Sure.  Like families of Chinese dissidents receive their bodies back.  With a bill for the bullet that killed them.  

But leaving my jaundiced attitude towards oppressive authority to one side for the moment, Josephus was not related to any of the three men he got taken off the cross and given medical attention.  He didn’t even know they were being crucified until he saw it himself.  He had unusual influence, because he’d turned his coat.  But that was a far more extreme case than just getting the body of an obscure penniless Jewish holy man, who had been entirely nonviolent, and believed his God would be doing all the heavy lifting.  

Jesus would have been perceived as a madman by the Roman authorities.  You know that.  Madmen can be dangerous, but they would have to have been extremely stupid not to have figured out, by the time it was over, that he was no physical threat.  (And the other kind of threat was so far in the future, nobody could see it.)  Unless we want to believe the high-ranking Jews in the city were as heartless as Matthew and John make them out to be, you must assume some of them felt remorse, and it would have only taken one or several Jewish men with influence (and money) to get the body off the cross, into a grave–and this was wise, as well as compassionate.  Jesus had impressed at least some of the local Jewish poor with his message–no one can doubt he was a charismatic speaker, and able to hold his own in an argument, and these are traits that are deeply valued to this day in Jerusalem.  Leaving him up there was going to remind everyone that the temple leadership had conspired with the Romans to crucify a rabbi, who some had thought might be the messiah.   Getting him out of sight was good politics–at least in the short term. With the Passover ending, the pilgrims leaving, the disciples fled–where’s the harm?

Is this the only way it could have happened?  No.  But when Bart suggests rotting on the cross was the only possibility–that’s looking for certainty where it does not exist.  That’s reacting to one excessively dogmatic argument with another.  

There’s plenty of evidence Pilate crucified Jews guilty of no violence at all–his attitude seems to have been take no chances, nip things in the bud, and he may even have gotten into trouble with Rome over that at times, since an overly harsh approach can create the very problems a territorial administrator is supposed to prevent–reportedly his successor was a lot more lenient.  

Part of Bart’s argument is that Pilate was casual about crucifixion.  But I can’t find any evidence he was a stickler for leaving bodies on the cross to rot, and I see plenty of evidence he had a give and take relationship with the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem.  He was only in Jerusalem for Passover, which was ending when Jesus died.  We don’t even know if he took any special interest in Jesus’ case.  The gospels say he did, and we’re mainly skeptical about that, right?  Well–selectively skeptical.  We believe any account that tells us what we want to hear.  Right?  

Can’t have it both ways.  If he wasn’t that interested in Jesus to start with, he wouldn’t care what happened to the body.  If somebody wanted it, he or some underling would have quite likely agreed.  Because that was an additional punishment, not always applied.  

And for what seems like the hundredth time–Josephus got three men who had been crucified for allegedly taking part in a massive military uprising against Rome taken off the cross and tended to–one of them lived!  There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to Roman crucifixion, and Roman ‘justice’ in general.  It’s all political, and the rules are pretty much whatever the person in charge wants them to be.  You can go from vicious cruelty to tearful compassion in a heartbeat. (A very bipolar justice system).   So there are no hard and fast arguments to make about what might happen to the body afterwards.  

So there is no basis for saying Jesus could not have been buried.  And all the accounts we have, going back to Paul, say that he was.  There were lots of Christians in Jerusalem by then.  And some of them would have remembered if he’d been left up on the cross to rot, because the entire point of doing that was so people would remember.  

It’s a very very weak case for non-burial.

Hngerhman said
There’s a slipperiness inherent in the argument that the executing authorities deemed Jesus be crucified – I’ll get to that below. But first, I want to take stock.

I agree that there is not a basis to say that Jesus could not have been buried. The case for whether he was probably not buried, however, rests on an evaluation of the evidence that speaks to frequency of non-burial. We do have some basis here.

