Final Contributions of Collection Countering the “Jesus’ Family Tomb” Hypothesis

This blog concludes the book review begun in our last two.

Gary Habermas, one of the most prolific writers on the resurrection of our generation, nicely summarizes all of the New Testament claims about Jesus’ family, his burial and his resurrection relevant to this issue.  This chapter contains the least amount of information not already well known to the biblically literate reader, but then there are increasingly few such individuals in our society.  Of course, the biblical claims can be challenged, but Habermas’ point is that the supporters of Talpiot-tomb hypothesis accept the information of the New Testament wherever it bolsters their case but then is happy to live with flatly contradictory information such as Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene and having a boy named Judah in order to shore up the provocative parts of their claims.  One can’t have it both ways.  Equally reliable (or unreliable) elements within a given story must consistently be endorsed or consistently questioned.

Michael Licona rounds out the volume’s main essays by reiterating what numerous previous studies, though often more technical in nature, have demonstrated.  When Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 speaks of Jesus’ resurrection body as “spiritual” (Greek, pneumatikos), it is in contrast to bodies that are “natural” (Greek, psychikos).  The same contrast occurs between kinds of people, more holistically, in 1 Corinthians 2-3, where it is clear that “spiritual” means “supernatural.”  So Paul by no means denies the bodily, material nature of Christ’s resurrection; rather he is contrasting its eternal, incorruptible, Spirit-energized nature from his previous mortal, corruptible body.  When he says, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom,” he is not denying that believers will have bodies in the world to come.  Instead, he is using a standard Jewish idiom for frail, fallen humanity.

Darrell Bock writes an unnumbered, concluding chapter, summarizing each previous essay in detail, with choice, lengthy quotations to retain the authors’ original wordings.  He goes on to stress how in our web-dominated world, the day is long past when potentially dramatic new finds are first assessed by conventional scholarly, peer-reviewed mechanisms.  We can be virtually guaranteed that the media, ever desperate for new stories in increasing volume, will latch on to any possible story, the more sensationalized the better, and broadcast to the world in every way possible the unevaluated claims they make.  Members of the public who want to make decisions informed by true scholarship will have to be content to wait the six, twelve or eighteen months (or more) it often takes for the careful wheels of true scholarship to turn and make definitive pronouncements that retain a high likelihood of being accurate.

All this has now happened with respect to the Talpiot tomb.  It is extraordinarily unlikely to have been the Jesus’ family tomb as bona fide biblical scholars and archaeologists of almost all ideological stripes acknowledge.  There will undoubtedly be more published works demonstrating this from many angles still to come.  Some will doubtless be more technical than Quarles’ volume.  But as a wonderful blend of accessible writing, buttressed by sufficient scholarship to rebut the claims of 2007, this work is sufficiently definitive and can be highly recommended to a broad cross-section of the reading public.