I was looking up supposed Bible contradictions, and I was able to review the great majority
of them because it's usually just a translation error or something like that,
but one of them I couldn't figure out. It was Matthew 28:2 and Luke 24:2. And they saw the tomb,
I think one verse says that the tomb was open and one verse says the tomb was closed,
and I'm not sure what the deal is with that.
So one of the things—and this is something we commonly discussed— the ancients did not write
history the way that we do. We insist today on a very videotape-like presentation, exactly what you
would have seen in exactly chronological order if you were there with a video camera. The ancients
did not do that. They sometimes did that, but they weren't required to. And one of the freedoms they
had was the ability to rearrange events to make the meaning clearer. You see this happening,
for example, with the story of the fig tree if you compare Mark and Matthew's version of it. In Mark,
Jesus and the disciples are on their way to the temple, they see the fig tree, Jesus curses the
fig tree, then they go and he clears out the temple, then they come back and they see that
the fig tree is withered; and by juxtaposing the two sides of the fig tree story with the temple in
the middle, it's a statement about the spiritual barrenness of the temple. In Matthew, though,
Jesus first clears the temple, then they see the fig tree, and then the fig tree withers;
and so Matthew has moved the two parts of the fig tree story together because they're on the
same topic and he wants to bring out a different aspect of their significance. He wants to make it
really clear, the connection between Jesus cursing the fig tree and it being withered,
and he's not bringing out the aspect about the barrenness of the temple—at least, not in the same
way. Well, if you look at Mark and Luke's version of the of the resurrection narrative—and by the
way, at jimmyakin.com I've got a thing on how the resurrection narratives fit together, so you can
check that out—but in Mark and Luke's account, it is clear, and this seems to be confirmed from
John, that when the women showed up, the stone had already been rolled away, and the tomb was empty,
and then the angels talked to them. You look in Matthew's version, though, and in Matthew 28,
it starts like this: "Now after the sabbath, towards the dawn of the first day of the week,
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the sepulcher. And behold, there was a great
earthquake for an angel of the lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone
and sat upon it." And then it goes on about him and the guards, and eventually the angel talks to
the women. Now what I would say is going on here is: Matthew's making it clear for his audience
how the stone got rolled away. In Mark and Luke, and also in John, they see the stone rolled away
and they meet angels, but it's not clear how did the stone get rolled away. And so what Matthew is
doing is, he's backing up in time a little bit to make it clear how the stone got rolled away:
it was an angel that did it. It wasn't Jesus himself that did it, Jesus was already gone;
an angel came down and did this, and that's how the stone got rolled away. And if you,
you know— technically, even though he mentions this after he mentions the women going to see, it
he doesn't say that the women were there to witness it;
he just says they were going to see it and this then this happened. But that doesn't establish
a strict chronology of these events, because as we mentioned they don't—the evangelists and other
ancient historical writers outside the New Testament don't have to give us everything in
strictly chronological order. They can do things like move slightly backwards or forwards in time
or arrange things topically in order to make the significance of them clear. And what I
would say is: okay, the women went there, and to make it clear to the reader how the stone
got moved away, Matthew just moves backwards in time a little bit in order to show us, okay,
it was an angel that did it, and then the story proceeds forward from there.