Was Jesus Buried?

The Gospel of Mark reports that Jesus was hastily buried by Joseph of Arimathea, after he petitioned Pilate for the body, placing Jesus’s body in a nearby tomb from his family’s holdings.[1]

But an alternative to the burial story is that Jesus’s body was left up on the cross as carrion for scavengers and any remains of his corpse were thrown in an unmarked grave.[2] John Dominic Crossan notes: “In normal circumstances the soldiers guarded the body until death and thereafter it was left for carrion crow, scavenger dog, or wild beasts to finish the brutal job. That nonburial consummated authority’s dreadful warning to any observer and every passerby.”[3] 

Bart Ehrman thinks we don’t know what happened to Jesus’ body, but he follows Crossan that “it is absolutely true that as far as we can tell from all the surviving evidence, what normally happened to a criminal’s body is that it was left to decompose and serve as food for scavenging animals. Crucifixion was meant to be a public disincentive to engage in politically subversive activities, and the disincentive did not end with the pain and death – it continued on in the ravages worked on the corpse afterward.”[4] He addresses that matter at length on his YouTube channel.

If that is what happened, then the burial story was invented by the early church in order to move Jesus’s body from a shallow grave to a more respectable tomb conveniently supplied by a Judean aristocrat.

It would mean that talk of an empty tomb is moot because there was no tomb in the first place.

The objection to the burial story does have some plausibility, Romans did crucify people, often en masse, and many if not most victims did not get a respectable burial.

But I think I can show Jesus was indeed buried after his crucifixion, and this was not the exception that proves the rule, because burial after crucifixion was not actually unusual. I’m going to give you six reasons why Jesus was buried rather than dumped in a mass grave as carrion for scavengers. Then, at the end, I’ll also reveal which of those two scholars I mentioned, Crossan and Ehrman, appears to have changed their mind on the burial of Jesus!

In sum, the authenticity of the burial story is established by several observations …

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(1) Its place in the earliest tradition attested in Paul is that Jesus “the Messiah died … and was buried.”[5] Earliest author, saw even earlier tradition, that Jesus was buried!

(2) The Gospel burial story is primitive, full of Judaean ambiance as it references Jewish purity concerns and Sabbath-observance, and lacks signs of legendary embellishment.[6]

(3) The Torah stipulated that the corpse of a dead criminal must be taken down before nightfall, because such a person is cursed by God and such a curse defiles the land, a practice confirmed by the Qumran scrolls, Philo, Josephus, and Mishnah.[7] This is precisely why in the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Peter Jesus’ body is quickly disposed of by burial, with respect to Dt 21.22-23 and the approaching Sabbath and Passover.[8]To reply that Jesus was executed by the Romans, who had no interest in respecting local customs is simply not true.[9] Romans did respect local customs, often releasing the body of  criminals executed for capital crimes.[10] The reason why the legs of the two brigands executed with Jesus were broken was to hasten their death, so they could be buried before sunset in accordance with Jewish law.[11] Pilate would not want to have offended Jewish burial customs during Passover with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims in the vicinity.[12]

(4) We have examples from Philo and Josephus of victims of crucifixion being taken down at the behest of family and friends.[13]

(5) There is also archaeological evidence for the burial of victims of crucifixion such as a man named Yehohanan discovered in a family at Giv‘at ha-Mivtar in north-eastern Jerusalem with a nail still lodged in his heel.[14] In addition, it is also possible that the crucified and decapitated bones of the last Hasmonean king, Mattathias son of Judah (aka Antigonus) have also been excavated, again showing the victims of crucifixion could be buried.[15] There might well be more evidence out there for victims of crucifixion, but it might not always be easy to identify them, especially if the victims were tied to a cross rather than nailed.

