What is the context?
While the women go to tell the disciples, some guards enter the city and report to the chief priests. The priests meet with the elders, pay the soldiers a large sum, and give them a story to repeat: the disciples stole Jesus' body while they slept. They promise to deal with the governor if the report reaches him.
This follows the deliberate securing of the tomb in Matthew 27:62–66. The people who asked for protection against a stolen-body claim now pay the guards to spread that very claim. Matthew contrasts it with the women's encounter with Jesus and says the account was still circulating when he wrote.
The passage describes these officials and soldiers making this arrangement. It does not assign their actions or motives to every Jewish person, either then or in later generations. Jesus, His disciples, and the women bringing the resurrection news were themselves Jewish.
How is this passage commonly understood?
Christian readings commonly understand this as Matthew's account of an organized attempt to explain away the empty tomb. Wesley on 28:13 points to the problem of sleeping guards claiming to know who took the body, while the US Catholic bishops' note on 28:11–15 describes the dispute as being over why the tomb was empty; no denominational breakdown is needed for that shared reading.
What is our position?
We don't have a position on this passage yet. When our study reaches a conclusion the text supports, it will appear here.