Empty Tomb - Resolving Differences

Resolving Differences

Resolving the accounts is a matter tied to the synoptic problem. The prevailing theory of Markan priority would suggest that the original story had a mysterious man in white in the tomb. In Matthew he becomes an angel and in Luke, written for a non-Jewish audience, he becomes two angel-like men. In John's gospel this part of the account is omitted. Most Christians and scholars before the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark tend to the view that the figure was an angel. It is not possible to tell whether the "angels" supposedly were in the form of men.

Wetstein has advanced a thesis linking the pair of angels to the pair of criminals who were crucified alongside Jesus. Raymond Brown has argued that the text for John 20 was combined from two separate sources, that John inexpertly interlaced together. The narrative in John between Mary discovering that the tomb is open and later witnessing angels inside it, is considered by some to be misplaced: it seems illogical for Mary not to have looked into the tomb the first time and her presence at the tomb when she witnesses the angels seems somewhat abrupt when the intervening narrative last mentions her some distance away.

Scholars; L. Michael White and Helmut Koester see the account of the guards in Matthew as an apologetic insertion, an attempt by the writer to explain the Jewish claims that the disciples stole the body; which were circulating at the time. The guards and the stolen body claims are not mentioned in the other three gospels. The apocryphal Gospel of Peter, on the other hand, is more detailed, specifying "Petronius the centurion with soldiers to guard the tomb".