Your very intriguing point that Cook does not put forth a frequency argument is quite interesting, in that, if true, it has the potential to upend the assumption we’re all discussing, which is that that non-burial was the default setting (which for me, at least, is based on Bart’s work). I have not yet read Cook, so I’m taking what you (and Robert) are saying about his work (in both directions) in good faith.

The situation, as I’m understanding it, is:

– We have positive textual evidence that Jesus was buried, and no positive textual evidence that he was not

– We have strong textual evidence that nonburial occurred, and some indication that it may have been considered the default (but perhaps not decisively more frequent)

– We have strong textual and archaeological evidence that (some form of) burial occurred, and some indication it was at the least more frequent than just a very few cases (but perhaps not decisively reasonably frequent)

– We have textual evidence that the non-Jesus cases of burial appear to have had some specialness involved with the appeals for release of the body

– Jesus’s story in the gospels inserts such a specialness in the appeal (Joe of Rama)

Please let me know if I missed anything crucial.

Now, the slipperiness. The problem I see with the argument of release of the body – without simultaneously relying on a specialness in the appeal – is that any argument that favors crucifixion also favors poor post-death treatment of the body, either through intention or cruelty or callousness. That is the issue: in the eyes of the executing authority, whatever argument merits Jesus hitting the threshold for crucifixion, then a parallel argument for poor treatment of the body is highly correlated. Not necessarily so, but practically so.

– If he wasn’t seen as entirely nonviolent, then it would argue for poor treatment out of intention

– If he was seen as entirely nonviolent, then it would argue for poor treatment out of cruelty or callousness 

It’s not impossible, but it seems very hard to find a wedge thin enough such that (a) the executing authority thought crucifixion was warranted but also (b) good treatment post-death was not. Why then crucify vs. private beheading or other execution?

Unless one invokes specialness of those doing the post-death appeal… Which then seems to suggest that if one wants to argue burial, then one has to help oneself to specialness in the appeal. JofA, or his ilk, starts to become *needed* to do the work for the account.

Until I have a better sense of the frequency issue (or learn decidedly that we have no real sense), I cannot yet claim that nonburial is a weak argument. I’m suspending judgment on it at present – but I will grant that if I either learn that burial was in fact reasonably frequent (with or without specialness in the appeal), or that we truly have no idea of the relative frequency, then the nonburial argument becomes much more tenuous.

But, the burial argument (without specialness of appeal) seems to have some real potential holes in it, too.

The fact of the matter in history is that it was either burial (properly defined) or nonburial (properly defined). However, a weak argument for one is not thereby a strong argument for the other. The arguments for both could be sufficiently weak such that taking a “no position” is the most justified route.  

We do not have strong ‘textual’ evidence nonburial occurred with Jesus.  We just know it happened with some people crucified.  The argument put forward is that we have very few bodies of crucified people–maybe two.  But the crucified were reportedly thrown into mass graves.  Where are the mass graves?  Bones last a very long time.  Dogs didn’t carry them all away.  “The dog ate it” is a lousy excuse in any century.  I think we don’t have the bodies because they were almost invariably poor people, and we don’t have most of the bodies of the vastly larger number of poor people who died of natural causes, either.  

My point is simply that if it was widely known (and it would have been) that the crucified rarely were buried, then the story of Jesus’ burial wouldn’t have been believed.  And opponents of Christianity would have thrown that in the faces of Christians at every opportunity.  Instead, we apparently had them insisting Jesus had not risen, but rather that his body had been stolen from the purported grave.  Meaning they found resurrection unlikely (understandable), but burial not at all.  

Meaning it was widely understood in the Roman world that burial of the crucified was commonplace. In extreme situations, such as the slave uprising led by Spartacus, they would leave the bodies up a long time, and make sure every slave even contemplating such a course knew the fate awaiting him.  But who would they be trying to impress by leaving Jesus up there, if he didn’t have any followers in Jerusalem?  

The argument for non-burial gets weaker and weaker, the more you think about it.  

It’s really not a big deal, and neither is you not wanting to discuss Greek mythology, which I’m even less well qualified to discuss–except that I am interested in the stories people of all cultures and eras tell–all stories are true, you see.  Especially the ones people make up.  

