Did Jesus Receive a Burial?
An overview of the arguments for and against
As I write in the Crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields towards the end of Holy Week, my thoughts have naturally turned to the burial of Jesus.
In historical Jesus studies, the burial place of Jesus is a veritable hot-bed of debate. Optimistically, John A.T. Robinson once described Joseph of Arimathea’s burial of Jesus as “one of the earliest and best-established facts about Jesus.”1
Yet in contemporary scholarship, two other options have gained considerable traction: either Jesus’ body was not buried at all, or he was buried in a common grave.
So how can we make sense of these different options historically? Which way does the evidence point? And what can we extricate of Jesus’ burial, behind the Gospels?
In this post, I lay out some of the key arguments for and against three main views.
The Non-Burial Hypothesis
The most scandalous proposal regarding Jesus’ burial is that he did not receive one.
This view, defended by historical Jesus scholar, John Dominic Crossan, suggests that it was more likely that Jesus’ corpse was left to decay on the cross.2
Arguments For
The best evidence in support of this scenario is that it was the most common result of crucifixion victims to be left to hang upon the cross after their burial.
In his own investigation of the issue, Bart Ehrman has recently come to support this position, listing several instances in which crucifixion victims were left to hang on the cross.3
In defence of this view, Ehrman enlists conservative New Testament scholar, Martin Hengel. In his magisterial study of ancient crucifixion, Hengel observes:
“Crucifixion was aggravated further by the fact that quite often its victims were never buried. It was a stereotyped picture that the crucified victim served as food for wild beasts and birds of prey. In this way his humiliation was made complete.”4
Arguments Against
While it was common for the corpses of crucifixion victims to be left on the cross, it is important to consider the historical data in any specific scenario.
In the case of Jesus, a significant datum supporting a burial is the formula of 1 Corinthians 15, which states that Jesus was ‘buried’ (v4). As is well-known, 1 Corinthians 15 is a credal formula which certainly predates 1 Corinthians and which some think stretches back to the very early Jesus movement.
In a recent article, Mark Goodacre puts it this way:
“[John Dominic Crossan] doubts that Jesus was buried at all. Crossan’s case seems weak in the light of the one genuinely early piece of data we have, that he was buried (ὅτι ἐτάϕη, 1 Cor. 15.4), a note that is among those that Paul has himself received and handed on ‘as of first importance’ (… 1 Cor. 15.3) in a text that mentions Peter, James and the Twelve (1 Cor. 15.5, 7)… it is beyond reasonable doubt that burial was a key element in the earliest Christian preaching, so much so that it becomes a part of Paul’s theological reflection (Rom. 6.4.…).”5
Moreover, while it is true that most crucifixion victims were left on the cross to rot, there are some literary and archaeological counter-examples to this point.
Most famously, there is the heel-bone of an unfortunate man named Yehohanan (Johnathan) which is pierced with a nail. We know that Yehohanan was buried as we find his bones in an ossuary, a box in which a person’s bones were placed after burial.
We also have some literary data which supports the idea that crucifixion victims were permitted a burial on occasion. Philo of Alexandria, Cicero and Flavius Josephus all know occasions in which crucifixion victims were permitted burial.6
This background knowledge fits the story of Joseph – who was not officially responsible for Jesus’ death – requesting permission from Pilate to bury Jesus.
The Entombment of Jesus
On the other side of the spectrum, some scholars have argued that Jesus’ body was buried in a tomb, in accordance with the Gospel accounts.
While this scenario is often defended by conservative critics - such as Craig A. Evans and William Lane Craig - it is noteworthy that they are joined by the most prolific resurrection scholar of our generation, Dale C. Allison.
Allison is a liberal Christian who confesses that he would be just as happy, if not more, without an empty tomb. The fact that he has defended Jesus’ burial in a tomb should therefore prick the ears of anyone interested in the question.
Arguments For
The most intriguing datum in support of the entombment of Jesus is Joseph of Arimathea. As a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish council who condemned Jesus, Brown finds it “almost inexplicable” that Joseph is an invention.7
Joseph’s name is also curious. Arimathea, often located as Ramathain, twenty miles north-west of Jerusalem, is a rather specific place with which to be identified.
