Cultural Background and Parallels
For many people of antiquity, empty tombs were seen as signs not of resurrection but of assumption, that is, the person being taken bodily into the divine realm. In Chariton’s ancient Greek novel Callirhoe, Chaereas finds his wife’s tomb empty and "All kinds of explanations were offered by the crowd, Chaereas, looking up to heaven and stretching up his hands said 'Which of the gods has become my rival and carried off Callirhoe and now has her instead of me, against her will but constrained by a better fate?'" In Ancient Greek thinking, the connection between postmortem disappearance and apotheosis was strong and there are numerous examples of individuals conspiring, before their deaths, to have their remains hidden in order to promote their postmortem venerations. Arrian wrote of Alexander the Great planning his own bodily disappearance so that he would be revered as a god. Disappearances of individuals to be taken in the divine realm also occur in Jewish literature, although they do not involve an empty tomb. Smith has recently proposed that the empty tomb stories in the gospels reflect traditions about Jesus' absence or assumption, in contrast to the resurrection appearance stories which were about Jesus' presence. He concludes that the gospel writers took the two traditions and weaved them together.
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