Stephen said
Jeepers, when did Christianity become a matter of proofs and not a matter of faith? . . .
Probably about the time that the Church started creating (er, collecting) relics and parading them around for the faithful. There is always the tacit admission that faith and doubt are unhappy companions.
Edit: In the Disney movie Darby O’Gill and the Little People, there is a scene where old Darby has the king of the leprechauns captive in a large brown sack. The king refuses to allow anyone but Darby see him, except as a rabbit (which, of course, lets everyone think that Darby is just a poacher). But when Darby takes the king to the local pub, being fond of a drink, he does agree to a glass of whiskey, which is prepared and handed to Darby with much attention, lowered into the sack, drained then thrown back out. The pub owner catches the glass with some amazement, and Darby walks out feeling that everyone understands that the sack contains no mere rabbit. After he leaves, the owner takes the glass and puts it back on a high shelf, as a place of pride, and says “and if anyone doubts the tale, there is the very glass.” This episode, I think, shows the nature of thought in the matter of relics. It is merely a glass; it proves nothing beyond its own existence — but what it really is, rather than proof, is a tangible reminder. Unfortunately, one of the things that such reminders often serve as is to remind us is that there really is no tangible proof, nor probably can there be.
One thing I just thought of is that it may have been in the best interests of the Romans to take down Jesus’ body. If the charge against him was that he was a revolutionary, then leaving his body up too long could anger the population even more. They would have achieved their goal of stopped a rebellion by humiliating Jesus, but it may not have been helpful to leave him up to rot.
cstu said
One thing I just thought of is that it may have been in the best interests of the Romans to take down Jesus’ body. If the charge against him was that he was a revolutionary, then leaving his body up too long could anger the population even more. They would have achieved their goal of stopped a rebellion by humiliating Jesus, but it may not have been helpful to leave him up to rot.
I believe that the idea of leaving a body to rot was precisely as a warning that “you might be next,” which was presumably a very effective means of discouraging others. In the case of Jesus, he had too few followers at the time, and they were not really organized in any meaningful way, such that they were hardly much of a concern. Indeed, if one were afraid of angering a large group, it is hard to imagine how much more that group could be riled up than by executing its leader. The very act of execution is a sign of power over that group as well as being an action to remove that person from a position of being able to plan and coordinate future trouble. For really important enemies, Rome liked to parade them through the streets in a big show before executing them. The whole public aspect was a key point. Some enemies, showing sufficient fealty, might be kept alive as an even greater show of power.
I leaned pretty strongly to BDE’s position on this until I started looking at the evidence.
(as to that evidence–here is the ** you do not have permission to see this link ** an especially helpful collection of relevant material on the topic.)
I think there are at least three questions:
First, what did Romans usually do? Would allowing a crucified criminal to be buried be strange and unusual?
The evidence seems to me to be mixed on this. Certainly the Romans sometimes allowed burial for the crucified (We have both written and archeological evidence that the crucified were sometimes afforded burial), but just as certainly there are individual cases when they didn’t. There is evidence that disallowing burial was considered, at least in the popular imagination, the norm. I think one needs to proceed with some caution in drawing conclusion here, as it doesn’t strike me as at all cut and dry.
Second, what was done in Roman Judea?
Romans had a respect for the Jewish religion, and there are well-known cases where the Romans made exceptions to their general laws to accommodate the Jews’ religion, so, even if the usual Roman practice was to leave the body out as carrion, might they have decided to accommodate the requirement of Deut. 21:22-23? I think Josephus’s saying that the Jews rushed to bury even the crucified is pretty much probative; I don’t see any reason to question his testimony that this was the Jewish practice, and if it was the Jewish practice, it must have been permitted, at least in some significant number of cases, by Roman authorities.
