Jesus' Seamless Tunic: A High Priestly Vestment?

In the first part of this series, I offered a reading of Jesus’ seamless tunic as a symbol of unity. Yet this is not the only interpretation on the table.

In this post, I will consider a more popular understanding of the tunic’s significance: that it is a priestly vestment, alluding to Jesus’ role as the high priest.

High Priestly Tunic 

The view that Jesus’ tunic is high priestly goes back to 1641, when Hugo Grontius - Dutch jurist and theologian extraordinariare - found a parallel in Josephus.¹

The first century Jewish historian describes a high priestly garment as follows:

‘But this tunic (ὁ χιτὼν) is not composed of two pieces, to be stitched (ῥαπτὸς) at the shoulders and at the sides: it is one long woven (ὑφασμένον) cloth, with a slit for the neck, parted not crosswise but lengthwise from the breast to a point in the middle of the back.’ (Antiquities 3. 161 LCL).

Josephus here describes a high priestly tunic (ὁ χιτὼν) that is not sewn (ῥαπτὸς). The term ῥαπτὸς (‘stitched,’ ‘sewn) further relates to ἄραφος (‘without seam’), the word John uses to describe Jesus’ own tunic (χιτὼν).

Josephus’ description of the garment as ‘one long woven (ὑφασμένον) cloth’ also bears resemblance to John’s description as ‘woven in one piece’ (ὑφαντὸς δι’ ὅλου; NASB).

John shares three cognate terms with Josephus in his terse description. On the basis of these similarities, many commentators have considered it plausible that John is casting Jesus as the high priest.²

Hugo Grontius discovered the parallel between Jesus’ seamless tunic and the description of the first-century Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus.

Challenging the High Priestly View  

There are a number of criticisms of this reading. For a start, commentators have questioned what interest John has in presenting Jesus as the High Priest.

Craig Keener notes that “John seems to lack the sort of explicitly high priestly emphasis one finds in Hebrews (2:17; 3:1; 4:14-5:10; 6:20-8:4; 9:11, 25; 10:21; 13:11).”³ Likewise, Andrew Lincoln deems a priestly interpretation doubtful “since a high-priest Christology plays no role elsewhere in his narrative.”⁴

More problematically, Joan Taylor has questioned the allusion on the ground that it “assumes a knowledge of Temple practices on the part of the readers of John far beyond what is found in scripture, with no clue at all given in the text.”⁵

As Taylor notes, the difficulty with identifying Jesus’ tunic as high priestly is the lack of any clear link between Josephus’ description and the Jewish Scriptures. The Bible describes a sacred linen tunic worn by the High Priest on the day of Atonement (Lev. 16:4), and a ‘checkered tunic of fine linen’ worn on other instances (Exod. 28:29).

But these tunics only have in common with Jesus’ tunic the fact that they are tunics; neither has anything to do with what Josephus describes as a ‘tunic’ (ὁ χιτὼν). What Josephus is calling a ‘tunic’ is actually the robe of the ephod, described in all its glory in Exodus 28:31-34 - it is not the simple garment undivided in John.⁶