Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Live right on

In Wendell Berry's novel Hannah Coulter, Hannah's husband Nathan has a repeated saying: "We're going to live right on." As Hannah trenchantly notes, Nathan does not say it often, and he says it only when living right on is going to be difficult.

In the end, Nathan gets cancer in his old age, and he declines treatment that he deems extraordinary and goes through a dying process that we now associate with home hospice care, eventually dying naturally in his own home in the presence of his wife and a close friend.

But Hannah finds it difficult at first to accept Nathan's decision to decline aggressive cancer treatment. Here is part of the scene:

My tears were falling into the bowl of beaten eggs and then my nose dripped into it. I flung the whole frosthy mess into the sink. I said, "Well, what are you planning to do? Just die? Or what?"

I couldn't turn around. I heard him fold the paper. After a minute he said, "Dear Hannah, I'm going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself."

He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. I fixed some supper, and we ate.

He lived right on.

I must confess here that, since the Covid-19 pandemic began, I have often felt a sense of paralysis that has prevented me from blogging, especially about the pandemic. Those who follow my public content on Facebook know that that has been loosening somewhat lately, as I state more forthrightly what I think in public posts. But for a while, I was simply not talking publicly. At first I wanted to tread carefully while watching how the empirical situation unfolded. Then I was almost stunned with horror at the destruction I saw being carried out by what I considered (and still consider) to be the disproportionate, unwise, and dystopian governmental response to the virus and, perhaps even more, by the fracturing and disagreement among otherwise sane and sensible people, including Christians and pro-lifers.

There were other reasons for not writing much on this topic. For a while I was finishing drafting my forthcoming book on John, The Eye of the Beholder. That manuscript is now with the publisher for electronic typesetting. Then I was working hard on my blog posts and video scripts for my responses to Michael Licona. That playlist and blog series are now completed. Then I was not wanting to do anything that might confusingly intersperse current posts at this blog with the massive archiving project in which others copied my apologetics and biblical studies posts over many years from What's Wrong With the World to this blog. So there was always something. And now I still have other work to do, including my duties at home.

In the back of my mind, too, was a feeling of utter weariness and a certain amount of shock at the attitudes being taken and their vehemence: Whom would I offend if I said openly that I think many if not most of the measures being taken against this virus are overly draconian and to that extent misguided, vastly overlooking spiritual and other intangible harms? Would that undermine my work in New Testament and apologetics? Who might hold such comments against me? Who might use them to portray me as some kind of anti-science kook? How much should I allow such considerations to weigh? And who has time for the never-ending squabbling of social media?

But recently, perhaps partly (in an odd way) as a result of the horrifically tragic death of Mike Adams, I have begun speaking out more, though in what I hope are judicious and thoughtful terms. See, for example, herehere, here, and here.

Today (it might seem, irrelevantly) I got my car's oil changed. While sitting in the waiting room at the dealership, clad (more or less) in a dutiful face shield, I was reading a back issue of The Human Life Review, produced during the New York City lockdown. It was a bit of a time capsule (of a time only a few months ago), with some articles showing no awareness of the pandemic and others being all about it. As usual with HLR, there were several well-researched and interesting articles about such esoteric and interesting matters as the under-reporting of abortion complications and the character of Abigail Adams (really). The short pandemic op-eds contained at least one cautionary note about the possible ill effects of lockdowns, but two of them expressed horror at what the authors saw as the brutal rhetoric, incompatible with a pro-life position, of those speaking against lockdowns. As we have seen for months, the pro-life version of, "You just want Grandma to die" is the claim that those who are raising the dangers of lockdowns see those in vulnerable populations as expendable. 

Now, to be fair, it absolutely does not help when some people speak against lockdowns by using talk of "quality of life years." Yikes! Don't do that. You just blur distinctions that need to be un-blurred, and you definitely give fodder to the "expendable lives" claim. Of course, others have pointed out more eloquently than I, and with more statistics, that many people will die as a result of economic and other indirect effects of the lockdowns themselves--people driven into poverty, people who don't get needed medical care, people driven to despair. Are their lives expendable?