Two other lesser considerations render this situation reported by Josephus, to my mind, plausible. The first is that the law in Deut. is not concerned with honoring the criminal. On the contrary, the motivation for the law was that even the criminal’s corpse was accursed and had to be removed from the land ASAP. And the effect of this would have been that the criminal would be denied the ordinary funeral rites and mourning simply for want of time (funerals would always have been arranged with a certain promptness, Jn 11:39, but not on the same day as the death; the practice of holding the body prior to the interment was, btw, the whole point of applying spices to the body). In other words, while the Jewish practice might be the opposite of typical Roman practice (a rushed burial as opposed to no burial), they both sent similar messages–this person is a criminal who is not to be honored in the usual ways even in death.
Third, what was done in the case of Jesus?
I think the unanimous testimony of the earliest Christian sources (not just the Gospels but Paul), viz., that Jesus was buried, can’t be overlooked. The authors were people who lived in the first-century Roman empire and they were writing to other people who lived in the first-century Roman empire. If the burial of a crucified criminal was exceptionally unusual, we would expect something to be said to explain it. And one hardly expects something that defies the regular practice–known to all–to have been invented by the earliest Christians, especially as they didn’t need to invent the burial: you can have a resurrection, even a bodily resurrection, without a prior burial; likewise you don’t need to invent an obscure figure like Joseph of Arimathea to move the plot along.
So, putting it all together, here is my very speculative suggestion: Joseph of Arimathea was real, he was a member of the Sanhedrin, and he did request and receive the body of Jesus from Pilate for burial. This was not because he was a secret follower of Jesus, but simply because he was an observant Jew who had been directly involved in condemning a man hanged from a tree and was thus bound by the law to bury him before sunset. Pilate consented to this because it was good policy both in general (letting the Jews practice their religion), and because he had a good working relationship with the Sanhedrin–they were valuable cooperators (witness that they were the one who tracked down and arrested this “King of the Jews” for him) and he wanted to keep them happy as long as it didn’t cost him much. Moreover, Pilate would have known that Joseph wasn’t asking for the body because he was a sympathizer who wanted to honor Jesus, he was one of the men who had had him crucified.
Now, once you have a situation in which Jesus was given a rushed, and dishonorable burial by his enemies, you can start to imagine all the ways that an empty tomb story might have arisen. The women returning with spices, for example, makes perfect sense, if they intended to re-inter the body in a more suitable location–and there are any number of ways that a body might have gone missing from e.g., a perfunctory shallow grave in the intervening day.
Yes, Porphyry, but a reasonable and naturalistic explanation, in addition to being no more provable than any other idea, will please neither of the opposing camps. The ardent Christians will want their bodily resurrection, and the ardent Atheists will want that body safely buried and forgotten.
JAS said
Yes, Porphyry, but a reasonable and naturalistic explanation . . . will please neither of the opposing camps.
I see and accept your compliment with gratitude.
The ardent Christians will want their bodily resurrection, and the ardent Atheists will want that body safely buried and forgotten.
I thought the atheists wanted to say he was never buried, so any story that included a burial could be dismissed as pure Christian fantasy–thus all resurrection accounts could be written off in one stroke.
Porphyry said
I thought the atheists wanted to say he was never buried, so any story that included a burial could be dismissed as pure Christian fantasy–thus all resurrection accounts could be written off in one stroke.
They want him left rotting on the cross, and whatever might be left as buried in a mass grave. As I have previously noted, the empty tomb story is very dramatic, but it is not necessary for the resurrection part of the story. Whenever the story was written down, they would surely have known what was the absolute practice and been reluctant to totally make up a detail that everyone would reject out of hand. (None of this necessarily makes the story true, but the claims about Roman practices is hardly the slam dunk that some seem to think.)
JAS said
Whenever the story was written down, they would surely have known what was the absolute practice and been reluctant to totally make up a detail that everyone would reject out of hand. (None of this necessarily makes the story true, but the claims about Roman practices is hardly the slam dunk that some seem to think.)
Exactly. This seems to me a case of some scholars getting out in front of their skis.
