Hello my friends it's Matt this is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast yesterday we started talking about the report of these guards who

Became exactly the opposite of what the religious leaders wanted them to be, which was reliable witnesses to the things which had occurred at the tomb.

They come back and they're telling the religious leaders about all of this.

That begs lots of questions, like, why are you going to the religious leaders instead of to your military superiors and what are you hoping happens here and what are the consequences for you not getting this one simple task right,

if you had one job, it's just guarded,

make sure that dead guy stayed dead and right there

and you blew it!

What are these guards thinking?

What is the culture like in which they live?

What kind of pressures are they under and how is that going to

affect the way this story plays out? We're going to look at that stuff today picking up

where we left off yesterday. At this time I'd like to invite my dear dear friend

Jeffrey to play some music and then we'll get back to it.

Why wouldn't they communicate to the pilot or one of the centurions who they answer to?

Well the reason is because they'd be risking massive punishment. What kind of

punishment? Like you're going to read a lot of books about the resurrection and stuff

where people speak with certainty.

They're like, oh, this would be the punishment every time in the first century

AD.

My digging around indicates that punishment might be more diverse, might be more at the discretion of a centurion,

but it wouldn't be friendly, ranging somewhere between a horribly dishonorable discharge and even being stripped of

rank and property, ranging up to physical punishment, ranging all the way up to maybe even death.

...