Truth Unites - Did Joseph of Arimathea Bury Jesus? Responding to Bart Ehrman

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

Gavin Ortlund addresses Bart Ehrman's arguments against the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

The Gospels narrate a story of Jesus being buried by Joseph of Arimathea, and this is an important narrative because it's included in arguments for the historicity of the resurrection of Christ. People like William Lane Craig and Mike Likona and many others use this as one data point, the empty tomb, and more specifically the burial by Joseph of Arimathea. This is a part of their argument, so this gets really important. But many people, like Bart Ehrman, think that we have reasons to doubt the traditional story of Jesus' burial. Well, he says that we know that there was an empty tomb. And you don't think that that's the case?

I don't know. One of the things that I think Dr. Craig might say on that point is that if people were claiming to have seen him, if people were claiming that this man had risen from the dead, the tomb was there. It was something people could have gone to check. And it would have probably been one of the first things that they did upon hearing that this Jesus figure had risen from the dead.

If there were no empty tomb, surely someone would have discovered this. This is not good. evidence confirming the idea that there was in fact an empty tomb. Well, it presupposes that he was buried in a tomb. This is one of the facts that William Lane Craig thinks, we can say, as well established, that he was buried in a tomb. That's important to him. You don't think so.

No, I don't. I mean, that's the thing. He takes these four things that, you know, basically everybody would agree on. You know, there's a man Jesus, he got killed. Later people said they saw him alive. So that's fine. And those four are easily explained. Was there an empty tomb?

There are very big problems with thinking there was a tomb at all. He's presupposing that the gospel story is right, that Joseph of Veramathia took Jesus, the afternoon he was crucified, and put him in a family tomb, and on the third day, women came and found the tomb empty. Okay, so what is our evidence of it? Well, the evidence, of course, is only in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they say that.

And it was the tradition that Christians had had for very important. very long time. So it's certainly the Christian tradition, but there are lots of reasons for doubting that it's right. Now, Airman says there the evidence, if you listen carefully, the evidence for the burial of Jesus is only in the Gospels. I assume that what he meant by that is that the evidence for Jesus' burial by Joseph is only in the four Gospels, because we have lots of other references to the burial of Christ, and he knows that. Erman knows that because he deals with them at length in his book, how Jesus became God, which we're going to work through in a second. Let's just be clear and catch everyone up to speed on these other points of textual data.

We have speeches in the book of Acts that reference Christ's burial in a tomb. This is explicit in Paul's speech in Acts 13. It's implicit in Peter's speech in Acts 2, where there's a reference to Jesus' body not being held by death. And then, of course, in Paul's letters. Paul cites a tradition in 1 Corinthians 15 that he has received, which references a burial of Christ. We also have, this is sometimes overlooked.

I think this is significant, but we have the language of baptism as being buried with Jesus, which is imagery that gives us information about the early Christians' views. So one criterion that historians use to determine the likelihood of a particular event is early independent attestation, which simply means that in general, it's less likely that you're going to find multiple independent sources attesting to an event very soon after its alleged occurrence if it didn't actually occur. Because you just wonder, you know, how did all these different people get the same idea? So with respect to the burial of Jesus, we have a lot of independent early attestation.

We have Mark. We have the tradition that Paul quotes from in 1st Corinthians 15. We have the sources used by Matthew, Luke, and John. We have the sermons and acts as recorded by Luke. Most people think that the sermons and acts are not created out of thin air by Luke. So there could be some discussion about how to understand all these different sources and so forth and where is their common or interdependence or something like that, fine. But any way you slice it, for ancient history, this is a lot of attestation very soon after the

event in question. And so for this reason and for others, traditionally, many scholars would say that just on historical grounds, the story of Jesus' burial, and more specifically burial by Joseph, is a reliable story. John Robinson in an older book says the burial of Jesus in the tomb is one of the earliest and best attested facts about Jesus. But in more recent decades, the burial story is contested, and Airman is one of those who questions it, so let's work through some of his arguments and think about it, whether these are convincing or not.