As part of the archiving project, this older post of mine came to light--an important bit of work, if I may say so myself.

But now I can add to it. What I argued there is that there is a great danger in our own time of loving death too much rather than loving life too much. I pointed out that older Christian writers, such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, saw a kind of vitalism or transhumanism that seeks to retain and lengthen life at all costs as the great danger in their time, whereas our own danger is somewhat different.

All true. And yet we are also now faced by paradoxes. Consider: In Canada, elderly people (and non-elderly people, for that matter) can choose euthanasia but can't (as in most nursing homes in the U.S.) have relatives visit them, lest they contract Covid-19 and die. Think about that. They can choose death, even due to the loneliness of the Covid restrictions (see this anecdotal comment), but they can't risk death by way of such an ordinary activity as seeing their children, friends, and grandchildren. Euthanasia advocates have even scrambled to be sure that euthanasia assistance is available by Zoom.

As this conversation points out, because ours is a materialistic culture, the physical goal of avoiding death is elevated to the detriment of intangible goods. True. But at the same time, abortion clinics were kept open in my state of Michigan as "essential" even during the hardest lockdown. Not only did this involve deliberately killing babies, it also exposed the mothers and their relatives, bent on the death of the child, to potential medical complications and, for that matter, virus infection, for the goal of making sure that no unwanted child was born. This seems to mean that Thanatos will have his sacrifice, come what may.

Does our secular Western country fear death too much or too little? Does it worship Death or run from him?

As it turns out, both. As a woman planning to access assisted suicide says openly here, it's all about control. "I choose to be in control," she says.

Now, this is just exactly morally backwards. In answer to the misguided hand-wringing about supposedly heartless and "Darwinian" concerns about lockdowns, masking, and other draconian measures, and also in answer to the death doctors, we must distinguish all of the following:

1) Killing people directly and deliberately (as in abortion and assisted suicide and euthanasia). (Always wrong)

2) Foregoing treatment that the patient understandably deems extraordinary. (Sometimes entirely legitimate)

3) Withholding basic care, such as food and water. (Always wrong.)

4) Engaging in otherwise entirely legitimate actions, such as spending time with friends, opening a legitimate business, singing, going to church, traveling, etc., which by an entirely indirect and unintended process causes a death.

It should be evident that #4 is something that we all have to risk doing all the time. It is impossible to live at all without risking causing someone else's death. It is shallow to say that we can take risks only for ourselves. As I pointed out here, we must take risks for other people constantly. Just driving down the road to take your child to get a vaccination risks causing a death by an indirect process, in an accident--your child's death, for one. There is nothing remotely un-pro-life, much less "Darwinian," about saying that you, and others, should go ahead and live life in a more or less normal way, doing moral and even praiseworthy activities, even if this risks causing a death as a result of someone's catching Covid. Of course we must take into account the degree of risk and the importance of the activity in question, and of course there are reasonable precautions we can take (I am not advocating "Covid parties"!). And of course reasonable people can and will differ on what count as reasonable precautions. The point is that risking an indirect and unintended death by engaging in a legitimate activity is business as usual in a contingent world, not heartless immorality. Indeed, by not acting in a way that carries risk, for ourselves and for others, we may indirectly cause more deaths! 

This is where the older authors such as C.S. Lewis have much to teach us. Lewis's characters in his Narnia books talk boldly about "taking the adventure that Aslan sends us." In the water world of Perelandra, the unfallen Green Lady emphasizes the importance of "accepting the wave" that God sends rather than demanding certainty and security. This is exactly what we are now being told never to do. Our hyper-controlling world worships the god Death at the same time that it fears him with a great fear, and the end result is that we never accept the wave or the adventure. In a grisly reversal of all right values, we flee from Death even to the extent of killing our incarnate friendships and our joyful gatherings, while at other times those in our secular world choose to seek out Death (at the abortion mill, at the hands of the euthanasia doctor) to offer him a living sacrifice, unholy and acceptable. Being Christians helps us to see where all of that goes wrong, though one should not need to be a Christian to see it. 

