1 Corinthians 15:4

1 Corinthians 15:4. and that he was buried and how buried? “As the manner of the Jews is to bury” (John 19:40). All the Evangelists record the burial so circumstantially as to shew that the object was to preclude possible doubt of the reality of the burial. The body being taken down from the cross, when the death had been certified by the centurion, and committed into the hands of two of his disciples, a profusion of rich aromatics was rubbed into the body, and all the orifices being closed, it was swathed from head to foot in fine linen, and then laid in a new tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, hewn out of a rock, a tomb wherein was never man before laid, and a great stone was rolled against the door of the sepulchre. The chief priests and Pharisees remembering His prediction that He would rise the third day, and fearing lest His disciples should come by night and steal Him away, and trump up a story that He was risen from the dead got Pilate's permission to place their own guard of Roman soldiers to watch the spot and see that all remained undisturbed until the third day. After this day, if He was found alive, since the reality of His death was beyond dispute, His actual resurrection could with no decency be questioned. So vividly did the apostles realize the importance of this fact being quite certain, that they glory in using the naked word “ death” in His case, while the death of believers they hesitate not to call a “ sleep.” And in one case the term is significantly changed, in passing from the death of the One to that of the others: “If we believe that Jesus DIED and rose again, even so them also that are FALLEN ASLEEP, in Jesus will God bring with Him” (1 Thessalonians 4:14). Here also we have the naked terms “How that Christ died for our sins,... and that He was buried,”

and that he hath been raised [1] on the third day according to the scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas (on this name of the Apostle Peter, see on 1 Corinthians 1:12). To Luke 24:34 we are indebted for the thrilling information that the risen Lord specially manifested Himself to that one of all the eleven who when He was on trial for His life before the Sanhedrin had thrice disowned Him. What passed at that interview is not probably could not have been described. This, indeed, is one of those, not few, cases in which the silences of Scripture are as grand as its utterances then to the twelve the original number being here retained, as a general and familiar designation (like the Decemviri and Duumviri in Latin), though as was well known, “Judas by transgression fell”.

[1] Note the perfect tense here, in place of the usual aorist denoting His now abiding condition: “Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over Him”(Romans 6:9).

then lie appeared to above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain until now, but some are fallen asleep. An attempt has been made to find a contradiction here to Acts 1:15, where they are said to be only a hundred and twenty. But that those assembled in the “upper room” were the whole surviving disciples of Christ there is no reason to believe. Whether the appearance here referred to in Galilee, or in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, before the vast numbers then at Jerusalem to keep the Passover had dispersed, is uncertain. Anyhow, it is not at all probable that it was the occasion referred to in Matthew 28:16. However the matter be, no sensible writer could have ventured on such a statement virtually calling in some hundreds of living witnesses to attest the fact if he had not been sure of his ground.