Many Saints Came Out of their Tombs: Matthew's Apocalyptic Anachronism

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

In the Gospel of Matthew, there is a strange scene, unique to Matthew, where people come out of their tombs the moment that Jesus died.

Matthew tells us, that immediately after Jesus’s death …

The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many. (Mat 27:52-53).

So let’s get this right. Jesus died and other “saints” - prophets or holy men - came back to life, but waited until Jesus’s resurrection to exit their tombs, after which they then walked around Jerusalem, and appeared to many people. And then what, they kept on living, or returned back to their tombs? And no one besides Matthew mentions it. Not the other evangelists, not Josephus, not Suetonius, nobody else. Apart from historicity, there is a theological problem. How can you have a resurrection before Jesus’s own resurrection since Jesus is the first-fruits and firstborn from among the dead in the wider New Testament?

What is going on in this strange text? A sci-fi reader might think it’s some kind of blessed zombie apocalypse. Jeremiah wakes up and walks around the city, not saying, “Brains, brains …” but something more like, “Well that was one heck of a dirt nap. What did I miss?” To be honest, it doesn’t give you great assurance of being historical! Does it prove that all resurrection stories are myths or poetry? What is happening in this weird text that we often gloss over when we read the Easter story?

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Michael Licona in his big book on Jesus’s resurrection calls Matt. 27.52-53 a “strange little text”(p. 548) which is quite the understatement. But it’s not that strange since strange phenomena like earthquakes and cosmic portents were frequently said to accompany the death of great leaders in ancient sources. Licona writes:

“[I]t seems to me that an understanding of the language in Matthew 27:52-53 as ‘special effects’ with eschatological Jewish texts and thought in mind is most plausible. There is further support for this interpretation. If the tombs were opened and the saints being raised upon Jesus’ death was not strange enough, Matthew adds that they did not come out of their tombs until after Jesus’ resurrection. What were they doing between Friday afternoon and early Sunday morning? Were they standing in the now open doorways of their tombs and waiting?” Licona then regards “this difficult text in Mathew as a poetic device added to communicate that the Son of God had died and that the impending judgment awaited Israel” (pp. 552-53).

In my chapter about the resurrection in How Did Christianity Begin: A Believer and Non-Believer Examine the Evidence, co-authored with James Crossley (London: SPCK, 2008/ Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010), I said in a footnote about Matt. 27.51-53:

“My understanding of this text is that it is not historical and it blends the present and the future together so that Matthew provides a cameo of the future resurrection at the point of Jesus’ death to underscore its living-giving power” (p. 69, n. 30).

Let me explain that further, in the same way that Matthew “mashes” the destruction of the Jerusalem temple (a temporal judgment) and Jesus’s return in Matthew 24-25 (the final judgment), here too, I think Matthew collapses the future resurrection into the Easter events and portents surrounding Jesus’s death. In other words, it’s meant to be a sign that Jesus’s death has cosmic significance and he’s previewing the general resurrection of the dead by interposing a deliberate “apocalyptic anachronism” at this point in the Easter story.

Greg Lanier tries his best to treat the event as historical in some sense, maybe it was Jesus’s departed followers who came back to life, kind of like the Lazarus story. But even he has to accept that this is a story loaded with apocalyptic atmosphere and meaning. Lanier says:

But this apocalyptic coloring doesn’t make Matthew’s scene unhistorical. Rather, it deliberately invokes Old Testament ideas to convey the significance of what is taking place. The eschatological Day has been inaugurated: the judgment of God has been brought forward in time, expressed at the cross, and the hope of future resurrection has appeared in part.

Apologies to Greg, but I don’t think it’s historical, but I agree on the apocalyptic coloring. I think Matthew is taking scenes from the end of history and blending them into the Easter story. The point of these strange verses is that Jesus’ death was a cataclysmic event which shows that the final Day of the Lord is near and it foreshadows what it is going to look like when it happens, i.e., the saints will come back to life!

And, for what it’s worth, I don’t see any reason why my interpretation or Licona’s of Matt. 27.51-53 does not conform to a view of scripture as infallible, inspired, and authoritative. I think it explains the text and it explains why you don’t hear Josephus or Tacitus talking about the day that many Jewish holy men came back to life.