How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (21 page)

In any event, a burial by Joseph is clearly a historical problem in light of other passages just within the New Testament. I pointed out earlier that Paul shows no evidence of knowing anything about a Joseph of Arimathea or Jesus’s burial by a “respected member of the council.” This datum was not included in the very early creed that Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, and if the author of that creed
had
known such a thing, he surely would have included it, since without naming the person who buried Jesus, as we have seen, he created an imbalance with the second portion of the creed where he does name the person to whom Jesus appeared (Cephas). Thus, this early creed knows nothing about Joseph. And Paul also betrays no knowledge of him.

Moreover, another tradition of Jesus’s burial says nothing about Joseph of Arimathea. As I pointed out earlier, the book of Acts was written by the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke. When writing Luke, this unknown author (we obviously call him Luke, but we don’t know who he really was) used a number of earlier written and oral sources for his stories, as he himself indicates (Luke 1:1–4). Scholars today are convinced that one of his sources was the Gospel of Mark, and so Luke includes the story of Joseph of Arimathea in his version of Jesus’s death and resurrection. When Luke wrote his second volume, the book of Acts, he had yet other sources available to him. Acts is not about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus but about the spread of the Christian church throughout the Roman empire afterward. About one-fourth of the book of Acts consists of speeches made by its main characters, mainly Peter and Paul—speeches, for example, to convert people to believe in Jesus or to instruct those who already believe. Scholars have long recognized that Luke himself wrote these speeches—they are not the speeches that these apostles really delivered at one time or another. Luke is writing decades after the events he narrates, and no one at the time was taking notes. Ancient historians as a whole made up the speeches of their main characters, as such a stalwart historian as the Greek Thucydides explicitly tells us (
Peloponnesian War
1.22.1–2). They had little choice.

When Luke composed his speeches, however, it appears that he did so, in part, on the basis of earlier sources that had come down to him—just as his accounts of Jesus’s teachings in the Gospel came from earlier sources (such as Mark). But if different traditions (speeches, for example) come from different sources, there is no guarantee that they will stand in complete harmony with one another. If they do not stand in harmony, it is almost always because someone is changing the stories or making something up.

That makes Paul’s speech in Acts 13 very interesting. Paul is speaking in a synagogue service in Antioch of Pisidia, and he uses the occasion to tell the congregation that the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem had sinned severely against God by having Jesus killed: “Though they could charge him with nothing deserving death, yet they asked Pilate to have him killed. And when they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb” (Acts 13:28–29).

This may appear to harmonize generally with what the Gospels say about Jesus’s death and burial—in that he died and was buried—but here it is not a single member of the Sanhedrin who buries Jesus, but the council as a whole. This is a different tradition. There is no word of Joseph here, any more than there is in Paul’s letters. Does this pre-Lukan tradition represent an older tradition than what is found in Mark about Joseph of Arimathea? Is the oldest surviving burial tradition one that says Jesus was buried by a group of Jews?

It would make sense that this was the older tradition of the two. Any tradition that is going to lead up to an empty tomb simply has to show that Jesus was properly buried, in a tomb. But who could do the burial? According to all the traditions, Jesus did not have any family in Jerusalem, and so there was no possibility of a family tomb in which to lay him or family members to do the requisite work of burial. Moreover, the accounts consistently report that his followers had all fled the scene, so they could not do the job. The Romans were not about to do it, for reasons that will become clear below. That leaves only one choice. If the followers of Jesus knew that he “had” to be buried in a tomb—since otherwise there could be no story about the tomb being empty—and they had to invent a story that described this burial, then the only ones who could possibly do the deed were the Jewish authorities themselves. And so that is the oldest tradition we have, as in Acts 13:29. Possibly this is the tradition that lies behind 1 Corinthians 15:4 as well: “and he was buried.”

As the burial tradition came to be told and retold, it possibly became embellished and made more concrete. Storytellers were apt to add details to stories that were vague, or to give names to people otherwise left nameless in a tradition, or to add named individuals to stories that originally mentioned only nameless individuals or undifferentiated groups of people. This is a tradition that lived on long after the New Testament period, as my own teacher Bruce Metzger showed so elegantly in his article “Names for the Nameless.”
⁷
Here he showed all the traditions of people who were unnamed in New Testament stories receiving names later; for example, the wise men are named in later traditions, as are priests serving on the Sanhedrin when they condemned Jesus and the two robbers who were crucified with him. In the story of Joseph of Arimathea we may have an early instance of the phenomenon: what was originally a vague statement that the unnamed Jewish leaders buried Jesus becomes a story of one leader in particular, who is named, doing so.

In addition, we have clear evidence in the Gospel traditions that as time went on, and stories were embellished, there was a tendency to find “good guys” among the “bad guys” of the stories. For example, in Mark’s Gospel both of the criminals being crucified with Jesus malign and mock him on the cross; in Luke’s later Gospel only one of the two does so, and the other confesses faith in Jesus and asks him to remember him when he comes into his kingdom (Luke 23:39–43). In John’s Gospel there is an additional good guy among the Sanhedrin bad guys who wants to help with Jesus’s burial, as Nicodemus accompanies Joseph to do his duties to Jesus’s corpse (John 19:38–42). Most notable is Pontius Pilate, who, as a thoroughly bad guy, condemned Jesus to death in our earliest Gospel Mark. But he does so only with great reluctance in Matthew and only after explicitly declaring Jesus innocent three times in both Luke and John. In later Gospels from outside the New Testament, Pilate is portrayed as an increasingly innocent good guy, to the point that he actually converts and becomes a believer in Jesus. In part, this ongoing and increasing exoneration of Pilate is enacted in order to show where the real guilt for Jesus’s undeserved death lies. For these authors living long after the fact, the guilt lies with the recalcitrant Jews. But the pattern is also part of a process of trying to find someone good in the barrel of rotten opponents of Jesus. Naming Joseph of Arimathea as a kind of secret admirer or respecter or even follower of Jesus may be part of the same process.

