Rev. Michael Piazza in Liberating Word says about Matthew 28:11-15 “This is a strange passage that occurs only in Matthew. It describes how the chief priests and elders paid a large sum of money to bribe the Roman soldiers guarding the tomb to say that the disciples had come in the night to steal the body of Jesus. Matthew concludes with the note, “And this story is still told among the Jews to this day.” Thirty years after Jesus was gone, when Matthew writes his gospel, he notes that, when the Church tried to talk about the resurrection of Jesus, Jewish leaders explained it by saying that his body had been stolen in the night. Apparently, Roman soldiers backed up that story as well, though that is odd. For the soldiers to allow that to happen would mean they would be punished, even executed, for failing to do their job. So, was it the women who outsmarted the Roman soldiers and stole the body? Even the men who wrote these stories admitted that, except for John, the male disciples fled in fear. Each of us must decide for ourselves what we believe about the physical resurrection of Jesus. Liberals tend to dismiss it as a metaphor. What is clear, though, is that those who wrote the Gospels believed it to be literally true. By the time some of the stories were written down, many of the eyewitnesses were dead. It would have been easy enough to put these stories in their mouths. The trouble is that many of those witnesses died because they insisted on telling these stories. So convinced were they that Jesus was alive, that they would die before they’d say otherwise. Few people have been willing to die for a lie. The conviction of Jesus’ resurrection gave the disciples power they seemed to utterly lack before these events. In addition, if the disciples had been smart enough to steal the body of Jesus even after the suspicious religious leaders put it under Roman guard, they would have been smart enough to synchronize their stories. The four different versions of the resurrection that the Gospels tell read just like four witness who saw the same thing but remembered it differently. This is not so much an argument for the physical resurrection of Jesus as it is a testimony to the conviction of those early witnesses that Jesus was alive. We may or may not believe it, but they obviously did. And that made all the difference in their lives.”
Rev. Michael Piazza in Liberating Word says about Matthew 28:11-15 “This is a strange passage that occurs only in Matthew. It describes how the chief priests and elders paid a large sum of money to bribe the Roman soldiers guarding the tomb to say that the disciples had come in the night to steal the body of Jesus. Matthew concludes with the note, “And this story is still told among the Jews to this day.” Thirty years after Jesus was gone, when Matthew writes his gospel, he notes that, when the Church tried to talk about the resurrection of Jesus, Jewish leaders explained it by saying that his body had been stolen in the night. Apparently, Roman soldiers backed up that story as well, though that is odd. For the soldiers to allow that to happen would mean they would be punished, even executed, for failing to do their job. So, was it the women who outsmarted the Roman soldiers and stole the body? Even the men who wrote these stories admitted that, except for John, the male disciples fled in fear. Each of us must decide for ourselves what we believe about the physical resurrection of Jesus. Liberals tend to dismiss it as a metaphor. What is clear, though, is that those who wrote the Gospels believed it to be literally true. By the time some of the stories were written down, many of the eyewitnesses were dead. It would have been easy enough to put these stories in their mouths. The trouble is that many of those witnesses died because they insisted on telling these stories. So convinced were they that Jesus was alive, that they would die before they’d say otherwise. Few people have been willing to die for a lie. The conviction of Jesus’ resurrection gave the disciples power they seemed to utterly lack before these events. In addition, if the disciples had been smart enough to steal the body of Jesus even after the suspicious religious leaders put it under Roman guard, they would have been smart enough to synchronize their stories. The four different versions of the resurrection that the Gospels tell read just like four witness who saw the same thing but remembered it differently. This is not so much an argument for the physical resurrection of Jesus as it is a testimony to the conviction of those early witnesses that Jesus was alive. We may or may not believe it, but they obviously did. And that made all the difference in their lives.”
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