| PAGE Book | LOC Kindle | CHAPTER 25 |
| 166 | 4484 | (The story of the empty tomb) is one of the most heavily researched and keenly debated episodes in the whole of ancient history: Neill, Stephen and Wright, Tom: The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861-1986, Second Edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1988, pp. 308-9; Rowland, Christopher: Christian Origins, SPCK, London 1985, pp. 187-193; Sheehan, Thomas: The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity, Crucible, Wellingborough 1988, pp. 101-2. |
| 167 | 4501 | Possible explanations for the empty tomb: see also Sheehan: op cit, pp. 150-4 for a rather different discussion. |
| 167 | 4502 | There never was an empty tomb: For the case for the left on the cross/common grave argument, see Ehrman, Bart D: How Jesus became God: the exaltation of a Jewish preacher from Galilee (Kindle Edition), HarperOne 2014, Loc 2334-2471. |
| 167 | 4507 | Mark’s tale of the empty tomb was not meant to be taken literally: Bond, Helen K: ‘Seated at the Right Hand of the Father’: The meaning of the empty tomb narrative in Mark, Modern Believing, Volume 64, March 2023. |
| 167 | 4515 | the presence of a crucified body desecrated their tomb: I have inferred this from Ehrman, Bart: Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (Kindle Edition), Loc 2331-2340. |
| 168 | 4529 | Some scholars who should know better seem to take (the idea that Jesus faked his death) seriously: For example Barbara Thiering (Jesus the Man: Decoding the Real Story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Corgi, London 1993, pp. 154-160), a serious scholar who has been led astray by ‘sporadic fundamentalism’ (Sanders: The Historic Figure of Jesus, p. 55), the belief that particular passages in religious texts should be taken literally. The source of Thiering’s error is a literalist interpretation of tales of Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances in the New Testament, the apocryphal Gospel of Philip and a number of Gnostic texts. |
| 169 | 4573 | ‘Just a summary’: For Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances, see the notes for Appendix Two. |
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Paul Clark 