Did the Jerusalem church fall for Mary's wrong-tomb blunder?

• About this question

  Did Mary, in attempting to visit Jesus's tomb, both mistake an empty tomb for being Jesus's and then infect the A.D. 30 Jerusalem church with her mistaken belief?

  This question plays a role in other questions, notably:

  • Did Mary discover Jesus's tomb empty?
  • Did the Jerusalem church publicly maintain that Mary discovered it empty?

• The church would have quickly found out

  The Jerusalem church would have learned of their wrong-tomb blunder if they did in fact blunder.¹ This is relevant because they never felt or learned that they had fallen for a wrong-tomb blunder from Mary.

  1. This should be granted for two reasons.
     First, if Jesus's tomb were not empty, everyone would know it by seeing that it was not empty

     • Craig Blomberg (NT professor at Denver): “Had the disciples or the women originally gone to the wrong tomb, the right one, with body intact, could easily have been produced by Christianity's opponents.” [Jesus and the Gospels (Broadman & Holman, 1997), 352.]
     • Gary Habermas & Mike Licona (NT scholar at Liberty & NT professor at Southern Ev. respectively): “If the women and disciples had gone to the wrong tomb, all that the Roman and Jewish authorities would have had to do would have been to go to the right tomb, exhume the body, publicly display it, and clear up the misunderstanding. …not a single critic is recorded to have even thought of this explanation for the Resurrection during the first few centuries of Christianity.” [The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel Pub., 2004), 98.]

     
     Second, if Jesus's tomb was not empty, they would know it by testimony, either directly from their enemies [Forthcoming], Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, or their servants/family, etc.).
     

     • Richard Swinburne (Philosophy professor at Oxford): “And above all Joseph…(and his helpers, including perhaps Nicodemus), would not just have left the real tomb (whose identity they certainly knew) uninspected for the next thirty years, when he heard rumours of the Resurrection.” [The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Clarendon Press, 2003), 177.]
     • C. E. B. Cranfield (NT scholar at Durham): “…it is difficult to imagine how [a wrong tomb] mistake would not have been quickly corrected.” [“The Resurrection of Jesus Christ.” in The Historical Jesus in Recent Research, eds. Dunn & McKnight (Eisenbrauns, 2005), 390.]

• Mary did not mistake Jesus's tomb

  

  In attempting to visit Jesus's tomb, Mary and the women with her mistook a stranger's empty tomb for being Jesus's.

  See this page to explore two evidences:¹

  • Jesus's graveclothes were inside.
  • Jesus's tomb was quite recognizable.