Tuesday, November 07, 2017

A guy walks out of a tomb...

Just listened to the recent Unbelievable show featuring 'Science Mike' and a more conventional Christian called JD Walters. I don't have much to say about the show except that on a few occasions Mike referred to the resurrection using phrases along the lines of "Jesus walked out of the tomb..."

Maybe I've been getting the wrong end of the stick all these years, but I always thought that the whole point of the stone being rolled away was to demonstrate that the tomb was actually empty, not to facilitate the risen Christ leaving? Jesus has no problem in the post-resurrection stories of simply appearing in locked rooms, so I had always assumed that the idea was that he could and did vanish (bodily) out of the tomb, and then appeared wherever later on, like on the road to Emmaus.

Do you think he walked out of the tomb?

I always thought that the tomb was empty before the stone was rolled away. Jesus didn't need the stone to be moved in order to get out. The rolling away of the stone was only to allow the witnesses to see an empty tomb.