Hngerhman said
godspell said
A body hanging on a cross in full sight is something everyone would know about. That’s the reason you leave it hanging on a cross in full sight. So if that’s what happened, why is there no suggestion of that, anywhere?The issue of silence (lack of alternate accounts, lack of objections to burial story) is treated in the following comments:
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190To the extent you disagree with the above comments that suggest the silence argument doesn’t do sufficient work (which it appears you do disagree with), would you mind unpacking your thoughts a bit here? I’d be keen to understand it better.
Yeah, I kind of do mind, since I’ve been doing this for what seems like years, and it’s my day off.
But basically, if they didn’t try to pretend he wasn’t crucified (when that was a really serious problem for them), why pretend he wasn’t left to rot on the cross?
Bart says none of them witnessed the crucifixion, so why didn’t they airbrush that out of their memories as well?
They all believed he’d been crucified.
They mainly believed he’d cried out in agony and despair on the cross.
And they all believed he’d been buried.
And this is what differs from the story of John the Baptist. John was beheaded (not a disgraceful death reserved for slaves, por poor people, and criminals), and there’s no story about what happened to his body afterwards. Nothing seems to have happened. And he ends up absorbed into the myths surrounding Jesus.
None of our explanations can be proved.
But only one of them at least gives us some idea of why Jesus’ cult survived. They had a better story to tell. But the story had to begin somewhere. I think it began with a grave.
A quick burial of any kind might fit the bill.
But if he’d been hanging up there for weeks, that would have been remembered.
Bart wants to emphasize instances where the body was left to rot, because he’s trying to undercut the resurrection story.
But then why didn’t people back then try to undercut it the same way? “He was up there for weeks, everybody remembers.”
Because that didn’t happen.
Lots of other things might have. The argument for the body staying up was that this was the standard procedure for crucifixion, but there’s very substantial doubt that it was. It was one possible outcome, but again, the entire point of doing that was so people would remember, so the disgrace would linger, and the fear that something similar might happen to you if you didn’t watch out.
So why wasn’t it remembered? Because it didn’t happen. What happened instead? We’ll probably never know. But it involved a dead body and a grave. And not weeks afterwards.
It’s a lot less work to justify. The simplest explanation for them saying he was buried–and nobody saying otherwise–is that he was buried.
I’m saying the most likely story is some form of decent burial by fellow Jews (not followers), whose identities were not widely known. Second most likely is a quick unceremonious burial by the Roman authorities, which also creates the possible germ for a resurrection story (since a body could easily disappear from a shallow grave). Least likely is him being left up on the cross for weeks.
Crossan’s scholarship wasn’t strong enough to overturn past consensus, but his goal was to attract controversy, get noticed, and he succeeded. Bart did very little serious crucifixion research of his own for his wide-ranging popular work (an enormous amount of work to do there, no possible way to cover all relevant sources), and probably just skimmed the available sources on crucifixion (as he admits he skimmed through Cook’s book but in fairness, that came out the same year as How Jesus Became God, and he probably hadn’t seen it at all before he submitted his final draft).
Bart has changed his mind on many other things, and I suspect he’ll eventually backtrack on this as well .
But it can only ever progress so far. Bart just had a guest poster telling us there’s never going to be full resolution of most issues.
I feel like we’ve progressed just by reaching the point where some of us agree it’s not that likely Jesus rotted on the cross for weeks.
For more progress to occur, we’d all have to do a lot more reading.
But if we’re constantly posting back and forth, there’s no time to read.
Honestly, it feels like we’re just looking for something to distract us from our own impending burials.
(Or do you want to argue about that?)
I remember that one. And his best point is that probably the women themselves told the story–and women can tell stories as well as any man. What was the first version of the story, that eventually men took control of? Whatever it was, that was the rock upon which the Christian church was built.
Stephen, I really try not to assume you’re a complete idiot.
Well that’s heartening godspell. You assume much in your posts so you may as well assume I’m an idiot because I’ll be damned if I can see the relevance of the Josephus anecdote to the question of the disposition of Jesus’ body. The funny part is when I pulled down Prof Ehrman’s HJBG to refresh myself on the particulars of his argument I fully expected to be reading about it. After all it’s a famous Josephus story about crucifixion. When I finished chapter four I remembered a reference to Josephus but I was puzzled that there was no mention of the anecdote. I checked all the references to Josephus in the index to make sure I hadn’t just missed it, but nope, nothing. But after I thought about it I realized, “Of course he didn’t mention it! That story has nothing to do with it.”
Josephus used his pull with the Big Boss to try and rescue some old friends. They were taken off their crosses alive and despite a physician’s care two of the three died. (I’ve often wondered if Josephus made any attempt to contact the survivor. And what would the reaction have been? Gratitude? Or contempt?) . This story relates to the story of Jesus only in the most trivial sense, that both stories involve crucifixion.
Prof Ehrman’s argument seems measured and compelling to me. He neither claims too much nor is he afraid to follow the implications of his findings. What can I say? That an idea is unpalatable does not make it false. Would that it were otherwise!
We don’t know what happened to Jesus’ body. But we can say with some reasonableness what normally happened. And in the face of a lack of definitive evidence logic presumes that what normally happened is probably what actually happened.
Okay, I’ll make no assumptions, and try to avoid large words.
The ‘old friends’ were crucified for violent sedition (I don’t know if they were guilty or not, but Josephus says nothing to the contrary). The Emperor would assume they were responsible for the death of Roman citizens, perhaps even high-ranking ones. They were crucified, and probably the plan was they stayed up there a long time. And he just goes and talks to the emperor, and they’re off the cross, one of them lives.
