The Case For Christ

contradiction says, 'This cannot be true, throw it out!' However,
the historian looks at these narratives and says, 'I see some
inconsistencies, but I notice something about them: they're all
in the secondary details.'
The core of the story is the same: Joseph of Arimathea takes the
body of Jesus, puts it in a tomb, the tomb is visited by a small
group of women followers of Jesus early on the Sunday morning
following his crucifixion, and they find that the tomb is empty.
They see a vision of angels saying that Jesus is risen.
The careful historian, unlike the philosopher, doesn't throw out
the baby with the bathwater. He says, 'This suggests that there
is a historical core to this story that is reliable and can be
depended upon, however conflicting the secondary details might
be.'
"So we can have great confidence in the core that's common to the
narratives and that would be agreed upon by the majority of New
Testament scholars today, even if there are some differences
concerning the names of the women, the exact time of the
morning, the number of the angels, and so forth. Those kinds of
secondary discrepancies wouldn't bother a historian."
Even the usually skeptical historian Michael Grant, a fellow of
Trinity College, Cambridge, and professor at Edinburgh
University, concedes in his book Jesus: An Historian's Review of
the Gospels, "True, the discovery of the empty tomb is
differently described by the various gospels, but if we apply the
same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other ancient
literary sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough
to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was, indeed, found
empty."
CAN DISCREPANCIES BE HARMONIZED?
Sometimes while covering criminal trials, I've seen two witnesses
give the exact same testimony, down to the nitty-gritty details,
only to find themselves ripped apart by the defense attorney for
having colluded before the trial. So I remarked to Craig, "I
suppose if all four gospels were identical in all their minutiae,
that would have raised the suspicion of plagiarism."
"Yes, that's a very good point," he said. "The differences
between the empty tomb narratives suggest that we have multiple,
independent attestation of the empty tomb story. Sometimes
people say, 'Matthew and Luke just plagiarized from Mark,' but