Affirm The Historicity Of The Guards At The Tomb

For the background to this post, see here, including the comments section of the thread.

Here's William Lane Craig's 1984 article defending the historicity of the passages in Matthew about the guards at the tomb. You can find web pages in which he cites that article approvingly in recent years here and here. Not only am I not aware of a retraction of the 1984 article, but I've also repeatedly seen Craig cite that article with approval in recent years. In the 1984 article, he refers to the historicity of the guards at the tomb as an "open question", but he seems to be limiting his evaluation to common criteria applied by modern scholarship. Craig's own view of the passages has to be further qualified by his positions on other issues, like Biblical inerrancy.

In his 2006 debate with Bart Ehrman, Craig said:

Conspiracies like this always come to light; his [Jesus'] Roman guards would have been happy to inform the Jewish leaders of what had happened.

In a 2008 article responding to Dale Allison, Craig seems to attribute the claim of guards at the tomb to Jewish opponents of Christianity acting shortly after Jesus' death. I doubt that Craig thinks that Jewish opponents would have made up or gone along with a false account of guards so early. Rather, Craig seems to be implying the historicity of the account:

It has been claimed that the Jewish charge that the disciples stole the body presupposes that the body was missing (Matt 28:11-15). Allison disputes this argument because of the uncertainty of the age of the Jewish polemic. He notes that "Some have, to be sure, surmised that the verses bear 'the mark of a fairly protracted controversy'," but he responds, "why this should be so escapes me" (p. 312). In so saying, Allison overlooks, I think, the developing pattern of assertion and counter-assertion in the tradition history that plausibly lay behind Matthew's guard story:

Christian Jew: "The Lord is risen!"

Non-Christian Jew: "No, his disciples stole away his body."

Christian Jew: "The guard at the tomb would have prevented any such theft."

Non-Christian Jew: "No, the guard fell asleep."

Christian Jew: "The chief priests bribed the guard to say this."

In response to the Christian proclamation of Jesus' resurrection, the non-Christian Jewish reaction was simply to assert that the disciples had stolen the body. The idea of a guard could only have been a Christian, not a non-Christian development. At the next stage there is no need for Christians to invent the bribing of the guard; it was sufficient to claim that the tomb was guarded. The bribe arises only in response to the second stage of the polemic, the non-Christian allegation that the guard fell asleep. This part of the story could only have been a non-Christian development, since it serves no purpose in the Christian polemic. At the final stage, the time of Matthew's writing, the Christian answer that the guard were bribed is given. So the story does, I think, show signs of fairly protracted controversy. The story also is peppered with non-Matthean vocabulary, indicative of a prior tradition. I see no reason to think that it does not represent the sort of controversy that went on between Jewish Christians and Jewish non-Christians soon after the message of the resurrection began to be proclaimed in Jerusalem. Given the early date of the pre-Markan Passion story, there is no need to quarrel with Allison's surmise that the controversy arose between Mark and Matthew, so long as by "Mark" we mean Mark's tradition.

Here's an article in which Craig defends the inerrancy of the resurrection narratives. I don't know when he wrote the article, but it was later than the video in which he allegedly denied the historicity of the guards. The Q & A section of his site, in which the article appears, is a feature that originated years later than the video in question.

It's possible that Craig has denied the historicity of the guards at the tomb at some point or even more than once. But if he did, his rejection of the guards material has been accompanied by many apparent affirmations of it. (Or would he argue that Matthew didn't intend the passages to be interpreted in a historical manner? That's a dubious position to take, and I doubt that Craig holds that view. For example, it would be ridiculous for Craig to argue that the empty tomb references are of a historical genre, for the reasons he's put forward, whereas the accompanying references to the guards were intended by Matthew to be taken as unhistorical.) I suspect that he's never denied the historicity of the passages, but instead has sometimes been misinterpreted on the subject or expressed his view poorly. Given that he published an article defending the historicity of the passages, has repeatedly cited that article with approval in recent years, has included it at his web site for a long time, has affirmed the inerrancy of the resurrection narratives and scripture in general, etc., I think that on balance he's done more to help the case for the historicity of the passages than to hurt it. The video that's at the center of the current controversy is an exception to that trend, at least in the sense that he expresses himself poorly there and makes some false or misleading claims in the process. And I think it's misleading and counterproductive for him to refer to the guards account as an open question. In all likelihood, Craig affirms the historicity of the account. But he wants to leave it an open question or set the issue aside in some contexts. He should express his view more clearly. Maybe he has done so at times, but he hasn't done it consistently.