It's often suggested that the New Testament accounts of Jesus' resurrection or the sources they're based upon faked some of their details to make the resurrection seem more credible. Matthew or his source fabricated the account of the guard at the tomb to prevent people from thinking that Jesus' body had been stolen. Luke and John made up stories to further the notion that the resurrection appearances were of a physical nature rather than something like a hallucination or vision. And so on.
Notice the irony in the fact that many of these same critics will object to the brevity of the accounts in Matthew and Mark. That sort of brevity doesn't sit well with the idea that the authors or their sources were trying to pad their case with fake evidence. Even the passages in Luke, John, Acts, and elsewhere are relatively short. The resurrection was so central to all of the gospels that they all conclude just after it, and it's treated as a foundational event in other ways, yet the resurrection accounts only take up a small percentage of the documents.
More significantly, think of the large amount of material they could have included, but didn't. There's no description of the resurrection itself. The empty tomb is discovered by some of Jesus' female followers rather than other witnesses who would have been considered more appropriate and more credible. There's no narration of the appearance to James, even though every gospel portrays him as an unbeliever, which makes his conversion after seeing the risen Jesus so important. (For documentation that all of the gospels portray James as an unbeliever, see Eric Svendsen's Who Is My Mother? [Amityville, New York: Calvary Press, 2001].) None of the gospels include the appearance to Paul. If the appearance to more than five hundred mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15:6 is narrated by anybody, it's done without mentioning that so many individuals were involved. Matthew's reference to the physicality of Jesus' body in 28:9 is incidental, and Matthew, Luke, and John's accounts of physicality are accompanied by accounts of people doubting or not recognizing Jesus (Matthew 28:17, Luke 24:16, 24:37-38, John 20:15, 21:4). Ancient Jewish literature frequently portrayed resurrected individuals and other exalted figures in glorious terms (Daniel 12:3, 2 Maccabees 15:13, Matthew 13:43), yet the gospels don't describe the resurrected Jesus that way.
Luke's gospel provides a good illustration of the sort of restraint I'm referring to. Given the earliness of the resurrection creed cited in 1 Corinthians 15 and Luke's close relationship with Paul, Luke probably knew about the appearances to James, Paul, and the more than five hundred. He portrays James as a believer and an apostle in Acts, and he narrates the appearance to Paul there. So, he seems to know about the resurrection appearances to James, Paul, and the more than five hundred, even though he only narrates one of them and waits until several chapters into Acts to do it. Jesus' body and general appearance are described in glorious terms in Luke's accounts of the Mount of Transfiguration and the resurrection appearance to Paul in Acts. Even the angels at Jesus' tomb are described in glorious terms (Luke 24:4-5). But the resurrected Jesus isn't described that way at the close of Luke's gospel or the opening of Acts. I could mention other examples, but these are more than enough to illustrate my point.
The impression given by the gospels and other early sources is that they had a large amount of resurrection evidence to draw from, but were satisfied with citing some representative examples. John 21:25 just about says that.
The rest of church history illustrates what I'm referring to. Even after Matthew's gospel became widely accepted, for example, the guards at the tomb weren't often brought up when Christians were arguing for their religion or the resurrection in particular. The guards offer a significant line of evidence for the resurrection, but they're just one significant line among many others. When I discuss the evidence for the resurrection, sometimes I cite the guard account, and sometimes I don't. Matthew probably included it because of its relevance to Judaism and the leaders of Judaism, to whom he was responding to such a large extent in his gospel. The other gospel authors had no need to include that material and thought that what they did include was adequate.
The earliest Christians don't seem to have been so desperate for resurrection evidence that they were making up stories about guards at the tomb, people touching Jesus' resurrection body, etc. Rather, many modern critics want to dismiss every such detail in the accounts, even if the details are offered so sparingly and surrounded with so much restraint. The early Christians were biased, but their critics have biases of their own.
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