Matthew's gospel raises the hypothesis only to refute it; according to it, the claim that the body was stolen is a lie spread by the High Priests of Israel.
In Matthew's account, the chief priests and the Pharisees know of prophecies that Jesus will return in three days, and fear that his disciples will steal the body to make it appear that he has been resurrected.
After the priests had assembled with the elders, they devised a plan to give a large sum of money to the soldiers, telling them, "You must say, 'His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.'
[3] The "faked resurrection" theory is the only scenario discussed in the gospels, although Matthew brings it up solely to refute it and claim that the tale was a concoction of Jerusalem's high priests.
A Jewish anti-Christian work dating from the 5th-century, the Toledoth Yeshu, contains the claim that the disciples planned to steal Jesus's body from his tomb.
[4] Another variant comes from a record of a 2nd-century debate between a Christian and a Jew, Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho: "his disciples stole him by night from the tomb, where he was laid when unfastened from the cross, and now deceive men by asserting that he has risen from the dead and ascended to heaven.
According to Reimarus, Jesus himself never imagined a religion like Christianity, and both he and his followers had been revolutionaries working for an earthly Kingdom of God after an overthrow of Roman rule.
In order for the switch in focus to work, they stole the body and left an empty tomb so that they could be respected leaders of a new religion, chosen by a resurrected prophet.
Anderson, dean of the faculty of law at the University of London and Christian apologist, said "This [the stolen body theory] would run totally contrary to all we know of them [the apostles]: their ethical teaching, the quality of their lives.
"[8]Graverobbing was a known problem in 1st century Judaea; the famous Nazareth Inscription details an edict of Caesar that mandates capital punishment for meddling with tombs.
[11] William Lane Craig dismisses these cases from elsewhere in the Roman Empire as too remote as they are "non-Jewish, non-Palestinian, and non-contemporary – in other words, irrelevant to Jesus.
[13] Dale Allison writes that "...some tomb inscriptions in pre-70 Jerusalem warn against moving or disturbing corpses, which is consistent with anxiety about theft".
[14] Geza Vermes also notes that "...interference with graves was not unusual, as can be deduced from the curse put on tomb desecrators...", but argues that "... the fact that the organizer(s) of the burial was/were well known and could have easily been asked for and supplied an explanation, strongly militates against this theory".
[15] Evidence of necromancy being practised likewise does appears in Judea, but after the region was repopulated by the Romans following the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 2nd century AD.
Also, he noted that the gospels of Matthew and Mark both record that one or more young men (or angels) dressed in white appeared to the myrrhbearers and told them to seek Jesus in Galilee.
Author and textual critic Bart Ehrman contends that while the stolen body hypothesis is unlikely, from a historical perspective it is still far more probable than the resurrection.
"[19] Tertullian, an early Christian polemicist, may have merely meant to mock those who doubted the resurrection by putting the petty gardener theory in their mouths.
Alternatively, the entire account of the guard and the chief priests can be discounted as likely to be an ahistorical addition written by Matthew to make the stolen body hypothesis appear implausible.
Among scholars, it "is widely regarded as an apologetic legend";[22] L. Michael White and Helmut Koester argue the story was probably added as an attempt to refute the Jewish claims that the disciples stole the body which were circulating at the time.
"[22] While the gospel accounts give good reason to believe that the disciples would not understand the resurrection until it happened, Craig grants that it is indeed harder to explain the chief priest's actions, although far from impossible – perhaps it was simply an attempt to ensure no trouble started.
Additionally, Matthew's account isn't as foolproof as an invented or exaggerated account could be – the Gospel of Peter has an explicitly Roman guard guarding the tomb sent immediately on Good Friday (rather than Matthew's Saturday), the tomb is sealed seven times, and the Jewish elders keep watch the entire time.
Additionally, Craig writes that the polemic mentioned by Matthew suggests that Jews didn't contest the existence of a guard at the time.
Christian apologists contend that a grave robber would probably have stolen everything, especially since Joseph of Arimathea was a man of means and the wrappings were likely to have been valuable.
[citation needed] Thus, the fact that women discovered the empty tomb first is seen as very plausible, and the (presumably devout) disciples taking the body is seen as a less likely explanation.
However, if a genuine conspiracy was afoot, breaking purity is unlikely to have stopped the conspirators, and grave robbers violate this law constantly by profession.