Did Jesus Receive a Decent Burial?
According to our earliest account, the Gospel of Mark, Jesus was buried by a previous unnamed and unknown figure, Joseph of Arimathea, “a respected member of the council” (Mark 15:43)—that is, a Jewish aristocrat who belonged to the Sanhedrin, which was the ruling body made up of “chief priests, elders, and scribes” (14:53). According to Mark 15:43, Joseph summoned up his courage and asked Pilate for Jesus’s body. Pilate granted Joseph his wish, and Joseph took the body from the cross, wrapped it in a linen shroud, “laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock,” and then rolled a stone in front of it (15:44–47). Mary Magdalene and another woman named Mary saw where this happened (15:48).
Let me stress that all of this—or something very much like it—needs to happen within Mark’s narrative in order for what happens next to make sense, namely, that on the day after the Sabbath, Mary Magdalene and two other women go to the tomb and find it empty. If there were no tomb for Jesus, or if no one knew where the tomb was, the bodily resurrection could not be proclaimed. You have to have a known tomb.
But was there one? Did Joseph of Arimathea really bury Jesus?
General Considerations
There are numerous reasons for doubting the tradition of Jesus’s burial by Joseph. For one thing, it is hard to make historical sense of this tradition just within the context of Mark’s narrative. Joseph’s identification as a respected member of the Sanhedrin should immediately raise questions. Mark himself said that at Jesus’s trial, which took place the previous evening, the “whole council” of the Sanhedrin (not just some or most of them—but all of them) tried to find evidence “against Jesus to put him to death” (14:55). At the end of this trial, because of Jesus’s statement that he was the Son of God (14:62), “they all condemned him as deserving death” (14:64). In other words, according to Mark, this unknown person, Joseph, was one of the people who had called for Jesus’s death just the night before he was crucified. Why, after Jesus is dead, is he suddenly risking himself (as implied by the fact that he had to gather up his courage) and seeking to do an act of mercy by arranging for a decent burial for Jesus’s corpse? Mark gives us no clue.6 My hunch is that the trial narrative and the burial narrative come from different sets of traditions inherited by Mark. Or did Mark simply invent one of the two traditions himself and overlook the apparent discrepancy?
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 welclass="underline" “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.