Gunning for God (32 page)

Jesus was then crucified. This meant nailing him to a rough wooden structure in the shape of a cross, with an upright pole and a cross-piece: one large nail through both feet, fastening them to the upright, and other nails through the outstretched wrists, fastening them to the cross-piece. This arrangement was maximally cruel, because the nails through the feet meant that the legs could give support as the victim struggled to raise his body up so as to be able to breathe a bit easier; this prolonged the agony of death, sometimes for several days.

However, the Jewish Sabbath was approaching and, according to John’s eyewitness account,
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the Jewish authorities did not want the bodies, which they regarded as defiling, to remain on the crosses on the Sabbath. They therefore asked permission from Pilate to have death hastened by the expedient of administering the
crucifragium
; that is, breaking the legs of the three crucified men.
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This would have the effect of removing support for the upper body, which would then hang with a dead weight and render the breathing action of the rib-cage very difficult, thereby hastening death if it had not already occurred. The permission was granted. However, when the soldiers came to Jesus they found he was dead already, so they did not break his legs. This means that they were absolutely sure he was dead — Roman soldiers knew a dead body when they saw one. However, presumably to make doubly sure that Jesus was dead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear.

John tells us that the spear-thrust produced a flow of blood and water.
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This supplies us with medical evidence of death. It indicates that massive blood clotting had taken place in the main arteries, which shows that Jesus had died even before the spear-thrust. Since John could not have known of the pathological significance of this, it is a powerful piece of circumstantial detail that establishes the Christian claim that Jesus really died.
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When the Sanhedrin Councillor, Joseph of Arimathea, subsequently came to Pilate to request the body for burial, Pilate was not willing to take any risks, not even for such a prominent person. In the very earliest of the Gospel accounts, Mark records that Pilate was surprised to hear that Jesus was already dead (recall the fact mentioned above, that crucified people often lived in agony for some days); so he took the precaution of checking with the duty centurion. Only when he had received this confirmation of death did Pilate release the corpse of Jesus for burial.
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The evidence for Jesus’ death is so strong that John Dominic Crossan, the highly sceptical co-founder of the Jesus Seminar admitted: “That [Jesus] was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.”
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And atheist scholar Gerd Lüdemann wrote: “Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.”
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II. THE BURIAL OF JESUS

1. Who buried Jesus?

All four Gospels tell us that Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy man, went to Pilate and requested the body of Jesus in order to bury it in a tomb that he owned.
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Presumably Joseph was able to get access to Pilate because of his status as a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin Council.

His motivation was clear: he had become a follower of Jesus, and wanted to ensure that he had a decent burial. But in all probability, he had another motive. By his action he wanted to show that he had no part in the Sanhedrin’s decision to execute Jesus, and was protesting against it. He had not joined the Sanhedrin in condemning him.
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Indeed, it might well be that burying the body of Jesus as he did effectively amounted to handing in his resignation from the Sanhedrin. In light of his action, it is very unlikely that the Sanhedrin would have tolerated his membership any longer.

From John’s account of the trial of Jesus, we have already deduced that Pilate had nothing but contempt for the Sanhedrin. He had seen that their case against Jesus was pathetically thin, and had acceded to their request to crucify Jesus only because they had blackmailed him. It may be, therefore, that in Joseph he was glad to see at least one member of the Sanhedrin who had disagreed with the general verdict; and in giving the body to Joseph he may well have felt a slight easing of his conscience.

This account of Pilate’s acceding to Joseph’s request for the body has all the hallmarks of authentic history. Bearing in mind the antagonism of the Sanhedrin to Christ and his followers, it is highly improbable that those same followers would have invented the story of a member of the Sanhedrin being prepared to stand with Jesus by ensuring he had an honourable burial, while many of the disciples themselves had run off in fear! In addition, if the story were false, it would have been fatal for the Christian version of events for the Gospel writers to name someone with such a high public profile as Joseph. It would have been so easy for opponents to check the details afterwards, and prove the story untrue.

2. The place of the burial

According to the record, Joseph, together with another member of the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus,
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buried the body of Jesus in a private tomb belonging to Joseph.
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In addition, other witnesses saw where the tomb was: the women from Galilee saw it,
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as did the two Marys.
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The fact of Jesus’ burial in a tomb plays an important role in the evidence for the resurrection. If Jesus’ corpse had simply been thrown into a common grave — as often happened to criminals — the determination of whether a specific body was no longer there would have been made very difficult, if not impossible. And not only was Jesus buried in a tomb; it was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid before, so there was no question of his body being accidentally confused with that of someone else.
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Moreover, since, as we have just noticed, some of the women-believers followed Joseph, and saw the tomb in which Christ’s body was laid,
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it makes it extremely unlikely that, when the women came early on the first day of the week while it was still dark, they mistook the tomb, as some scholars have suggested.