Life is a contingent gift and must be embraced and lived. If you do not believe in God, you may not know how to express that, and in a sense you may not consciously believe it. But in your best moments, you sense it and know it. And you also know that life must be lived and seized and that life is not without risk. Indeed, any driving instructor knows that the student who tries too hard to avoid risk in making a lefthand turn is often the student whose driving is the most dangerous, the most indecisive and tentative, and hence the most likely to cause an accident. Prudence is not dithering. Prudence is not the vain attempt to avoid all risk. Prudence must not be turned into the enemy of all gallantry, courage, joy, and generosity. And prudence is not trying literally to put human relationships and societies into "freeze" mode, shutting them down indefinitely or over and over again, in the hopes that a pathogen will pack its bags and leave in discouragement and that one will do more good than harm by such means. (Nor is such a hope scientific in its basis. Wherefore acting on it is not, ultimately, prudent!) 

At the same time, if you actually do love and care about human life, you ought to be able to see the terrible irony in continuing to kill humans deliberately while compassing land and sea, causing untold spin-off harms (including deaths), in order to avoid causing a single accidental death by means of a single, specific virus.

So if the lady in the nursing home wants to see her relatives, let her see her relatives. Let her take that risk. Let them hold each others' hands and see each others' faces. That is a healthy attitude. It can and should be a part of a healthy worldview that is as far removed as possible from the euthanasia mindset. And if others want to work and rejoice and gather and see each other face to face, don't tell them that this must mean that they do not care about the elderly lady. Their actions can and should be part of a healthy worldview that is as far removed as possible from the desire to see others die or even to neglect them. It should be part of embracing life and should provide the society (both economically and interpersonally) in which the elderly can be cared for rather than being isolated "for their own good." But beware: If you tell all of these people that they must be anti-life to think this way, you risk their believing you, which would be a tragic confusion.

I hope to continue saying these things as a reminder from time to time, while I continue working on other things. 

Live right on. Dying will have to take care of itself.

Monday, August 24, 2020

Independence, conspiracy, and the resurrection

Recently a correspondent wrote and told me that he wanted more ammunition against the theory that the disciples were involved in a conspiracy to fake the resurrection of Jesus. He said that he sees that hallucination theories are a poor explanation and grants (this is important) the reliability of the Gospels but, despite the fact that many of the original witnesses risked much for their testimony, he was still concerned about conspiracy theories.

I found that what I wrote in return has implications more broadly for the arguments for the resurrection, so I decided that it would make a good blog post. Notice for example that the considerations here about the women who claimed to have seen angels and Jesus have implications for hallucination theories as well. Apparently the women claimed to have seen Jesus separately (at least Mary Magdalene separate from the others) as well as a group together. And as argued here, they would have been under various social pressures from their relatives and friends, which produces an important degree of independence in their testimony. This is overwhelmingly strong when it comes to conspiracy, but it is also relevant to other theories. If one can bring oneself to imagine any kind of experience that would lead a group of women to think falsely they had chatted with angels and gripped the feet of the risen Jesus (and what would that be?), one should remember that they would have had separate chances to "snap out of it" in consultation with their own families and friends later on. And once again, Mary Magdalene apparently claimed to have had a separate experience from the others.

It's also important to emphasize the role played here by the reliability of the Gospels. Since he (rightly) took that to be established, I argue repeatedly using the names and descriptions of the alleged witnesses and the specifics of what they claimed. This is important. It's a good thing that I don't regard it as "beyond what historians can conclude" to say that Joanna, the wife of Chuza, was one of the women at the tomb or that two disciples who were not members of the eleven claimed to have experienced the events on the Road to Emmaus. Again, as I have often emphasized, taking the Gospel accounts as reliable means that we can claim boldly that this was what the putative witnesses said. In writing this I was struck anew by how many different people--people, by the way, whom Tim and I didn't even bother to name or to break out as separate witnesses in our 2009 article--claimed to have seen Jesus after his resurrection and were willing to be known as witnesses either by name (often) or occasionally by description (e.g., Clopas's companion). I was also struck again by the relevance of the conversion of James, Jesus' brother and the fact that he had not previously been a follower of Jesus, which, again, attests to the independence of his testimony. 