…here is the ** you do not have permission to see this link ** that Stephen mentioned above…
Yes thanks Robert and Porphyry, no need to worry about the rest of the thread. When driving by the accident scene on the highway you can’t not look so I reread my post. I’ll stand by that. The bit at the end was exasperation at godspell’s obtuseness.
I thought the atheists wanted to say…
What atheists want to say is that they don’t believe God exists. This atheist is interested in historical critical questions (not all are) but my atheism is not dependent on the question of the disposition of Jesus’ body.
Whenever the story was written down, they would surely have known what was the absolute practice and been reluctant to totally make up a detail that everyone would reject out of hand.
Or consider the possibility that if they knew Jesus’ body was left on the cross and the gore disposed of in a shallow grave, the horror at that might have been impetus to create stories of a special burial.
JAS said
Don’t tell Mel Gibson that — he seems to revel in the gore and suffering.
Not to get completely off the subject but I was astounded at the movie P of the C. Pure torture porn. Millions of American Christians willingly sitting through it who would be terrified at sitting through a movie that depicted human beings making love. A religion whose central image is that of a man being tortured to death is going to have a strong sadomasochistic strain. Surely pagans f*&^ing in a field to make the crops grow was better than that!
John Dominic Crossan’s view, which I think has merit, is that Jesus was simply not an important figure to the Romans. They crucified him for causing a disruption in the Temple, scattering money, creating a major headache as far as who among the traders and money changers originally had how much money, which they now wanted back. This sort of disturbance was exactly the sort of thing that the Roman’s would swiftly deal with. There wasn’t a need for a trial, he was guilty by his actions, the whole business of the Temple Jews saying he was claiming to be God wouldn’t be something the Romans cared about. So he’s crucified and stays there, eventually they take the body down and the dogs get it.
But as a narrative, this can’t go into the Gospels, so they elevate Jesus to a trial and condemnation by the Temple priests, because the Gospels were being written for Pauline Gentiles. Never happened, no body, no resurrection. You can see why this would be a problem to a Pauline Jesus movement which was based on the idea of resurrection as central to the movement.
sssboa said
So Bart is saying that the crucified stayed on crosses for days until fell apart and no one ever wrote otherwise, which is to add to doubts about the empty tomb story.I am just reading Eisenman’s “James the brother of Jesus…” and he quotes Josephus Flavius writing (doesn’t say in which book):
“…the Jews would take so much care for the burial of men, that they even took down malefactors, condemned to crucifixion, and buried them before the setting of the sun.”
So how does it measure against what Bart is saying? Is Eisenman misquoting Flavius?
Thanks,
Andy
Roman crucifixion practices took place over the course of nearly a millennium over thousands of miles, with different cultures, local laws, customs, etc., and with different Roman governments!
It’s almost like trying to argue that the Salem Witch Trials never could have happened because Massachusetts courts granted the accused due process rights.
It’s always been a really strange hill for Bart to die on, and one of two examples — his belief that Papias wasn’t referring to our Mark or our Matthew — of where I view his hostility to NT historicity has compelled him to defend really, really, really weak, implausible arguments.
It’s not just Josephus, or the Digesta; we have physical evidence from the ossuary of Yehohanan, a First Century Jew put to death by crucifixion and later given a proper Jewish burial in Jerusalem.
cstu said
JAS said
Well, not to start it all up again, all we have is a statement that the official policy was to let the body rot and then an anonymous, mass burial. But given the routine nature of such executions, no one should really need or expect specific documentation on how well that policy was followed in every case. Anyone who has ever dealt with official policy knows how frequently they are not adhered to. The two potentially special aspects for Jesus are first that he was not an especially important character, and it may not have been all that useful to adhere to the policy in his case. Second, he had a small group of people who were actually interested in what happened to the body, and may have been willing to carry out the act. Can I prove it? Of course not, but neither can anyone prove that the policy was rigidly adhered to in every case (which would be highly unusual). A third consideration is that the writers of the gospels likely also knew of how such matters were handled, and had no particular reason to invent a change of this sort that would likely be questioned. The story at the tomb makes for a certain degree of drama, but it is in no way essential for the story line. Might it have been made up? Sure, but it might also not have been made up. No answer can really be proven.
