Some believe the Biblical stories were myths or exaggerations. At worst, everything is an invention. At best, just the miracle claims were invented. When you examine the Gospels, however, you find plenty of evidence that the authors were being faithful to what really happened, even when it was embarrassing. Examples abound, including Peter’s denial of Jesus, Jesus calling Peter “Satan,” the disciples not understanding Jesus’ predictions of His resurrection, etc. This is called the principle of embarrassment, and is one of the key principles historians use to judge the historicity of a report.
While reading Matthew the other day, another example of this principle stood out to me in a way it had not before. We are told by Matthew that the chief priests went to Pilate “the next day” after Jesus had been crucified and buried to ask for guards to be posted at the tomb (Mt 27:62-63). Why? Because Jesus had predicted that He would rise from the dead, and they feared that the disciples might come and steal his body from the tomb and then claim Jesus’ prediction had come true (Mt 27:64).
If the disciples were making this account up, surely they would have had the chief priests asking for a guard before Jesus’ death, and had the guard posted immediately after Jesus was entombed. That is the only way to guarantee that the disciples could not have stolen Jesus’ body. In the story Matthew penned, however, there is a gap of at least 9 hours between Jesus’ entombment and the posting of the guard. That was plenty of time for Jesus’ followers to pull off a heist. By refusing to close this loop, Matthew opened himself up to be charged with the very thing the chief priests claimed would happen. Why didn’t Matthew close that loop, then? He didn’t close the loop because the loop was real. Even though the history was not apologetically advantageous, it was what happened, so Matthew reported it. This shows that Matthew was more interested in what really happened than he was advancing an apology for Christianity. When one displays integrity of this nature in the small matters, it is difficult to claim that they lacked so much integrity elsewhere such that they would invent entire histories out of whole cloth.
Another interesting feature of this story is that it reveals how Jews thought about the resurrection. Some scholars want to claim that resurrection was something that happened to the spirit rather than the body (i.e. a spiritual resurrection). For them, even if Jesus’ body was still in the grave it is still intelligible to say Jesus was raised from the dead. N.T. Wright has offered a devastating critique of this view in The Resurrection of the Son of God, so I will not attempt to refute the notion here. The statement of the chief priests, however, shows how the Jews in Jesus’ day thought of resurrection. They understood that the disciples could not claim Jesus had been raised from the dead if His body was still in the tomb. That is why they sought to protect Jesus’ body. If they could ensure that Jesus’ body remained in the tomb, they could ensure that Jesus’ disciples could not proclaim that Jesus was resurrected. A dead body proved there was no resurrection. The notion of a resurrection while the body remains in the tomb was as inconceivable as water that’s not wet. Indeed, for them, an empty tomb alone (without appearances of the risen Jesus) was enough to proclaim the resurrection.
Thinking to Believe 
February 4, 2015 at 2:49 am
I cannot get by the fact that you still believe Matthew wrote the book of Matthew. You of course know this is not the case? Right? So, you know not who the author was and therefore are in no position to state authoritatively what he “saw” or “experienced”. It is therefore impossible to draw conclusions. Paul certainly believed in the “spirit” kind of resurrection.
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February 4, 2015 at 10:21 am
Kerry, you are wrong on so many fronts.
First, why should I doubt Matthean authorship when it is the unanimous and early tradition of the church? The original recipients of the gospel would surely know who wrote it, and they would surely pass that information on. Just because a work does not name its author does not mean we cannot know who it is. There are Greco-Roman works that are also anonymous, and yet the author was known and identified by tradition and scholars do not question the accuracy of that tradition today.
How could you possibly know that Matthew did not write it?
Second, I did not claim that the author saw the events in question. Surely Matthew was not present for the meeting between Pilate and the priests. What he had was testimony concerning the event. Testimony is how most of history is written.
As for Paul’s view of the resurrection, he held to a bodily resurrection like all other Jews. You need to read Wright’s work on this. There was simply no notion of a spiritual resurrection in Paul’s day. Resurrection always referred to what happened to the body. Surely you must appeal to a bad reading of 1 Cor 15 to support your claim (and ignore what Paul said elsewhere). Paul’s reference to a “spiritual body” does not mean an immaterial body. “Spiritual” does not mean “immaterial.” Paul uses the same word earlier in the epistle when he says “I could not speak to you as unto spiritual.” Was he saying he could not speak to them as immaterial beings? No. He could not speak to them because they were not spiritually oriented. So when he speaks of a spiritual body, he is referring to a body that is spiritually oriented, not a body that is not physical. Besides, the reason the Corinthians were objecting to the idea of resurrection is because of the fact that it involved the body. Their neo-Platonism did not jive well with the idea of a resurrection. If Paul held to a spiritual resurrection, he would have agreed with the Corinthians, not argued with them.
Jason
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February 4, 2015 at 10:37 am
This is something many skeptics seem to be ignorant of when they claim the writers fudged the gospel accounts in order to make up a portrait of Jesus they knew wasn’t true.
The gospel accounts contain a lot of “embarrassing” information. I remember NT Wright also talking about the fact that the first witnesses were women. This was not the sort of thing that would have been made up because women were not considered competent witnesses. This, like the loop you mention, are a few of the many clues within the accounts that suggest the gospels were written to describe what actually happened by contemporary witnesses.