By the way, did you know Truth Unites has an Instagram account? We're posting on there almost every day during the week, and I've got a buddy in mine who's helping, making it really excellent. I hope the content there is edifying to. It's a little Instagram is a different field than YouTube. It's a little more devotionally focused, but it's very similar. So anyway, if you're on Instagram, give it a follow. interested. All right, first, Airman notes that the Sanhedron as a whole condemns Jesus. At Jesus' trial

in the Gospel of Mark, the chief priests and the entire Sanhedron are involved in our reference there in Mark Chapter 14. So Joseph of Arimathea is himself one of the members of the Sanhedron. The Sanhedron is the Jewish ruling court, typically held to have 71 members. Joseph of Aramethi is one of those members. So Aramon is saying, well, this would be very strange. If Joseph is calling for his crucifixion in one moment and then in the next moment going to bury him. Quote, why after Jesus is dead is he suddenly risking himself, as implied by the fact that he had to gather up his courage, and seeking to do an act of mercy by arranging for a decent burial for Jesus' corpse?

That's Airman's argument. And from that, he derives the conclusion, my hunch is that the trial narrative and the burial narrative come from different sets of traditions inherited by Mark, or did Mark simply invent one of the two traditions himself and overlook the apparent discrepancy. Remember this word discrepancy. This is going to come up here. So the question is, is that really a discrepancy? This seems to me a very unimaginative way of considering historical narratives. Let me give two reasons. First, the reasoning here assumes a strangely literalistic way of how the actions of a group, in this case the Sanhedron, can be described. The fact that you have the whole counsel referenced

need not require the involvement of every single member. In this case, it would be very unlikely that the entire Sanhedron is present. The Sanhedron has 71 people. This is a hastily drawn meeting in the middle of the night at the private residence of Caiaphas the High Priest. After this, they have to wait till the morning to bring him to pilot. According to D.A. Carson and Michael Green, only 23 members of the Sanhedron would be needed for a quorum.

So why should we accept it when Airman concludes, according to Mark, this unknown person, Joseph, was one of the people who had called for Jesus' death just the night before he was crucified. That assumes that Joseph was there at Caiaphas' home. But the New Testament frequently speaks about groups in general terms, and actually any document, and today we do this as well. This is how language works. The group can be spoken of as taking an action without requiring the inclusion of every single individual member. We even have that for the burial of Jesus in Paul's speech in Acts 13, where it says, Those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers are the ones who condemn Jesus to death, and then that word,

they, is used in verse 29 with reference to the burial. But obviously, this would be ridiculous to say every single citizen of Jerusalem was involved in the death of Jesus. Groups can be spoken of without assuming the involvement of every individual. Second, and even more to the point here, even if Joseph had been present at the trial, obviously the Sanhedron can act as a a whole entity in ways that are at variance with individual members and their own opinion or their own wishes. You know, this is why I say it's an unimaginative argument. It's like, this is how groups work. I wonder if Bart Ehrman has ever been a part of a committee, probably he has. You know, this is how it works, right? Or in my line of work in church context, you have elder meetings and so forth, you have

members meetings, and, you know, there might be an outcome that the group decides upon that isn't reflective of the opinions and wishes of every single person present. This just is how human beings work. This is how all groups work. So when Luke 2351 records that Joseph was a member of the Sanhedron, but he had not consented to their actions and to their decision and action, why should we think that that's remotely implausible? You know, you got 71 people on the Sanhedron. This would be precisely why his actions would be courageous, because he's going against the route. And it would fit with how other members of the Sanhedron are portrayed as sympathetic to Jesus, but they have to kind of be sneaky about it, like Nicodemus, who's involved in the burial as well in John's account, I think,

and then in John 3-2, he's going at night to Jesus, which implies it's kind of a secret meeting, perhaps. So, you know, it's not, there's nothing remotely implausible about saying you've got 71 people, the group as a whole comes to a verdict, but you got one or two, like Nicodemus and Joseph, who don't agree with what the group does. I mean, why would that be remotely surprising, right? So if you put up Airman's conclusion again, or he's saying, you know, he's referencing a discrepancy, and that's the basis for his argument against accepting this. That's one of his arguments.

