I have not covered all of the points that Craig Evans makes in his essay “Getting the Burial Traditions and Evidences Right,” which is his response to the position I stake out in How Jesus Became God.  My view is that Jesus probably was not given a decent burial on the day of his death by the otherwise unknown figure, Joseph of Arimathea.   In this thread I have tried to focus on Craig’s main points.   In my judgment, despite all the various issues he raises there are really only two of that are directly relevant and that need to be taken with utmost seriousness:  Josephus appears to say that Jews were allowed to bury their dead (Craig makes two arguments about this) and we have the skeletal remains of one crucified victim from Judea at about the time of Jesus.

First I’ll be dealing with the evidence from Josephus.  My view is that of the two arguments Craig makes, based on Josephus, the first also carries almost no weight and the second cannot mean what he claims it does.

His first argument seems straightforward, but in fact it is a bit convoluted – I will have to unpack it to explain why I do not find it persuasive.   This will take two posts.  Here is the argument, in Craig’s own words.

“Josephus asserts the same thing.  The Romans, he says, do not require “their subjects to violate their national laws” (Against Apion 2.73).

The Jewish historian then adds that the Roman procurators who succeeded Agrippa I “by abstaining from all interference with the customs of the country kept the nation at peace” (Jewish War 2.220)…

“… customs that included never leaving a “corpse unburied” (Against Apion 2.211).

Craig has made a clever move here, combining fragments of what Josephus says in one book devoted to one topic with another from another book on another topic, and then a third from the same book as the first.  The first and third quotations

come from Against Apion, a book in which Josephus, near the end of his life, defends Judaism against the attacks of a pagan opponent, Apion.  In this book Josephus argues, among other things, that Judaism is a very ancient and therefore respectable religion, that the slurs against it are unfounded, and that it is a highly moral and socially conscious religion.  The other book is called the Jewish War; it is a six-volume historical narrative that describes the history leading up to the Jewish revolt of 66-70 CE, and that gives a blow-by-blow account of the war itself by someone who was intimately connected to it, first as a general in the Jewish army, and then as the liaison between the combating parties, serving as an interpreter for the Romans, written after he had been appointed a kind of court historian by the Roman emperor Vespasian, to whom he had surrendered in the course of the war.

So, what do we make of Craig’s concatenation of these three passages from Jospehus?  It would help to take them one by one.

1)       The first one is from Apion 2.73 (reread it, above). I would like to make two points about it:

1. a. Josephus is not talking about burial laws or customs (the issue of relevance).  You can read the passage on line for yourself.  Josephus is referring to the national law of the Jews that did not allow them to make images, let alone images of foreign rulers.   If Jews were required to make images, it would be a violation of their religious tradition – as in, e.g., the Ten Commandments.  Josephus is saying something specific here: when the Romans conquered Judea, they did not force them to break their national laws against idolatry and so they exempted them from requiring images of the emperor, allowing them, instead, to pray for the emperor and sacrifice on his behalf in order to show all due honor to him.  Josephus is not talking about *all* Jewish practices; only about their customs with respect to idolatry.

You may say in response that even though that is what Josephus is talking about in this context, his general claim would still be valid, that Romans did not require their subjects to break their laws, and since there was a Jewish law that executed criminals were to be buried before sunset, they must have kept that law as well.  My view is that this generalized interpretation is a stretch, since burial customs are not in view in the passage.  But let’s say that the generalized interpretation does hold. Then what?  That’s my second point about it.

b. In that case the passage would indicate that Jews were not forced to break their laws by, say, executing someone and then leaving him unburied — since the law of Moses says that Jews are to bury their victims of capital punishment by sundown.  But there’s an obvious problem here.  In the case of Jesus we’re not talking about someone whom the Jews executed and then left unburied.  Jews didn’t execute Jesus.  The Romans did.  And they – not the Jews – were the ones who decided on when he would be buried.  Even if Josephus is taken to mean that Jews buried their own executed criminals, it is not relevant to the question of whether ROMANS were compelled to bury theirs. The law doesn’t condemn Jews for what foreigners did, only for what they themselves did.

Look at it this way.  No one would say that since the Jews of Judea followed the law of the Sabbath, and had to do so if they were to be faithful to their traditions, that therefore Roman soldiers  in Israel also were not allowed to work on the Sabbath.  Roman soldiers didn’t give a twit for Jewish law (with respect to themselves) and didn’t keep it in any way.  They didn’t keep kosher.  They didn’t keep Sabbath.  They didn’t keep the festivals.  They did what they, the Romans, did, not what the Jews did.

And it was they, the Romans, who executed Jesus.

Some readers on the blog have insisted that since the Jewish leaders *wanted* Jesus executed (I’m not sure of that, but grant the point for the sake of the argument) that this was the same as executing him, and so they were bound to bury him.  But wanting someone executed or even urging that someone be executed is not the same thing as executing the person.  It was the Romans who executed Jesus and who had to decide when and how to have him buried.  No Jews were directly involved in Jesus’ crucifixion.  And so NO JEW was forced to violate the law by not burying him.

Still, one might ask: wouldn’t Jews have been insulted by a Roman decision to leave a corpse unburied?  Yes, indeed, they would have been.  Just as they were insulted by a *lot* of things that the Romans did (e.g.:  Controlling the promised land! Requiring tribute.  Intervening in local affairs at will.  And on and on).  Possibly with respect to some issues the Romans gave way to the  Jews, for example, not requiring Jews to break the Sabbath, not making them eat pork, not forcing them to make statues of the emperor, not insisting that they make offerings to pagan divinities.  But on other issues, Romans were intransigent.  When someone was executed for crimes against the state, as, say, an insurgent or guerilla fighter or, worse, a “rival king,” the Romans were intent on showing to all that the power of Rome was not to be opposed.

Jesus was killed as someone who claimed to be a rival king.  If Jews had executed him for being a blasphemer, they would have been required to bury him by sundown.  But he was killed by Romans, not Jews, and for political sedition in opposition to Rome, not for blasphemy.  Romans knew full well how to handle people like that, and they did it with well-known ruthlessness.  No one could openly oppose the power of Rome.  And anyone who was even thinking about it could see full well what it would lead to: death on a cross and the further humiliation of being left hanging in full view for days.

2)      I will be dealing with Craig’s second and third quotations in my next post.