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February 4, 2015 at 10:38 am
Whoever wrote Matthew is incidental regarding the “loop” because the fact is that the writers of the Gospels wrote according to what they believed happened and not necessarily to what actually happened. You see, there were only three people who knew about the resurrection plan and Matthew or whoever else wrote the Gospels was not among them. (And of course myself, a priori, but that did not count at the time period in question)
The three who knew about the plan were: Jesus, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. Nicodemus and Joseph also had previous knowledge as to what the plan of arrest was, how & when and where the arrest would take, who the betrayer was and the events surrounding the pre-planned crucifixion. And of course being disciples of Jesus, secretly they reveaed these things to Jesus.
So when Jesus predicted “the one who dipped his bread in the sop”, it was not a prophecy or a prediction but knowledge he spoke and when he had quotes the proverb:”Then Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away because of me this night. For it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’ and when Peter said he would go to prison or death with hiim, Jesus told Peter that Peter would deny him that very night; he also said that with the knowledge that the centurions had orders to round up his gang of accomplices who could be subjected to death themselves if caught, knowing the instinctual forces of self preservation; the prediction could also have served as a forewarning to Peter “to deny Jesus” for his own good, knowing what was about to happen that very night in Gethsemane.
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February 4, 2015 at 2:18 pm
It’s not whether the story is true or not, it’s does it make sense to you? If someone tells you a story (ranging from the very serious to the insignificant) like the Gospel, the assassination of JFK, a problem at work, how the lamp got broke in your living room, dog ate my homework, etc… If the story doesn’t seem plausible to you, you won’t believe it even if it is true.
For someone who rejects the supernatural, the Gospel or parts of the Gospel are false. Others look at the “problems” and see no issues other than different sides of the same story being told.
My personal beef is not necessarily what we have for writings but what we don’t have. I’d sure like to know what Our Lord said word for word on the Road to Emmaus and any other words after His Resurrection. And wouldn’t it be nice to have a transcript of Paul’s debate with the Jew’s where he proved Jesus was the Messiah? And some more info like days of the week for certain events, this information isn’t pivotal for me but I’m very curious about these details.
Seems to me the first century Christians believed Our Lord would return in their generation or the next so they weren’t too worried to get the story down so 2000 years latter we knew all the details of what happened.
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February 4, 2015 at 6:42 pm
Not only did Matthew write one of the four NT Gospels; he wrote it in Hebrew not Greek…
Additionally, to obtain a valid understanding of Messiah’s Resurrection read Matthew 28:1-15 paying clear attention to the account of the chief priests & elders bribing of the Roman soldiers. Indeed you need to realize what it took to be a soldier in the Roman guard.
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February 6, 2015 at 10:08 pm
Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared. Beware of him, and obey his voice, provoke him not; for he will not pardon your transgressions: for my name is in him. (Exodus 23:20-21)
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February 10, 2015 at 10:08 am
Jason,
As usual, I love your work. I do have a small quibble that think is worth considering. I received my undergraduate degree in history, and studied extensively the subject of historicity, and I never learned about the principle (or criterion) of embarrassment.
Upon doing a casual google search (admittedly only spent five minutes on it) I was unable to find any references to it as a tool of testing historical veracity that wasn’t directly related to Christian apologetics. In other words, all references that I found were written by people making religious claims. Every reference that I looked at made the claim that “historians” use this principle, but I don’t find any evidence (at least in five minutes) that anyone is relying on this principle outside of us Christians.
Now…I am strongly in favor of this principle. It makes sense to me, and it builds my faith in the biblical narrative, and I have used it myself (many times) in discussions with people about the trustworthiness of the Bible…but I am wondering if it is fair to describe it as “one of the key principles historians use”.
It feels like an inappropriate use of an appeal to authority. Of course, the problem would vanish if the sentence read: “…is one of the key principles religious historians use”.
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February 12, 2015 at 12:04 am
Paul V,
I agree with you that whether one believes a story or not will depend, in part, in whether or not he believes the story is plausible, but why would you say it doesn’t matter if the story is true or not? It still matters. What we need to do is find out why the person thinks the story is implausible and start from there.
I agree that they were not concerned with all of the details in the sense that they were not concerned with writing an exhaustive treatment, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t concerned about accuracy for what they chose to convey (given the conventions of historical reporting and literature at the time). Luke is very clear in his prologue that he was very concerned with the accuracy of what he reported. And just because the early church may have thought they would see the return of Christ doesn’t mean they didn’t care about the details. After all, they put pen to paper. Look at the modern day Christians who think the Lord will return within years. They are writing tons of detailed theological treatises trying to get their message out there.
Jason
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February 12, 2015 at 12:05 am
RichardGobble,
I am not a historian, but I know when it comes to assessing the historicity of the Gospels, both Christian and non-Christian historians and critics use this principle to assess the historicity of the Biblical accounts. Perhaps it is used more by historians of religion than others, but I don’t see why that would be the case. It’s an observation about human behavior. Whether one is writing favorably about the life of Napoleon or the life of Jesus, they are unlikely to invent embarrassing facts. I would be interested to know more about this. If you have time, perhaps you could reach out to Mike Licona with this question (http://www.risenjesus.com/). He was trained in the philosophy of history. He might know a bit more about this. Perhaps this is a key principle in the philosophy of history, but one that does not always get employed by historians in the practice. Or perhaps it is only applied to auto-biographical accounts and other accounts where the author was a supporter the person he was writing about (since, after all, we would expect detractors to include or invent embarrassing details in their apologetic against the person they are writing about).
Jason
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