No answer can be proven, but I find it unlikely the Romans deviated from the norm in Jesus’ case. Maybe I could see them being a little lax at a different time of year at a different place, but not during Passover in Jerusalem. I think it’s most probable that they made an example of Jesus and humiliated him the most they could to discourage future uprisings.
But we don’t know what the norm was for First Century crucifixions in Judea. If one goes by Josephus, then removal from the cross would seem consistent with the norm.
Stephen said
I’m not sure how anyone could get anything other than this from my statement but I will stipulate that we have no idea what happened to Jesus’ body. Only fundamentalists would disagree I think. Jesus’ fate would seem to be an excellent point on which to suspend judgement and let the ones with axes to grind fight it out.Actually I have a pet hypothesis about the Empty Tomb. I suspect it was a literary conceit invented by Mark. Consider the ET as an aniconic (non-representational) image of the resurrection. You depict the resurrection not by clumsy post-mortem appearances (you leave that to lesser interpreters) but by depicting an empty tomb. Mark is the first gospel but he reflects a transitional, developing phase of Christian understanding. By having Jesus being made divine at his baptism he stands midway between the original conception of Jesus being made divine at the resurrection and Jesus being divine at birth. So in his conception of the resurrection he stands midway between the original view of the resurrection as an apotheosis and the view of the resurrection as some sort of resuscitation.
I’m not saying this reading was the intention of Mark. We have no access to the author’s intentions. But if you read it that way it explains the abrupt ending at 16:8. The book ends with the reaction to the empty tomb. Fear. One of Mark’s favorite themes.
What did Paul mean in 1 Corinthians when he said Jesus was buried? That his remains were left on the cross to rot and then tossed into a pit to be eaten by dogs? Where did the idea of resurrection happening on the “third day” come from? Third day from what? Why was the Christian day of worship so quickly moved to the first day of the week, i.e., the supposed “third day” from the day of crucifixion?
I suppose we can agree that we will never “know.” But there are so many little pieces of evidence (without even resorting to Mark’s empty tomb) that Jesus died and was buried on the day of his crucifixion, and was not left on the cross to rot.
vinsapone123 said
vinsapone123, I’m not making any historical claims. I’m critiquing Christian claims. The reason I’m hesitant to plunge into this subject is that a while back I had a loooooong argument with a former poster named godspell about Jesus’ burial. The short version is that I dug out and listed pagan sources that demonstrated a clear association between crucifixion and body desecration. It was part of the punishment. It seems to have been what normally happened. We have no idea what happened to Jesus’ body. We don’t have enough information. Christian claims are suspect because they have a vested interest in their conclusions and they stand in contrast to what appears to be normal Roman practice. All I’m saying.
And this “clear association” was universal and known to apply to 1st-century Palestinian Jews crucified just outside Jerusalem when not in the time of war? Despite the evidence of Philo, Josephus, Mark, Paul and Jesus’s earliest followers, John etc all to the contrary in this region and time? Not to mention the Roman exception and the buried body found with the spike still in it. There are always exceptions to rules and we know of them in relation to crucified criminals as well. Even if this was not common practice throughout parts of Rome, that lazy historical work doesn’t mean we get to make it total or universal.
