Who Guarded Jesus' Tomb?
Only Matthew's Gospel describes a guard being placed at the tomb, requested from Pilate by the chief priests and Pharisees specifically to prevent the disciples from stealing the body and claiming a resurrection; Pilate is said to have granted a guard and a seal on the stone. This detail is absent from Mark, Luke, and John, leading scholars to see it as material likely added to counter an accusation Matthew explicitly mentions: that opponents were circulating a story that the disciples had stolen the body. This suggests Matthew's account may be responding to a specific dispute current in his community rather than reporting an independently attested detail.
Whether the guards were Roman soldiers, more consistent with Pilate's reply "you have a guard" implying he assigned troops, or temple police, a Jewish security force with narrower authority, is genuinely debated based on the ambiguous Greek wording. Because this detail appears in only one Gospel and serves an evident purpose within that Gospel's argument, it stands as one of the passion narrative's more historically uncertain elements, useful for understanding early Christian apologetics but hard to verify as historical fact.
In the Maximus novel the detail of guards is deliberately not mentioned. Nowhere in Jewish teaching, prior to the Jesus’ death and resurrection, is any suggestion that “God’s Chosen One” would even die at the hands of his enemies, let alone rise from the dead. Jesus disciples went into hiding on Friday night, probably believing that since he had been “hung on a tree” he was cursed by God and therefore clearly not messiah. Why would they have believed he would rise from the dead? Or steal the body? No other Jewish contender as messiah and killed by the Romans were believed to have risen from the dead. The woman who went back to continue his burial process on Sunday clearly thought he was still dead too.
As Pilate jokes in the novel to Maximus, if the disciples did then invent the story, why did they say the women were the main witnesses? Why make an already unbelievable story even more unbelievable? That, of course poses the questions where did the story come from? Why have so many people, who set out to debunk it, end up believing it?
Enjoyed this article? John writes regularly about the historical world behind the Maximus novels.