Passage

Matthew 28.6

Book: Matthew · NASB95

Verse

"He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying." (Matthew 28:6, NASB95)

Immediate context (±2 verses)

NASB95 (NASB95)

"The guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, 'Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified.'"

"'He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying.'"

"'Go quickly and tell His disciples that He has risen from the dead; and behold, He is going ahead of you into Galilee, there you will see Him; behold, I have told you.' And they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to report it to His disciples." (Matthew 28:4-8, NASB95)

Setting

Speaker: an angel of the Lord, addressing the women at the tomb.
Audience: Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary" (Matthew 27:61; possibly Mary the mother of James, Mark 16:1), eyewitness testimony from the women who watched the burial Friday afternoon and returned Sunday morning.
Location: the garden tomb outside Jerusalem (precise modern identification disputed between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, traditional, and the "Garden Tomb" near Skull Hill, Protestant alternative).
Time period: "the first day of the week", Sunday morning, c. AD 30 (Friday-Saturday-Sunday counting inclusively as the "third day"). The first Easter morning.

Theological reading

The verse is the central declaration of the Christian gospel: Christ is risen. Two intertwined claims:

Empty tomb. Ouk estin hōde, "He is not here." The body is not in the tomb. This is the foundational physical-historical claim.
Resurrection cause. Ēgerthē gar, "for He has been raised." Aorist passive, the divine passive: God raised Him. The empty tomb is not because of body-theft, decomposition, or substitution; it is because Christ has been resurrected.

The verse is brief but evidentially weighted. The angel offers verification, deute idete "come, see", inviting investigation. This is NOT mythic-religious assertion shielded from inquiry; the text presents the resurrection as a physical, investigable, eyewitness-attested event.

Apologetic use, the four-fact case. Modern resurrection apologetics (Gary Habermas, The Risen Jesus and Future Hope, 2003; The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus with Mike Licona, 2004; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 2003) build on a "minimal facts" argument structured around facts nearly all critical scholars accept:

Jesus died by crucifixion. Universally accepted across critical and conservative scholarship, even John Dominic Crossan grants this.
The disciples believed they encountered the risen Jesus. Nearly universally accepted; the disciples' transformed lives, willingness to die for the claim, and unanimous testimony establish their belief.
The tomb was empty. The early Jerusalem proclamation could not have succeeded if the body were still in the tomb; opponents would have produced the corpse. The women-discoverer detail is unlikely to be Christian invention (women's testimony was not legally counted in the period, see Josephus Antiquities 4.8.15).
Skeptics were converted. Paul (former persecutor) and James (skeptical brother of Jesus, John 7:5) both attribute their conversion to encounters with the risen Christ.

The best explanation that accounts for all four facts: actual resurrection. Alternative explanations (hallucination theory, swoon theory, body-theft, wrong tomb, twin theory) all fail one or more of the four facts.

Patristic. The empty tomb and resurrection appearances are universally attested in the patristic tradition. Justin Martyr (First Apology 30, 35; Dialogue with Trypho 108, c. AD 160), Tertullian (Apology 21, c. AD 200), Origen (Against Celsus II, extensive resurrection apologetic, c. AD 248), and Eusebius (Hist. Eccl.) treat the resurrection as the historical bedrock of Christian faith. Augustine (City of God 22) lists the resurrection alongside the cosmological argument as a foundational truth.

Modern textual / historical. The resurrection traditions in the four Gospels show independent attestation with explanatory discrepancies in detail that mark genuine eyewitness accounts (number of women, exact angel description, precise sequence of appearances), features uniformly characteristic of multiple independent reporters of the same complex event, not of a coordinated fabrication.

Reformation. Calvin (Institutes II.16.13-14; Matthew commentary) treats the resurrection as the fulcrum of soteriology: without it, atonement is incomplete. 1 Corinthians 15:14, 17, "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless", is the Pauline statement of the same priority. Luther's catechism, the Apostles' Creed, and the Westminster Confession all give the resurrection central place in the Christian kerygma.

Connection to the apologetic-against-plagiarism cluster

The verse appears densely in ris3n's "Debunking Christian Plagiarism" notes (Attis, Dionysus, Hercules, Krishna, Mithras, Serapis, Tammuz, Zoroaster). The function: alleged "dying-and-rising god" parallels in pagan religion are urged as the source of Christian resurrection belief. The defense:

Most "dying-and-rising god" claims are post-Christian, when the comparative-religion claims are checked, they often draw on sources written after Christianity (post-2nd c. AD), or they misrepresent pagan myths (Adonis dies and stays in the underworld; Osiris is dismembered, not resurrected to bodily life).
The Christian resurrection is bodily-historical-eyewitness. Pagan dying-god myths are seasonal-vegetative-cyclical, not historical. The genre difference is decisive.
Jewish first-century context excludes pagan borrowing. The Jewish hostility to pagan religion in the Second Temple period makes any deliberate Christian borrowing of pagan dying-god mythology vanishingly unlikely.
The early kerygma is too early for pagan borrowing to have shaped it. 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 (the resurrection creed) dates within 2-5 years of the events.

Key words

G1453 - egeiro, egeirō (raise), the resurrection verb (passive ēgerthē)
G0386 - anastasis, anastasis (resurrection), the noun form
G2962 - kyrios, kyrios (Lord), Christological context
G3498 - nekros, nekros (dead one), "raised from the dead"