In addition to the rather general considerations I have just given for questioning the idea that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus, there are three more specific reasons for doubting the tradition that Jesus received a decent burial at all, in a tomb that could later be recognized as empty.

Sometimes Christian apologists argue that Jesus had to be taken off the cross before sunset on Friday because the next day was the Sabbath and it was against Jewish law, or at least Jewish sensitivities, to allow a person to remain on the cross during the Sabbath. Unfortunately, the historical record suggests just the opposite. It was not Jews who killed Jesus, and so they had no say about when he would be taken down from the cross. Moreover, the Romans who did crucify him had no concern to obey Jewish law and virtually no interest in Jewish sensitivities. Quite the contrary. When it came to crucified criminals—in this case, someone charged with crimes against the state—there was regularly no mercy and no concern for anyone’s sensitivities. The point of crucifixion was to torture and humiliate a person as fully as possible, and to show any bystanders what happens to someone who is a troublemaker in the eyes of Rome. Part of the humiliation and degradation was the body being left on the cross after death to be subject to scavenging animals.

John Dominic Crossan has made the rather infamous suggestion that Jesus’s body was not raised from the dead but was eaten by dogs.
⁸
When I first heard this suggestion, I was no longer a Christian and so was not religiously outraged, but I did think it was excessive and sensationalist. But that was before I did any real research on the matter. My view now is that we do not know, and cannot know, what actually happened to Jesus’s body. But 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.

Evidence for this comes from a wide range of sources. An ancient inscription found on the tombstone of a man who was murdered by his slave in the city of Caria tells us that the murderer was “hung . . . alive for the wild beasts and birds of prey.”
⁹
The Roman author Horace says in one of his letters that a slave was claiming to have done nothing wrong, to which his master replied, “You shall not therefore feed the carrion crows on the cross” (
Epistle
1.16.46–48).
¹⁰
The Roman satirist Juvenal speaks of “the vulture [that] hurries from the dead cattle and dogs and corpses, to bring some of the carrion to her offspring” (
Satires
14.77–78).
¹¹
The most famous interpreter of dreams from the ancient world, a Greek Sigmund Freud named Artemidorus, writes that it is auspicious for a poor man in particular to have a dream about being crucified, since “a crucified man is raised high and his substance is sufficient to keep many birds” (
Dream Book
2.53).
¹²
And there is a bit of gallows humor in the
Satyricon
of Petronius, a one-time advisor to the emperor Nero, about a crucified victim being left for days on the cross (chaps. 11–12).

It is unfortunate that we do not have from the ancient world any literary description of the process of crucifixion, so we are left guessing about the details of how it was carried out. But consistent references to the fate of the crucified show that part of the ordeal involved being left as fodder for the scavengers upon death. As the conservative Christian commentator Martin Hengel once observed: “Crucifixion was aggravated further by the fact that quite often its victims were never buried. It was a stereotyped picture that the crucified victim served as food for wild beasts and birds of prey. In this way his humiliation was made complete.”
¹³

I should point out that other conservative Christian commentators have claimed that there were exceptions to this rule, as indicated in the writings of Philo, and that Jews were sometimes allowed to bury people who had been crucified. In fact, however, this is a misreading of the evidence from Philo, as can be seen simply by quoting his words at length (emphasis is mine):

Rulers who conduct their government as they should and do not pretend to honour but do really honour their benefactors make a practice of not punishing any condemned person until those notable celebrations
in honour of the birthdays of the illustrious Augustan house
are over. . . . I have known cases when on the eve of a holiday
of this kind,
people who have been crucified have been taken down and their bodies delivered to their kinsfolk, because it was thought well to give them burial and allow them the ordinary rites. For it was meet that the dead also should have the advantage of some kind treatment
upon the birthday of the emperor
and also that the sanctity of the festival should be maintained.
¹⁴

When the statement is read in toto, it is clearly seen to provide the exception that proves the rule. Philo is mentioning this kind of exceptional case precisely because it goes
against
established practice. Two things should be noted. The first, and less important, is that in the cases that Philo mentions, the bodies were taken down so that they could be given to the crucified person’s family members for decent burial—that is, it was a favor done for certain families, and one might assume these were elite families with high connections. Jesus’s family did not have high connections; they did not have the means of burying anyone in Jerusalem; they weren’t even from Jerusalem; none of them knew any of the ruling authorities to ask for the body; and what is more, in our earliest accounts, none of them, even his mother, was actually at the event.

The bigger point has to do with when and why these exceptions Philo mentions were made: when a Roman governor chose to honor a Roman emperor’s birthday—in other words, to honor a
Roman
leader on a Roman holiday. This has nothing to do with Jesus’s crucifixion, which did not occur on an emperor’s birthday. It happened during a Jewish Passover feast—a Jewish festival widely recognized as fostering
anti
-Roman sentiments. It is just the opposite kind of occasion from that mentioned in Philo. And we have no record at all—none—of governors making exceptions in any case such as that.

In sum, the common Roman practice was to allow the bodies of crucified people to decompose on the cross and be attacked by scavengers as part of the disincentive for crime. I have not run across any contrary indications in any ancient source. It is always possible that an exception was made, of course. But it must be remembered that the Christian storytellers who indicated that Jesus was an exception to the rule had an extremely compelling reason to do so. If Jesus had not been buried, his tomb could not be declared empty.