Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Religious Studies – Anthology
92Extract 8: Frank Morison, ‘Between Sunset and Dawn (2015)
Taken from: Who Moved the Stone? By Frank Morison (Magdalene Press 2015),
Chapter 8 Between Sunset and Dawn, pp.88–102.
It is st range t hat t here is no esc aping t he c loc k in all t his baffling st ory of t he
c losing phase of t he life of Jesus.
We saw in an earlier chapter how the inexorable pressure of events precipitated the
arrest, forc ed the hands of the authorities, prolonged the hour of the prelimina ry
hearing, and modified profoundly the c harac ter of the Roman trial. It is as though
everything in this affair was done under the lash of an invisible taskmaster, from
whose decree there was no appeal. So now, whether we realize it at first or not, we
shall find t he problem st eadily narrowing it self down t o an invest igat ion of what
was happening just outside the walls of Jerusalem about 1,900 years ago between
sunset on a c ertain Saturday and the first streaks of dawn on the following
morning. Let us begin by c onsidering in some detail the various hypotheses whic h
have been put forward to account for the facts.
There is, of course, one suggestion which few readers of this book will expect
t o be argued seriously. I mean t he suggest ion, so widely c irc ulat ed in apost olic
times, that the disciples themselves had stolen or abducted the body. I do not
propose to devote any considerable amount of space to testing the historical
ac c urac y of this c harge bec ause the verdic t has been antic ipated by the almost
universal sense and feeling of mankind. So far as I know there is not a single writer
whose work is of c rit ic al value t oday who holds t hat t here is even a c ase for
disc ussion. We know these eleven men pretty well by their subsequent ac tions and
writings. Somehow they are not built that way. There is no trac e of the daring sort
of ringleader who would have had the imagination to plan a c oup like that and to
c arry it through without detec tion. Even if it had been possible, and the disc iples
the men to do it, the subsequent history of Christianity would have been different.
Sooner or later, someone who knew the fac ts would have ‘split’.
Further, no great moral struc ture like the Early Churc h, based as it was upon
lifelong persec ution and personal suffering, c ould have reared its head upon a
statement which every one of the eleven apostles knew to be a lie. I have asked
myself many times, would Peter have been a party to a deception like that, would
John, would Andrew, would Philip or Thomas? Whatever the explanation of these
extraordinary events may be, we may be certain that it was not that.
We are left, therefore, with the problem of the vacant tomb still unsolved. Can
we get any light by exploring the various other explanations whic h have been
advanced?
T here are, in t he main, six independent lines of c rit ic al approac h t o t his
mat t er. Four of them assume the vac anc y of the tomb as an historic fac t, while the
others take the extremer view that the story is either entirely apocryphal or that
the tomb was not investigated under the c onditions desc ribed in the Gospels. Very
briefly these hypotheses may be summarized as follows:
1 That Joseph of Arimathea secretly removed the body to a more suitable
rest ing-plac e.
2 That the body was removed by order of the Roman Power.