Wrestling with the Empty Tomb

Part Two: The Historical Case Against the Empty Tomb

In part one, I examined a range of arguments for the empty tomb, from the women’s testimony to the archaeological evidence. In this piece, I turn to the arguments against.

a. Jesus was not Entombed

The most common ground on which to question the empty tomb is to question the tomb itself. Scholars who reject the empty tomb tend to doubt that a victim of crucifixion would be placed in the tomb of an individual like Joseph of Arimathea. In its place, they have suggested a range of scenarios which they consider more likely.

The most scandalous proposal regarding Jesus’ burial is that he did not receive one. This view, famously defended by John Dominic Crossan – and now, more tentatively by Bart Ehrman – suggests that Jesus’ corpse would have been left on the cross.¹

The basis of this view is that crucifixion was designed for the total humiliation of the victim – and a common part of that humiliation was not receiving a burial. As the conservative biblical scholar Martin Hengel puts it in his classic study of crucifixion:

“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.”²