And you think there's only a discrepancy if you assume that a group and the individual members of that group never conflict. But why should we think that? The same problem arises with Airman's treatment of Acts 13, where he sees a discrepancy with what is written in Luke versus what is written in Acts. And so he concludes there must be two different sources or something like this that need to be harmonized because Luke mentions Joseph, but Acts mentions the Sanhedron as a whole. I'll put up Acts. I won't put up X or I'll put up his statement. He quotes Acts 13. Then he says, here it is not a single member of the Sanhedron who

buries Jesus, but the council as a whole. This is a different tradition. There is no word of Joseph here. Okay, but hold on. When he quotes this passage, leaves off, verse 27. It's not the Sanhedron in view. I'll put it up again. We just saw this passage. It's those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers. What this passage actually shows is that a literalism with respect to how groups and their individual members can be spoken of doesn't work. Because obviously it wasn't everyone in Jerusalem who participated in the death of Jesus, the burial of Jesus, and so forth. This is just a collective phrase, and that's fine. The insistence on a literalistic way to describe the actions of groups is very strange here.

And so it's very problematic to question the veracity of this tradition on that basis. One individual can act on behalf of the group. So, for example, if a teacher calls parents and says, your student has been skipping class and I've decided to give him a detention. Let's say the dad receives this phone call at 4 p.m. 5 p.m. he sees his wife and he says the school called today. our son is in trouble. Do we have a discrepancy here? Between the teacher and a singular individual who makes the call and then the school being referenced? Well, of course not. We shouldn't assume,

you know, different sources or something that needs to be harmonized or something like that. It's just a group can be spoken of like that. A singular person can act on behalf of a group. I have so many metaphors you can think of. You can think of countries, a government taking an action, and then you can speak of the citizens of that country is now in place. war. But there's no discrepancy between speaking of the group and the individual at the top. Or, you know, in a church context, there could be elders who enact church of discipline upon a particular member. Three elders meet with a member and deliver this verdict. And then that person could speak of the church as a whole as kicking me out of the church or something like that.

This is how language can work. Airman also finds it significant that Paul doesn't get mentioned in the, or that Paul doesn't mention Joseph in 1st Corinthians 15. So you have a similar appeal here. Now, by the way, as with Acts, this wouldn't be an argument against the burial as such, only against Joseph's involvement. That's a key distinction here. But even so, again, this is an argument from silence that seems to, because basically what Airman is saying is like, oh, well, if Joseph had been the one who buried Jesus and Paul had known of that, he surely would have mentioned it. But that's an argument from silence that amounts to a requirement that Paul must be very detailed in his summary. This is an extremely compact creedal formula that Paul is citing in 1st Corinthians 15.

In verses 3 to 5 here, I count 30 Greek words. It doesn't have to go into who all is involved. Now, Airman's main argument in favor of this seems to be rooted in a perception of the parallelism in the passage. So he divides the creed into two major sections of four statements. I took a picture out of his book. I'll put it up here. This is from page 139. So you can see the parallelism here between 4A and 4B, that he was buried in verse 4.

And the he appeared to Cephas in verse 5. Airman then concludes, if the author of that creed had known such a thing, he surely would have included it, since without naming the party who buried Jesus, he created imbalance with the second portion of the creed where he does name the person to whom Jesus appeared, Seifus. But again, there's this kind of speculative, reconstructive feel to these kinds of arguments. You might question, well, how do you know that the author would have been thinking along the lines of this parallelism and would have included such a fact? This seems very uncertain.

It seems dangerous to base too much on that. It's somewhat speculative. But there's a deeper problem here. The parallelism only works if one omits the creed, the first. final clause, then to the 12 in 1st Corinthians 15, 5. I'll put that up in bold here. You can see those last four words. In order to get to the parallelism, that phrase needs to be omitted. And I'm not sure why it would be omitted or whether, I'd like to ask, Airman, if he thinks that's a part of the original creed or not. He says the original form of the creed was simply verses three to five,

but I don't know why, but that's part of verse five. So I'm not sure why he would disclude that. one of the things Airmen himself acknowledges is that there is no reference to the 12 anywhere in Paul's writings. So it would be surprising if Paul added that here. So why exclude this? But once you leave it in, once you leave in the reference to and to the 12, this disrupts the supposed parallelism. Okay. So in other words, not only is this argument pretty speculative, but the parallelism that it's based upon really isn't. there. It only works if you arbitrarily cut off the tradition that Paul is citing early before you get

to verse 6. The more basic methodological problem here is an argument from silence. He's treating 1st Corinthians 15, 3 to following, as this kind of comprehensive summary so that if something isn't mentioned, then Paul couldn't have known about it, or the author of the tradition couldn't have known about it. He uses this passage to also derive the conclusion that the women visiting the tomb on Sunday morning is a later tradition. And his reason for this is that, well, Paul's giving you this list of all the people Jesus appeared to in 1st Corinthians 15, 5 to 8. And that's why he refers to himself as last of all there in that passage. But the fact that Paul references his temporal relation to previous appearances does not mean he's giving an exhaustive list. The focus of 1st Corinthians