What is likely is that one of those women was Joanna, the wife of Chuza, the steward or manager of Herod’s household. Luke tells us that she was a follower of Jesus from Galilee,
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and that these women from Galilee not only witnessed the crucifixion, but also the burial.
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As a member of the upper-crust of society, and as a follower of Jesus, she would have been well known to Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. With such prominent people involved, it is inconceivable that a mistake could have been made regarding the location of the tomb, especially in light of the additional information that John gives us, to the effect that the tomb was in Joseph’s private garden, near to the place where Jesus was crucified.
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3. The manner of the burial

Together with Nicodemus, Joseph wrapped the body in linen cloths interlaced with spices.
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They were following a time-honoured custom for the burial of an important person; and in the process they would have used a mixture of myrrh and aloes — about 25 kg in all. As wealthy people, in all probability they would have had a store of such spices readily available at home. It is possible that they were helped in this by the wealthier women from Galilee.
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In any case, between them they had enough spices for the preliminary embalming. The rest could wait until the Sabbath was over.

The other women, who were not so prosperous, had no such spices available; they would have to wait until the shops reopened after the Sabbath in order to buy them.
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Implications

One thing is very clear from all of this: they were not expecting a resurrection. If you expect a body to rise from the dead, you do not embalm it in this way! Indeed, when the women arrived the next morning (Sunday), they were only concerned with the problem of gaining access to the tomb in order to continue the embalming
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— clear evidence once more that they were not expecting a resurrection.

It is also to be noted that the weight of the spices, and the way in which the grave-cloths would have been tightly bound around the body, render incredible the theory mentioned earlier — that Christ swooned on the cross, revived in the tomb, and then managed to escape.

Security at the tomb

The body was placed in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock, not in a grave dug in the earth. The tomb must have been of considerable size, since Peter and John were later able to go right into it.
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In such tombs the body was usually placed in an alcove on a rock-ledge, the ledge having an elevated part at one end where the head could rest slightly higher than the body. The tomb was then secured by Joseph with a large disc-shaped stone that fitted into a slanting groove at the entrance to the tomb: though easily rolled into place, it would have required several men to move it away.
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In addition, acting on the authority of Pilate, the next day the Jewish leaders had the stone officially sealed, so that no one could break that seal without incurring the wrath of officialdom.
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Moreover, at the request of the Pharisees and with Pilate’s permission, guards were placed around the tomb. Matthew tells us that this was to prevent the disciples coming, removing the body of Jesus, and fraudulently announcing a “resurrection”. Here are the details of his account:

The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, “Sir, we remember how that impostor said, while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise.’ Therefore order the tomb to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away and tell the people, ‘He has risen from the dead,’ and the last fraud will be worse than the first.” Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers. Go, make it as secure as you can.” So they went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard.
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Although some have questioned the authenticity of the story about the guards, there is strong evidence of its truth. First of all, it is not hard to imagine the unease and nervousness of the priests as they recalled Christ’s prediction of his resurrection. They could not afford to run any risk of a deception here, so it was in their interests to get the tomb guarded. In addition to this, the story is confirmed by its sequel, as we shall see in a moment. Here, however, we should notice in passing that it was not until the day after the burial that the priests posted the guard. The women, who had gone home immediately after the burial, would have known nothing about the guard. This accounts for the fact that, as they were going to the tomb the next (Sunday) morning, they questioned among themselves: “Who will roll away the stone for us?” According to Mark, the stone had in fact been rolled away by angelic intervention.
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III. THE EMPTY TOMB

It is the constant and unvarying testimony of the Gospels that the tomb was found to be empty when the Christian women came early in the morning of the first day of the week, to complete the task of encasing the body of Jesus in spices. And when the apostles went to investigate the women’s report, they likewise found the tomb empty.

It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of this fact, for it shows us what the early Christians mean when they testify to the resurrection of Jesus. They mean that the body of Jesus which they had buried in the tomb, knowing it to be dead — that same body was raised from the dead and had vacated the tomb. However much that body was changed (and the descriptions of what that body was like, when they eventually saw and handled it alive, will indicate some of these changes), they insist that it was the same body that had been laid in the tomb. It was not another, new, body, unconnected with the original body of Jesus. It was a genuine resurrection of the original body, not the substitution of a new body in place of the original.

This fact is very important, because, in the last century and a half, some theologians have argued that the testimony of the early Christians to the bodily resurrection of Christ was never more than a mythical way of expressing their faith that Christ’s spirit had survived death; and therefore it would not have made any difference to their claim that Christ had risen from the dead, if it could have been demonstrated to them that his body was still in the tomb.

But this is a comparatively modern, and indeed a modernist, theory based on the
a priori
assumption of naturalism. It cannot be made to square with the insistent emphasis that the early witnesses placed on the fact that the tomb was empty. When they explain that fact by saying that Christ had risen from the dead, they mean by that the literal resurrection of his body.