Matt. 27 : 52 Empty tombs?

[Prodigal Girl]

There must be evidence of a bunch of empty tombs in Israel, as per Matthew 27:52:

"The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they entered the holy city and appeared to many". (NAS)

I am wondering if this is known by the people who are very knowledgeable about archeology there, but not known by the average person.

[Nachshon]

I think they probably returned to the graves after they had testified. But that is just my thought. The Scriptural account tells us nothing about it, really.

[Mark]

Empty tombs are fairly common all over the world and thus are not considered strong evidence of any sort of miracle. Typically, they are attributed to grave robbers. Sometimes, because of political unrest, the one who dug the grave (keeping in mind that we are talking about a crypt, not a hole in the earth) was forced to leave the area, and the standard of the tomb did not meet the spiritual or social requirements of the new populace, thus it remained unused.

There are some real uncomfortable things about Matthew's testimony in Matthew 27:52-53. This is why many commentators will suggest that this text was added later and thus not reliable; however, all of the oldest manuscripts contain this account- and in the broadest circulation. Since universal preservation is typically a sign of authenticity, it is pretty hard to invalidate.

So, there are a couple of very uncomfortable questions that come out of this text. The first is simple logistics. How did these dead people get out of their tombs? Remember that Lazarus was bound head to foot and men had to roll the stone away for him. One of the answers is that these people had not been dead for very long and thus had not yet been embalmed or sealed in their tomb. Keep in mind that the idea of "many" is very relative. When you're talking about people rising from the dead, two would be a lot! What might also lead us to believe that we are talking about those recently deceased is that they were identifiable and recognized as those who had passed. If someone came into town saying that he was Moses, it wouldn't cause folks to proclaim that the great saint of old had risen from the dead, it would cause them to look around to find a quiet little room that he could spend by himself.

Textually, we are very uncomfortable with the phrase "and many bodies of the saints arose." Greek tends to be very specific and very accurate as a language. Why did Matthew choose to say that the bodies of the saints arose and not simply many saints arose? One hypothesis is that simply the bodies of these saints came out of the grave and into the city but nobody was home. The result would be, with much chagrin, to simply take them and put them back where they belonged. This would certainly explain why nothing was written about the strange occurrence in the history books- Globe magazine was not yet in publication.

Keeping in mind that these were likely recently departed folk, the community would not have been hugely affected if these people had simply come back to life and continued their natural existence (as we assume that many others who had been raised had done). Others suggest that after being seen in the city, they simply disappeared, advancing into glory.

We can hypothesize; but we'll certainly not know for sure until the movie comes out... I mean, we meet the Author and Creator of this epic story.

Mark