Assuming, then, that the name was not invented from thin air, the idea that this Joseph was responsible for Jesus’ burial in a tomb makes best sense of why his name was preserved: Joseph had done something truly remarkable for Christ.8
Moreover, there was an incentive for Joseph to be involved in the burial. The Gospels tell us that the Sabbath was drawing near. To avoid Jesus’ corpse defiling the land (Deut. 21:23), Joseph may have entrusted with burying Christ.
Not having time to prepare a grave, however, Joseph may have placed him in his own tomb - perhaps to be removed later (cf. Jn 20:13). This would also explain why this act was later remembered as a sign of his personal devotion.
With these considerations in mind, it does not seem wholly implausible that a certain Joseph of Arimathea carried out Jesus’ burial as described in the Gospels.9
Arguments Against
Against Jesus’ burial by Joseph in a tomb, there stand a number of considerations.
First, Raymond Brown finds the idea that Joseph of Arimathea would have had an unused tomb close to a site of crucifixion to the tomb incredible.10 Joseph was an aristocrat. And aristocrats do not buy burial plots next to crucifixion sites.
Second, the precise involvement of Joseph in Jesus’ death is somewhat difficult to discern. In Mark, he is a wealthy member of the Sanhedrin who is awaiting the Kingdom, as many Jews were. There is no indication that he is a follower of Jesus.
Yet in the later accounts, his characterisation has somewhat developed; Matthew calls him a follower of Jesus; Luke tells us that he never consented to Jesus’ death, and John describes him as a (secret) disciple of the Lord.11
This surely raises the (unanswerable) question of what development Joseph’s role in Jesus’ burial had already undergone embellishment by the time he reached Mark.
Is it possible that Joseph was indeed the person responsible for Jesus’ burial, but that this burial was not the (less plausible) entombment narrated by the Gospels?
Third, many scholars question to what extent the Gospels’ presentation of the Jewish leaders’ involvement in Jesus’ death is historically plausible. Crucifixion was fundamentally a Roman crime, and Jesus was crucified as a political threat to Rome.
Finally, if Jesus was not buried in a tomb, there was a strong reason to suppose that he was. By having Jesus buried in an unused tomb, one can show that it was empty.12
A Common Burial
Due to the problems associated with the options above, some scholars have opted for a third view: that Jesus was buried, perhaps by a certain Joseph, but not in a tomb.
This position is adopted by scholars ranging from the Catholic giant of Gospel scholarship, Raymond Brown, to liberals such as Maurice Casey and Helen Bond.
Arguments For
One of the primary arguments for this position concerns Joseph’s role as a member of the Sanhedrin. For those who think that Joseph’s piety may be exaggerated by the later Gospel accounts, it remains plausible that he was responsible for burying Jesus.
In this case, however, where would Joseph be expected to bury Jesus? Jewish tradition refers to graves, not tombs, which were maintained for those who suffered capital punishment. It is in one of these graves that Joseph might have used:
‘… And they [the Jewish court] did not bury them in the graves of their fathers, but two graves were arranged for the Court (Beth Dīn), one for (those) stoned and (those) burned, and one for (those) beheaded and (those) strangled’ (m. Sanh. 6.11).
As ever, we should be cautious when using this second-century rabbinic text to reconstruct a first-century setting. Yet, as Maurice Casey points out, there is no obvious reason why this Mishnaic text should reflect a later situation.13
That Joseph was simply part of a group of men responsible for burying Jesus might also explain why the women do not prepare Jesus’ body, co-operating with Joseph, but rather stand at a distance.14
Arguments Against
Perhaps the primary difficulty with this view is that it relies on quite a sudden parsing between Joseph’s initial involvement in the burial (which is deemed essentially historical) and the following narrative of Jesus’ entombment (which is contrived.)
For some, this move will seem overly subtle. On the one hand, scholars who assign a high prior probability to Jesus’ body being left on the cross will find reason to be suspicious of the narrative as a whole.
In their view, the Sanhedrin’s involvement in what was essentially a Roman crucifixion will seem doubtful from start to finish. The idea of a burial by a certain young Joseph may appear inspired by Scripture rather than history (cf. Isa. 53:9).