Why doesn’t Bart mention it? I’m not sure, since Crossan does. He had no problem demonstrating the counterpoint to his case for non-burial–and frankly, it’s such a great story, he wants it in there. If people are reading his book, he’s happy. They can disagree all they like. He just wants to argue.
Bart, being less reckless and devil may care, cuts out all the contradictory evidence–you’d never know from his book that burial of the crucified was a very normal thing to happen, and wasn’t out of the question even for violent rebels. Of course he knows the Josephus story, which says the Romans made all kinds of exceptions, far stranger than giving some obscure rabbi over for burial after he was crucified for a bit of civil disobedience. He’s read Josephus in the original, and he’s read Crossan’s book (most of which he wasn’t impressed by, much as he likes Crossan personally). This particular argument in that book he found useful, so he edited it down. Only the same year HJBG came out, there was this huge book about crucifixion that knocked his assumptions into a cocked hat. The totality of evidence about crucifixion shows that it was not in any sense a given that the crucified rotted up there, and in fact they were frequently taken down shortly after death, and either given the same fate hanged men were later on (a quick cheap burial) or else released to anyone who wanted to pay for a more dignified respose.
The point, that you don’t want to see (because you want to believe Jesus rotted on the cross and the early Christians lied about that) is that Roman mercy could be as arbitrary and confusing as Roman punishment. So there is zero reason to assume Jesus rotted on the cross, when we have absolutely no evidence he did, other than the fact that this was sometimes done.
He, unlike Josephus’ friends, was not part of a massive military uprising–or any military uprising. UNLESS you want to believe Reza Aslan. Why don’t you? Honestly, if this were his blog, you probably would.
IF Josephus could get three violent rebels taken off the cross, given medical attention, THEN anybody with the least bit of influence in Jerusalem could have gotten Jesus’ dead body taken down and buried. And that’s the story we’re told. And nobody–not even once–suggested that part of the story wasn’t true. Until Crossan. Who neither Bart nor yourself considers all that credible overall. But Bart liked that one argument–and cut out all the bits and pieces that called it into question.
Now it really would take an idiot not to understand that. Let’s see. 🙂
Page 111 in Cook’s crucifixion book–a quote from Quintilian–a wife objects to her son’s burial, someone else responds–
Crosses are cut down, the executioner does not prevent those who have been struck/pierced from being buried.
The actual point derived from this in the book is that piercing the sides of the crucified may in fact have been a common practice. But it is also evidence that the pagan world did not automatically associate crucifixion with non-burial.
Page 239: (a quote from Josephus, relating to the Jewish war)
They actually went so far in their impiety as to cast out the corpses without burial, although the Jews are so careful about funeral rites that even malefactors who have been sentenced to crucifixion are taken down and buried before sunset.
To which Cook adds:
The text indicates that crucified individuals in Palestine were buried, at least in Josephus’ estimation. I will not include the testimonium Flavianum here, because the passage about Jesus in Josephus’s text has been worked over by Christian scribes. At the least one may conclude that Josephus knew about Jesus’ crucifixion.
Pages 385-387 refers to the burial pits for crucified people denied proper burial–which archaeologists have not discovered, although the bones would certainly survive (who seriously believes dogs carried them all away?). It is clear that the main reason for this practice was poverty, not punishment. The crucified were mainly at the bottom of the social scale, and their remains were treated not much differently than the average slave or poor person who died without the resources to afford a proper grave. Cook goes on to quote another passage–
The corpses of those who were sentenced to die are not to be withheld from their relatives: the divine Augustus writes in the tenth book of his autobiography that he had observed this rule. Today, however, the corpses of executed people are buried as if permission had been asked for and granted, with some exceptions, especially when the charge was high treason. Even the bodies of those condemned to be burned at the stake can be claimed, obviously so that bones and ashes can be collected and buried.
Cook continues:
There are historical and fictional references to the burial of crucified bodies. The lex apparently does not make provision for allowing the corpses of the crucified to rot on their crosses.
Emphasis added, naturally.
Was Jesus in fact convicted of high treason? For knocking over tables, and speaking of some future supernatural event that would lead to the overthrow of Rome (and all other empires and kingdoms?) Apparently it was possible to be crucified simply for consulting an astrologer about the emperor’s health. (Something similar happened in Henry VIII’s England–you would have been ill advised to say you had a dream about the king dying back then).
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I don’t see anything here terribly applicable to the case of Jesus. But of course, Josephus is all the evidence we need to cast doubt on the notion that even those who resorted to violence to end Roman rule were always left up to rot.
Let’s just say that there would have been a great deal of leeway with regards to the treatment of the body, and that leaving the body to rot on the cross was not really a formal part of the legal code, that anyone can determine. It was just something done if the authorities wanted to make a really strong point (such as after the Spartacus rebellion was crushed). If they were concerned that others might emulate the deceased, and of course it would have to be someone fairly special. Someone with enough status to be worth humiliating.
There’s really no evidence that it was all that commonplace to leave the body up there a long time. I think the preponderance of evidence shows that burial was much more common–and basic public hygiene would make that likely.
But I certainly agree that if nobody asked for his body, Jesus would have been taken down and given a beggar’s grave, at most. Probably very shortly after he died.
Josephus, however, seems to indicate there was a strong opposition among the Jews to allowing this. And that the Romans were largely disinclined to prevent them from showing respect for their dead–even if the dead in question were not people the Jewish authorities thought highly of. They were still Jews. And they had their codes, even as the Romans did.
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