This is such an excellent point, and really hits upon a major blind spot in some of our modern critical scholarship. It’s not just taking these generalized pagan sources for a punishment that was occurring over a millennium in far-flung regions of a vast empire, with varying levels of central control, highly different cultures and customs, and with the structure of the central government often in flux, and then strictly applying them to every individual event of this punishment (in another post, I compared this to someone denying the historicity of the Salem Witch Trials based on the generalized due process rights available in Massachusetts) …
and it’s not just ignoring specified sources (even non-Christian ones), like Josephus and the Yehohanan ossuary, or contradictory sources, like the Digesta …
It’s the idea that this type of flagrantly implausible story — a crucified decedent getting a same-day burial — would have been in any way persuasive to anyone living within the Roman Empire and knowing Roman crucifixion practices. Remember, the same-day burial belief did not originate with Mark. It was in the creed Paul recites in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, to wit: “Christ died[,] and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day.” Quite obviously, the formulation of dying, being buried, and rising on the third day makes clear that Jesus’s body could not have remained on the cross for desecration. In order to get buried and rise on the third day, his body needs to be removed from the cross on the day of his crucifixion. The overwhelming scholarly consensus is that this creed was not invented by Paul, but was something he picked up from the very early Church, likely within the first decade following the crucifixion of Jesus.
So, we have almost from the very beginning of the religion a belief in the same-day burial of Jesus. AND … we have virtually all of the original Christians living within the Roman Empire and knowing very well Roman crucifixion practices. So …. if same-day burial was so uncommon (as we are led to believe from these generalized pagan sources), how come:
(1) the early Christians were persuaded by this story;
(2) later Christians living in the Roman Empire for the next three centuries (and also knowing crucifixion practices) were persuaded by this story and by its enhancement/embellishment under Mark and Matthew (and John); and
(3) none of the ancient anti-Christian polemicists ever mention the implausible/anachronistic elements of this part of the story?
It beggars belief that the crucifixion practices described in some of the pagan literature were universal. Otherwise, we quickly begin to fun afoul of Occam. The simplest explanation, which requires multiplying the fewest number of entities, is merely that different crucifixion practices prevailed in different regions of the Empire, at different times.
vinsapone123 said
sssboa said
Sorry, looks like has been discussed before:
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Boy howdy did we! I don’t have the will to search for it but we had a long argument about crucifixion and the possible fate of Jesus. The short version is that in the sources we have (which ain’t much) there was a clear association between crucifixion and body desecration. Those who claim Jesus was treated differently have the onus on them to demonstrate why the Romans would have treated him special. Of course his disciples thought he was special. In the face of the lack of definitive evidence it is not unreasonable to suppose that what actually happened is what normally happened. I think what drives resistance to the idea that Jesus was left on the cross and his body thrown into a shallow pit is mostly horror at the idea of it.
The onus is on anyone making any positive historical claim. If you want to argue Jesus was buried you have to provide historical evidence. If you want to argue he would not be permitted a burial, you have to provide evidence that this was so uncommon it most likely did not happen. So how extensive is the evidence against burial? How many estimated crucifixions were there and how many do we actually know about the fate of the body? How many descriptions are outside of a war context/active rebellion and how many are within? How comprehensive in time and location is the evidence against burial? You already said the sources we have “ain’t much” and sawed off the branch you are sitting in. Sounds to me like we are falling victim to a faulty generalization fallacy. Or do the compelling examples you would cite stem from a time of war when a special example was definitely being made? Was a guy flipping tables in a Jewish temple an act of war against Rome? Maybe a judgment of non liquet is better. JC Cook wrote:
Romans were not concerned to leave descriptions of crucifixion. The texts that contain details are brief. They are even more sparing about descriptions of the ultimate fate of the corpses of those who had been crucified. The jurist Ulpian describes, in the early third century, in book nine of his Duties of the Proconsul, the legal situation he knows of that governs the disposal of executed bodies: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 autobiogra- phy 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.Not first century but is it completely irrelevant? He also writes:
. . . the Platonist critics of Christianity (Celsus, Porphyry, Hierocles, Julian, and Macarius’s anonymous pagan philosopher), while not accepting the resurrection of Christ, do not (according to the surviving evidence) reject the historicity of the burial. [New Testament Studies / Volume 57 / Issue 02 / April 2011, pp 193 – 213]
Not to mention, even if you could demonstrate that burial was very unlikely for most victims, it is just arguing from a generality to a specific case and committing the fallacy of division. You need more than that to definitely say the the burial of a specific individual did not occur when a text, which may or may not be trustworthy, says he was. “Its not unreasonable to suppose” is not a positive historical argument. That can be followed with a million statements. Jesus’s closest followers don’t seem to have been hunted down from the surviving record so was he actually considered a real threat?
