Why did the Jews lie about Jesus?

[Vicki Q]

Matthew never claims the Jewish authorities knew/believed Jesus had been resurrected. They were proceeding with a strategy to kill off reports that something odd had happened.

Really? They were paying off people with large sums of money not to make up odd stories? Gee, it must have been a really easy way to make money 2000 years ago: you just walk to Jewish elders and say: "hey, I just saw a pink dragon vomiting candy and singing 'Oh! Susanna'" and they would immediately give me large sums of money to keep quiet.

No, there was a vanished body, a load of stories doing the rounds, and some Roman soldiers with a very strange account of why. The authorities came up with an ingenious solution that kept everybody happy. It was the lack of a body and how the Xians were overheating that necessitated a response.

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To give a brief summary, the earliest traditions of Jesus do not allude to a bodily resurrection; the latter traditions are embellishments.

This is not correct.

The earliest accounts are from Paul, writing in the 50s, and with his use of anastasis and egeiro he makes it clear beyond argument that the resurrection under discussion is physical. These words do not get used of non-physical situations.

The next set of writings are the Gospels. Leaving Mark as a question Mark, the others all make a physical resurrection clear. There are the direct accounts, and the indirect allusions such as Matthew 28, the guards passage of the OP, which only make sense if the debate is over a solid body.

Then Acts. However one views Peter's speech, the use of Psalm 16 can only work in a mindset that says the resurrection was a bodily event in which Jesus body received new, physical life.

And so on. It's a consistent, clear message.

At this point 1 Corinthians 15:42-49 gets trotted out as a counterargument, but even there, Paul's soma psychikon/soma pneumatikon contrast would point to the resurrection body as the physical one!

Indeed, someone who had been killed, and subsequently appears as a non-corporeal entity is simply underlining the point that they're still highly dead. The whole thing the Xians were saying is that Jesus was alive.