However, I still think that every Roman patrician grew up imagining what he’d do in Achilles’ place, when some supplicant asks for the release of a dead body.  We all have our fantasies, our role-playing games, that make us do things we might otherwise not do.  You might even say that’s our Achilles heel.  Oh please, you knew that was coming.  😉

Hngerhman said

We do not have strong ‘textual’ evidence nonburial occurred with Jesus. 

 

Concur. I hope that came across. If it didn’t, to be extra clear, we agree here. In the specific case of Jesus, we only have positive textual evidence of burial, and zero positive textual evidence of nonburial (obviously, putting aside docetic/gnostic accounts).

 

 
however, I think you’re wrong to think only dedicated followers of Jesus would pay attention to a crucifixion (public hangings were, after all, a widely attended event in later times).  

 

Funnily enough, we do not disagree on this point either – I just didn’t lay it out in what was already a long enough comment. 

 

But it may be the step beyond that where we part ways (I’m not yet sure). For this fact (that at least some noninconsequential number of people outside of Jesus followers witnessed the crucifixion) to matter is to assume there was a sufficiently meaningful interaction between the two groups in the aftermath. 

 

If we posit (as I think we both do) that the Jesus group was small, and then we append to that (a) it mostly scattered, (b) the core of the post-Easter believers were back in Galilee, and (c) when they did regroup back in Jerusalem, their claims were now quite different than when Jesus was alive – then I think we get a small group who weren’t terribly successful at convincing people in their immediate vicinity of their stories. And not intending to be pejorative but risking it, there was likely a bias of credulity within the small sample set of the population that became early post-Easter Jerusalem converts.

 

Let me try a different tack. What evidence do we have as to the size of the Jerusalem community pre-70? The TF doesn’t give us much to go on, nor does Paul, and Acts is, well…

 

I’d have to look more deeply into the actual population stats to have a better view, but it is easy to imagine (I don’t have want the availability heuristic to do too much of the work here, though) that there was not a lot of *meaningful* interaction between the small core Jesus group and those Jerusalem citizens who actually witnessed the aftermath to see where the body ended up. 

 

My point is simply that if it was widely known (and it would have been) that the crucified rarely were buried, then the story of Jesus’ burial wouldn’t have been believed.  And opponents of Christianity would have thrown that in the faces of Christians at every opportunity.

 

Yeah, I get that point entirely – it is a really solid insight you make. And it was precisely this point (plus your point representing what Cook does not say in his book) that got my attention earlier, and has led me to interrogate my assumption set around burial vs nonburial. Burial might have a stronger case than I’d previously understood, and nonburial might have a weaker case than I’d thought. But, as I said above, I’m not there yet on conclusions – I’m still trying to follow where the arguments lead me (and not the reverse). I am, however, coming from the direction of nonburial-town.

 
However, in light of my logic (crazy)train above, I think I’d qualify this excellent point just a bit. With the addition of an appeal by a special party (JofA; I imagine kinda like Jenny from the Block, but less of a dancer), the story is rendered believable to a first century audience. The textual evidence of burial that we have is highly suggestive of specialness in those cases where post-crucifixion burial occurred. So, I’d suggest we are not yet warranted in believing burial per se is therefore shown to be believable, but that burial in the wake of specialness of appeal was believable to them. That, I’d offer, is what the evidence supports. I know that’s a more minimalist approach to it than you’re laying out, so I’d love to hear why I should entertain greater maximalism here. 
As an aside, I’m aware but not deeply read here – e.g., I am familiar with the outlines some of the debates, like with Celsus and Trypho (but have not read them, only summaries). So I have to accept in good faith that what you say about the silence of burial incredulity in the opposing sides’ retorts is accurate. And I’m not aware of any counterevidence here.

 

If you’re going to say Jesus was seen as a threat by the Romans, you have to explain that.  If he had no following at all there, then why bother with him? 