(6) That Jesus was interred by Joseph of Arimathea is very probable since a Christian fictive account would be unlikely to depict a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin as undertaking this generous and gracious act for Jesus when the Evangelists had a tendency to criticize and condemn the Judean leadership en masse for their part in orchestrating Jesus’s death.[16]

The account of Jesus’s crucifixion and burial is beyond plausible as it accords with the earliest sources we have, it agrees with Jewish custom, and archaeological evidence.[17] This goes to show that the hypothesis that Jesus’s body must have been dumped into a mass grave with violent criminals and insurrectionists is disproved.[18]

I think the conclusion of John Granger Cook is measured and fair:

Provincial officials, including prefects like Pilate, had a choice when faced with the disposal of the corpses of those condemned to crucifixion. In Palestine, where the evidence shows that Romans crucified Jews in the first century for political disturbances, prefects and procurators were able to do as they pleased. … [Then adds] Many bodies in the Roman world were left to rot on crosses, with no burial. Animals probably consumed those cadavers as they gradually decayed. There seem to be no texts from the ancient world that explicitly state that corpses of the crucified were buried in shallow graves. Some texts, such as the lex Puteoli, indicate that bodies were taken to places 'where there were many cadavers', but there is no statement that the undertaker's workers buried them carelessly. One cannot rule out the possibility that some crucified corpses were placed in open pits (puticuli), but Roman texts do not mention it. There are a number of texts that do prove the bodies of the crucified were occasionally buried by people simply concerned to bury the dead or by their family. Those texts show that the narrative of Joseph of Arimathaea's burial of Jesus would be perfectly comprehensible to a Greco-Roman reader of the gospels and historically credible.[19]

So we have good evidence for the authenticity of the burial story of Jesus.

Postscript.

I think Dom Crossan has changed his mind on this or at least mitigated his scepticism.

In a book he co-authored with Jonathan Reed called Excavating Jesus they affirm that victims of crucifixion were normally left to rot or cast aside as carrion for birds and dogs. But they note how “the Jews are so careful about funeral rites that even malefactors who have been sentenced to crucifixion are taken down and buried before sunset.”[20] Then later, they add that the Holy Sepulcher is one of the few early Christian holy sites with historical credibility as the place of Jesus’s execution and burial. They then “stipulate that Jesus was buried beneath what is now called the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.”[21]

Did Crossan change his mind or was he just deferring to Reed who probably wrote this chapter. Either way, the book moves from doubt, to agnosticism, to stipulating that Jesus was buried somewhere proximate to where the Holy Sepulcher now is.

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[1] Mk 15:42-47/Mt 27:57-61/Lk 23:50-56/Jn 19:38-42/Gos. Pet. 23-24.

[2] Cf. e.g. Horace (Ep. 1.16.48): “hanging on a cross to feed crows” and Juvenal (Sat. 14.77-78): “The vulture hurries from dead cattle and dogs and crosses to bring some of the carrion to her offspring.” Also Josephus, Ant. 17.295, War 2.306-7; 5.450.

[3] Crossan 1994, 153; cf. Ehrman 2014, 159.

[4] Ehrman, How God Became Jesus, 157.

[5] 1 Cor 15.4; cf. Rom 6.4; Col 2.12.

[6] Bultmann 1963 [1921], 274; Bornkamm 1960 [1956], 168.

[7] Dt 21:22-23; 11QT^a 64.9-12; Philo, Spec. Leg. 3.151-52; Josephus, Ant. 4.202, 264-65; War 4.317; m.Sanh. 6.5-6. See Chapman 2010, 117-49.

[8] Jn 19:31 and Gos. Pet. 5.

[9] Contra Ehrman 2014, 157 and with Evans 2014, 73-75.

[10] Evans 2014, 76-78, citing Josephus, Apion 2.73, 211; War 2.220.

[11] Jn 19:32-33.

[12] Chilton 2000, 270.

[13] Philo, Flacc. 83-85 (on the eve of a festival!); Josephus, Life 420.

[14] Cf. Zias & Charlesworth 1992, 279-80; Chapman 2010, 86-89.

[15] Evans 2014, 85-86.

[16] Cf. Acts 3:17; 13:26-29. See Allison 2005a, 352-62 on Joseph and the burial story, which is very persuasive.

[17] Cf. Magness 2006 and Cook 2011.

[18] Charlesworth 1989, 123; Hengel & Schwemer 2019 [2007], 655.

[19] Cook 2011, 213.

[20] Reed & Crossan 2001, 234.

[21] Crossan & Reed 2001, 298.