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Ed Atkinson's avatar

Hi John, more helpful material for my debate! Thanks.

Many of the arguments you report rely on JoA being a real person, but surely if there was a tomb burial he'd need to be invented (how else could Jesus be placed in a tomb without such a benefactor figure?). I didn't see you confronting this possibility. Your point on the development of the JoA narrative in the 4 accounts do suggest that he may have been invented when we stretch the development back to the stage before Mark wrote. But there's more. First, his name is suspicious. Why is there no place Arimathea? Scholars have to scrape about to find a place with a similar name, but a simpler explanation is that it's made up. Have you heard that 'Arimathea' in Greek has the meaning 'best disciple town'? That indicates a made up name surely? Second, why does JoA come into the Christian story from nowhere and then immediately disappear again? Finally, there seems to be a discrepancy between how, on the one hand, he is described as being supportive of Jesus but, on the other hand, he was a “prominent member of the Council” on which “all condemned him as worthy of death” (Mark 15v43 and 14v64 respectively).

The burial that I've considered the most likely is in a Roman communal grave. My reasons are that for an insurrectionist claiming to be 'King of the Jews' any compromise on normal Roman crucifixion practice would be minimal. Releasing the body to others, especially one individual, would be a step too far (Philo mentions releasing bodies to families only on the Emperor's birthday, and those are criminals, not insurrectionists). The unlikelihood of the Romans releasing an insurrectionist’s body is shown by Mark 15v43, Joseph had to ask Pilate for Jesus’ body, so the normal procedure would have been for the Roman’s to keep it. That Joseph had to go “boldly” to Pilate suggests that it was a very unusual request. I do hear the arguments that the Romans might compromise with Jewish sensibilities against leaving bodies on crosses overnight, which would defile the land. But that wouldn't require anything more than a Roman controlled communal grave. (And I agree with the 1Cor15 point which indicates burial). What do you make of this option?

Sorry to go on, but another whole area for discussion is the absence of tomb veneration. Both sides of the Resurrection debate agree that there is no record in early Christian documents of veneration of Jesus' tomb and, when Constantine sent people to find the tomb in about 325AD, it seems that they just had to guess its location. Modern apologists argue that the lack of veneration is actually further evidence for an empty tomb because reverence was given, not to the tomb but, instead, to he who had lain within it and who still exists. Sceptics, however, suggest that there having been no tomb at all is a vastly better explanation. It is deep in our human nature to venerate the locations of significant events and it was part of Hebrew culture .

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Andrej Zeman's avatar

Some of my questions about the stone:

From a theological perspective, what is the point of the rolled-away stone? That is, let's assume Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. Still, why have the stone rolled away by, presumably, some kind of divine intervention? To me, this is even stranger in Matthew (Mt 28:2) where the angel rolls the stone away and then sits on it. It does not mention that the stone was moved because it enabled Jesus to walk out (and high-five the sitting angel on the way). In some gospel traditions, Jesus can pass through walls so why the need to have the stone rolled away? Maybe it has some evidentiary function? If the stone was not rolled away, the women/apostles would still have found Jesus' body missing. Would such a scenario have changed anything about the early Christian proclamation or reconstruction of what happened? No need to answer these questions; just sharing some that popped into my mind. (Pehaps someone has already written on this?)

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