In history, the onus is on everyone who makes any historical claim.
Is the ossuary of Jehohanan not evidence crucified individuals could be buried? I mean it it the only one so maybe its an exception to the rule or maybe the Romans had a fluid philosophy that varied from place to place throughout time.
Josephus also mentions it occurring but he is doing a bit of apologetics so we can’t just naively trust it. But as Mark Smith writes of Josephus’s statement:
This evidence is particularly illuminating when taken together with Deuteronomy, the Temple Scroll, the Gospel of John, and Philo. All concur that the executed, even the crucified, must be properly buried by sunset. Josephus and Philo further concur that Romans regularly honored this Jewish expectation. As we have seen, Josephus did not hesitate to describe the many victims of crucifixion before the walls of Jerusalem whose bodies were probably exposed on crosses. Here he seems to be drawing an important distinction between ordinary executions, and the extraordinary ones that took place in a context of war.
I think the evidence that Rome would not have allowed Jesus to be buried is overstated. If the Tomb story is fake, and it very well may be, that needs to be established on other grounds.
Vinnie
Powerhouse post from Vinnie.
wrouthier said
John Dominic Crossan’s view, which I think has merit, is that Jesus was simply not an important figure to the Romans. They crucified him for causing a disruption in the Temple, scattering money, creating a major headache as far as who among the traders and money changers originally had how much money, which they now wanted back. This sort of disturbance was exactly the sort of thing that the Roman’s would swiftly deal with. There wasn’t a need for a trial, he was guilty by his actions, the whole business of the Temple Jews saying he was claiming to be God wouldn’t be something the Romans cared about. So he’s crucified and stays there, eventually they take the body down and the dogs get it.But as a narrative, this can’t go into the Gospels, so they elevate Jesus to a trial and condemnation by the Temple priests, because the Gospels were being written for Pauline Gentiles. Never happened, no body, no resurrection. You can see why this would be a problem to a Pauline Jesus movement which was based on the idea of resurrection as central to the movement.
The problem with this view is that the burial narrative doesn’t come from the Gospels; and it apparently didn’t even come from Paul. The overwhelming evidence is that it’s pre-Pauline and goes back to the very early Church.
Moreover, what evidence exists that the resurrection narrative was particularly central to the Pauline Jesus movement, as opposed to other early Christian movements? Do we have any evidence of any early Christian movement where the resurrection was not central?
The best hints we have at the very earliest Christian traditions come from 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 and from the passion narrative.
I will answer questions addressed to me but otherwise I am content to let this one go. I had my say.
What did Paul mean in 1 Corinthians when he said Jesus was buried?
Scholars have been arguing about this since they could do safely do so. Paul is repeating a credo of some sort but given his view of the Resurrection body I wonder just how concerned he would have been about the disposition of Jesus’ corpus. Paul’s view was that in the Resurrection the sarx, the “flesh”, would wither away. The psyche, the “soul”, would also wither. The finer portion of the body, pneuma, the “spirit”, would be transformed into the resurrection body.
Where did the idea of resurrection happening on the “third day” come from?
Once again we have no real idea.
But there are so many little pieces of evidence (without even resorting to Mark’s empty tomb) that Jesus died and was buried on the day of his crucifixion, and was not left on the cross to rot.
My impression is that what gives people pause is the horror of the idea rather than any piece of evidence pro or con.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert