Why Women at the Tomb Is Actually Evidence
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About this video
If you were inventing a resurrection story in the first century and you wanted people to believe it, you would not open with women finding the tomb.
That isn't a comment on women. It's a comment on that legal culture. In the first-century Jewish world, women's testimony was generally not admitted in court. Josephus states it directly in Antiquities 4.8.15: "let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex." A fabricator writing for that audience picks Peter. He picks John. He does not pick the witnesses his own readers were trained to discount.
Historians call this the criterion of embarrassment: when a source preserves a detail that works against its own interests, that detail is more likely to be there because it happened than because someone chose it.
This doesn't prove the resurrection by itself, and it isn't meant to. It's one strand. But it's a strand that gets stronger the more you know about the world it came from.
Full episode: https://youtu.be/SG5W2DtZZ9M
Transcript (show)
Fact two, on the Sunday morning after the crucifixion, his tomb was found empty by a group of women. Two observations here. First, in the first century Jewish world, women were not considered valid legal witnesses. If you are inventing a story to sell it to a skeptical culture, you would never put women at the empty tomb. The fact that all four gospels do even though it was culturally awkward is a sign the writers are reporting what happened, not what would sell.
Second, Christianity was publicly preached in Jerusalem 7 weeks later in the same city to the same people. If the body were still in a known tomb, the authorities only needed to produce it. They didn't. Matthew records that the earliest counter story was that the disciples had stolen the body which itself conceds that the tomb was
Transcript from the video's captions on YouTube.
