Bruce Chilton Defends the Burial of Jesus
Bruce Chilton, Jesus Seminar Fellow and Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College, on the Burial of Jesus from Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography:
A straightforward reading of the Gospels' portrait of the burial has been challenged by revisionist scholars, who theorize that Jesus died in a mass crucifixion: the body was thrown into a common, shallow trench, to become carrion for vultures and scavenging dogs. This makes for vivid drama but implausible history. Pilate, after all, had been forced in the face of Jewish opposition to withdraw his military shields from public view in the city when he first acceded to power. What likelihood was there, especially after Sejanus' death, that he would get away with flagrantly exposing the corpse of an executed Jew beyond the interval permitted by the Torah, and encouraging its mutilation by scavengers just outside Jerusalem?
Revisionism can be productive. But it can also become more intent on explaining away traditional beliefs than on coming to grips with the evidence at hand, and I think this is a case in point. It is worth explaining why I go along with much of the Gospels' account of Jesus' burial, because doing so will help us grapple with the vexed question of what happened three days after his crucifixion.
Time and again, the Gospels reveal the tendency of the first Christians to shift the blame for Jesus' death away from Pilate and onto the Sanhedrin. Yet when it comes to taking on the weighty responsibility of burying Jesus, we find members of that same council taking the lead, while most of Jesus' disciples had beaten a hasty and ignominious retreat. Joseph's and Nicodemus' public act cost them: they donated mortuary dressing and ointment as well as use of the cave. They also contracted uncleanness for seven days after the burial. On each of those seven days they would have had to explain to curious colleagues where and why they had come into contact with a corpse, a powerful source of impurity.
Joseph's act went beyond a mere display of ordinary decency. He ensured that Jesus was interred in one of the caves he had recently dug for himself and his family. The significance of this gesture is plain: there were those within the council who had not agreed with Caiaphas' condemnation of Jesus to Pilate. Adding insult to injury, Joseph's newly hewn cave was probably not far from the site of Caiaphas' own family mausoleum on the hillside south of the Temple. Scores of burial caves from the first century of the kind that Joseph prepared for Jesus are visible there today. The irony is poignant: the bodies of the two antagonists, the high priest and the renegade rabbi who had so bitterly clashed, ended up interred in the same cemetery.
Home Page & Introduction: The Shroud of Turin Story - A Guide to the Facts 2005
© 2004 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York