 

It’s a great question, and a relative to Dr Fredricksen’s charge that one has to explain why Jesus got picked off but none of his disciples did (that we’re aware of). 

 

I think one can take a minimalist view of the evidence and still easily explain his crucifixion without him having a large following. He instigated an affront to the temple authorities in front of a “packed house” at Passover time, which caused something of a scene amongst a crowd that was vast majority not his followers, and he got picked off at night away so as to be away from these types of crowds. His message was an affront, and in that spectacle, eye-catching enough to spook the authorities. And then it comes out he doesn’t or can’t effectively deny messiahship charges (especially if Judas corroborated a messianic claim) – so he’s handed off for sedition charges.
 

One can get there without thinking he had throngs, or even a throng, of followers. If I were a iconoclastic rural holy man who descended upon an airport with a duffle bag screaming about the end of the world during an orange terror alert, I’d be arrested tout de suite, avec ou sans disciples.

 

When the executing authority has a hair trigger, small (in hindsight) threats get caught in the same net as large ones. And, to recall my earlier argument, when the executing authority has a hair trigger, post-crucifixion poor treatment of the body would be a more consistent outcome than compassionate treatment.

 

To invoke part of our shared position (I think?) on miracles here, “I don’t know…” But, I’m still trying to swim in all the arguments. Thanks for making some good ones to swim in!  

All quite reasonable, but isn’t it equally reasonable to think that once the crucifixion was over, and it became clear he wasn’t any kind of threat, that they’d all overreacted, that they’d just want to sweep him under the rug, so to speak?  Get him off the cross, into a grave, forget about him.  If only it had been that easy.  

If it was an invariant rule that those crucified for suspicion of sedition (without ever dong anything but turn over a few tables) got left up to rot, then fine.  It doesn’t seem to have been that.  It was case by case, as evidenced by the Josephus story.  Justice tempered with (very belated) mercy.  

I don’t need to prove Jesus was buried, because that’s the default setting–all primary sources agree that he was, and basically, nobody was suggesting he wasn’t until a few decades ago (except Muhammad), it isn’t the scholarly consensus that he wasn’t, there’s no evidence that he wasn’t.  

The only reason anybody says he wasn’t is to cast doubt on the resurrection story, but why would a rational person feel that was necessary, or even effective?  Saying he wasn’t buried isn’t going to change the mind of anyone who thinks resurrection of the dead is a thing.  It becomes a kneejerk reflex by some to shoot down every aspect of the story that is the least bit out of the ordinary, but what story could be more out of the ordinary than that of Jesus of Nazareth?  If it was all by the numbers up to that point in time, why did it depart so radically from the usual afterwards?  

Of all the people killed by Rome who had some kind of following, why did he–and only he–inspire such lasting devotion?  I think it was partly the man himself–his soul, if you don’t object to the term.  But I also think maybe something happened that his followers seized upon as evidence he’d risen.  It wouldn’t take much.  It definitely would not take a dead guy walking around with holes in his hands and feet.  

We have a mystery here, and pretending it’s all very cut and dried and commonplace isn’t changing that.  John the Baptist had a following that lasted long after his death, claimed he (not Jesus) was Messiah, but it never grew much, and gradually died out.  Nobody said he’d risen from the dead, far as we know.  Why not?  Perhaps because there was no such misunderstanding about what happened to his body.  Herod Antipas might have refused to release the body, out of fear of the strong movement surrounding John (stronger than that of Jesus, most likely) using it as a rallying point.  

Nobody said Jesus was left up on the cross to rot, that we know of. Why not?  Probably because he wasn’t.  He was buried, and his mortal remains certainly rotted, but in the minds of the people who had loved him, he remained alive, incorruptible.  They could not let him go.  They took up the cross themselves, and here we are.

Lots of things are possible, but what’s most likely?  That Jesus was buried.  His followers mainly never saw the body, but somebody was telling weird stories, and the stories inspired visions, dreams, and more and more creative variations on the original stories.