On the other hand, those who believe in Jesus’ entombment may easily find reasons to suspect that something special did indeed happen. Indeed, if Joseph had not done something remarkable, then why remember him at all?
As with many questions about these ancient texts, parsing fact from fiction, genuine memory from the growth of tradition, is an enormously difficult task.
Some Personal Reflections
The idea that Jesus may not have received a proper burial may seem shocking to some.
On a purely emotional level, it is difficult to wrestle with the idea that the Lord’s body was not interred in a tomb after his crucifixion. I must admit that I find this historical possibility quite troubling.
Yet could such grief at the possibility of an unburied Jesus not have been part of the impetus to remember Jesus as having received a proper burial?
Or, to put it otherwise, in the pious imagination of believers, could the burial accounts not be a means to process the collective trauma experienced by his earliest followers?15
With the disciples’ grief in mind, the story of Jesus’ burial takes on a new meaning: it is an expression of faithful devotion, love and hope in the resurrection of Jesus.
So, what do you think?….
As I get ready to leave the Crypt, I have laid out just some of the more significant arguments for and against Jesus’ burial.
But I would like to know what our community thinks.
Did Jesus receive a burial? And if so, of what kind?
John A.T. Robinson, The Human Face of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973), 131.
John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Jewish Mediterranean Peasant (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 391; Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (SanFrancisco: Harper Collins), 388.
See, for example, Horace, Epistle 1.16.46-48; Juvenal, Satires 14.77-78; Artmidorus, Dream Book 2.53; Petronius, Satyricon, ch. 11-12 cited in Bart D. Ehrman, “Did Romans Allow Decent Burials for Crucified Criminals?” The Bart Ehrman Blog: The History & Literature of Early Christianity, July 25, 2023. https://ehrmanblog.org/did-romans-allow-decent-burials-for-crucified-criminals/ [Accessed 28.3.2024]
Martin Hengel, Crucifixion: In the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 76.
Mark Goodacre, “How Empty was the Tomb?,” JSNT 44 n.1 (2021): 134-148 (138 n.18).
Philo, Flaccum, 83-85; Josephus, War. 4.317; Cicero, Verr. 2.5.45. See Helen K. Bond, The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 163-164.
Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, vol. 2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1994), 1240-41.
Dale C. Allison Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 112.
I do not treat here the authenticity of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is often judged inauthentic. But, for a recent positive assessment, see Joan E. Taylor, “Golgotha: A Reconsideration of the Evidence for the Sites of Jesus’ Crucifixion and Burial,” Bible and Spade, vol. 15 (2002): 39-50.
Raymond E. Brown, “The Burial of Jesus (Mark 15.42-7),” CBQ 50 n.2 (1988): 233–45 (243).
On the ‘Christianisation’ of Joseph, see Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus: A Historical Approach to the Resurrection. Trans. John Bowden (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press), 20-21.
This apologetic intent is palpable in Matthew, Luke and John’s concern to show that the tomb was new and unused.
Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of His Life and Teaching (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 449-450.
See Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, 449.
For a developed account of this possibility, see Mireia Vidal i Quintero, “The Empty Tomb Tradition: Its Origins and Early Development in light of Cultural Trauma Theory and Ritual Lamentation,” PhD Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 2023.
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 .
I think the one area of scholarship I would consider adding to the mix is the apparent fact that the "empty tomb" was a motif used ubiquitously in Roman-Greco literature. Scholards Richard C. Miller and Rachel Faith Walsh have deep studies and analysis showing this. Plus the writers of the gospels were likely well educated and part of a literary tradition informed by Greco-Roman practices and education, not just Judaic. There is evidence that many Gospel stories in general were engaged with Homer, Virgil, etc. in a typical of the time, mimetic way (MacDonald). This all makes even more plausible the idea that the empty tomb was actually to some extent a device used by whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark, and then later the other adopted and embellished by other gospel writers, for the purpose of indicating the deification of the story's hero (as you indicate). This reddit thread (specifically, nightshadetwine) cuts and pastes some of the relevant passages from RFW's book on the subject in a recent thread discussing Allison's book.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/1bpz9ne/any_thoughts_on_dale_allisons_defense_of_the/