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.
Roman Practices of Crucifixion
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.