15 is apostolicity. Paul is naming individuals in relation. to their apostolicity because in verses 9 through 11, he's defending his own status as an apostle and being an eyewitness to the risen Christ as a criteria for apostleship. But there's so much that isn't included here, and that's fine. You shouldn't expect exhaustive detail here in this little tradition that Paul quotes. Here's how Craig Evans puts it. Being buried by Joseph is hardly the equivalent to being seen by Cephas, that is Peter. Who saw the risen Jesus was important, both to the creed and to the point that Paul is making in 1st Corinthians, who buried Jesus was not. There are many other things that Paul and the creed do not mention, such as Jesus' death in Jerusalem,

at the time of Passover, at the request of the Jewish Council, and at the hands of Pontius Pilate. The failure to mention these details does not mean they did not happen or were not involved. So to take the lack of Joseph being named or the women being named or identified or referenced in 1st Corinthians 15 as entailing these are later traditions is very problematic. It's dangerous to build so much on an argument from silence when you're dealing with this compact creedal formula. Now, one other argument Airman makes is that the normal practice for a criminal's body was to be left up as food for scavenging animals. This has been dealt with by others at greater length, but I should at least mention this, that we know the Jewish custom from Deuteronomy 21 was burial. And this is confirmed to be Jewish practice around this time

by Josephus. And we have good reason to think that during peacetime, the Romans often allowed for Jewish burial practices to be observed. One summary of Jewish law, for example, encourages the bodies of criminals to be given to their relatives upon request. And Evans also argues that when the Sanhedron condemned someone to death, they were responsible then to take care of the burial. So there's nothing that makes it hard to believe that pilot would grant Joseph's request. There's a lot more to say about that. You could see Craig Evans' chapter in the book How God Became Jesus for a Fuller Treatment of that. He also discusses the archaeological data, which I've skipped over here. But suffice to say, Airman has not given good reasons to doubt the historicity of the burial of Jesus, certainly not

the burial in general, but even specifically the burial of Jesus in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea. This whole episode, this little episode, it might seem kind of niche, but it's actually really important for the broader questions of the trustworthiness of the Gospels, arguments for the resurrection and so forth. And I could just say this is a good example of the kind of undue skepticism that is often reflected in critical reconstruction of the development of the stories that are eventually included in the New Testament. They feel very tendentious and speculative. There's a lot of reliance upon arguments from silence like we've seen. And the fact is simply this. The historical data we have.

associated with the launch of the Christian movement. So a little data point like the burial of Jesus by Joseph is pretty good. You know, compared to other ancient history that we're trying to study, we have a lot of data to work with. The fact, for example, the fact that we have so many individuals named in 1st. Corinthians 153 to following is just, this is within two decades or so of Jesus' death. That is unbelievable. This is the kind of thing John Rogers calls the sword.

of data that historians of antiquity drool over. When I began studying the historical reliability of the gospels, I expected that I was skeptical that a strong case could be made, and I was actually amazed at how powerful the New Testament data is and how much we can know. And then the big thing you're trying to figure out is, okay, we seem to know for sure that Jesus died and that the disciples had this profound belief in his resurrection. And then you're trying to say, what makes sense of that? how do we understand that? And more needs to be said on that to get into it. You know, that's a separate argument. I did a video with Mike Lycona on that, if you're interested in the argument for Jesus's resurrection. But hopefully this video at least gets people thinking more about the story

of Joseph's role in the burial. Simple fact is we have good reason to accept that story. The historical evidence for Joseph's role is very strong. All right, thanks for watching. Let me know what you think in the comments. Don't forget to check out the Instagram account. We'll see you next time, everybody.