The Synoptic Accounts of the Empty Tomb
(avg. read time: 12–25 mins.)
In anticipation of my planned projects for my volume on resurrection in the Synoptic Gospels and my Gospel synopsis commentary, and in celebration of the upcoming Easter, I would like to do a comparison of the Synoptic accounts of the empty tomb before the first recorded appearance of the resurrected Jesus. I could also add John here, but I will save that for the synopsis commentary, and it would be more consistent with my focus the last couple of months to restrict the scope to the Synoptics. While I am convinced of the authenticity of Mark 16:9–20, this study concerns the elements of the gospel narrative universally agreed to be shared among the Synoptic Gospels. Even taking Mark 16:9–20 into account, the fact remains that when the Synoptic Gospels narrate the appearances of the Jesus, they diverge rather significantly as to what details and appearances they recount (this is even more the case when we take John into account, which has a longer story to tell prior to Jesus’s first appearance). On the other hand, there are many similarities of detail and overarching areas of similarity between the Synoptic accounts concerning Jesus’s death and burial (though I have not yet done the sort of analysis I do here to see how similar they are). In between the accounts of his death and burial and the accounts of his appearances, there are the accounts of the empty tomb, how it was discovered, what happened there, and how people responded to it. The purpose of this study on the empty tomb is to do a synoptic comparison of the similarities and differences, and to comment on the significances of both. To this end, I will be employing the model I used in my study on the story of resurrection speculation in the Synoptics.
The following tables supply a textual comparison of each version of the pericope. The words in plain font are common between all three texts. The words in red font are common between two of the three texts. The words in bold font are unique to each Gospel. The words in italics are alternate forms of words that appear in multiple texts or synonyms. The words in brackets are variants. The addition this time will be similarity scores. For each text, I will give two scores of similarity to each of the other Gospels: one will be cases of absolute matching and the other will be cases of “weighted” matching, not counting variants (assigning a value of 1 to perfect matches, 0.75 to alternate forms of the same word and 0.5 to synonyms). There is no easy way to account for variation in word order in these similarity scores, thus my only solution to make note of these variations is to put a < symbol next to scores to signify that the verbal similarity is actually less than the calculated score would indicate because of the difference in word order where the wording is otherwise similar. The Greek is taken from NA28 and the variants noted there which make one Gospel text more similar to another are noted in brackets.
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