Despite the fact that the conspiracy theory is not generally considered to be a strong candidate as an alternative to the resurrection, contemplating all that is wrong with it helps to draw one's attention more generally to the strength of the maximal data case for the resurrection. Here is what I wrote, very slightly edited:

When it comes to a conspiracy theory, I'm inclined to mention the "consensus of scholarship," though not as a bare argument from authority. What I would say is that there is a good reason why even skeptical scholars have abandoned the conspiracy theory. I think they really have been overwhelmed by the evidence, though they may not have thought it all out in detail.

Let me discuss some of the very strong arguments against conspiracy. I'm taking the reliability of the Gospels to mean that the Gospel resurrection accounts at least represent what the alleged witnesses claimed occurred.

First, let's consider the speed with which such a conspiracy would have had to get going. In order to account for the fact that the Jewish leaders didn't simply lead people to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and display the fact that the body was still there, someone invoking conspiracy presumably has to hold that the disciples did in fact move the body and rebury it somewhere secretly--the theory mentioned at the end of Matthew as held "by the Jews to this day." Since the disciples claimed that Jesus rose on the third day, they presumably had to move the body quite early in order to begin putting about this rumor among the larger group of Jesus' former followers whom they hoped to deceive. Otherwise, especially with the testimony of the women, the other followers would have had a very legitimate complaint if the eleven didn't start saying anything about the resurrection prior to Pentecost, even among Jesus' followers--why didn't you say something sooner if all of these exciting things were happening on the third day?

But remember that just as recently as Thursday night, Peter was denying Jesus. What this tells us is that Peter at that time believed that his own best interests lay in denying any connection with Jesus, denying that he ever knew him. He does appear to have felt guilty about doing so, but that would hardly motivate him to turn around within just a few days and start perpetrating a cynical hoax that Jesus had risen! If anything, the feeling that he had failed Jesus and his weeping bitterly would be likely to move him to be a better man. And even if we imagine that he had some hitherto unknown dark streak that would lead him to lie elaborately about Jesus (a supposition completely at odds with the entire portrayal of Peter's personality throughout the Gospels), he would have had to have a radical and swift change of mind about his own self-interest to become involved in a plot to steal and rebury the body just three days later, with the intent to lie and say that Jesus was risen.

This is somewhat different from the usual (and also legitimate) point made about the transformation in the disciples from being fearful to being bold proclaimers of Jesus' message forty days later. Here I am emphasizing how bizarre and swift this about-face would be from the perspective of cynical self-interest, given what we know about Peter's thoughts in that respect on the Thursday evening. And in fact, he was doubtless "correct" on the Thursday evening that the safest course for him to take, from a self-interested perspective, would be to deny Jesus or at least distance himself from Jesus as much as possible. Why in the world, then, would he suddenly change his mind by Saturday night, just two days later, and decide to start an elaborate hoax that would involve lifelong continued association with Jesus' name via a lie and a body theft? That makes no sense. Nor does it make sense for the other disciples either, who all forsook Jesus and fled in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Moreover, Peter and the other disciples would have had to get the women involved in the plot in a short time as well, since the women would be telling their story at least to other followers of Jesus long before the day of Pentecost. Is it at all plausible that they slipped off to wherever the various women were staying on the Sabbath, while everyone was still in shock from the crucifixion, and talked them into participating in such a hoax within a period of less than 48 hours?

Next, consider the number and variety of people who would have to be involved in such a hoax, against their own interests, if the Gospels are reliable accounts of what the alleged witnesses claimed. Of course there were the eleven. Then there would be the women. Given the various name lists in the Gospels, there would be at least five of these--Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, Salome, Joanna, and at least one more (if we take literally the plural "other women" in Luke 24:11). We're up to at least sixteen, in at least two different groups. 

Then there would be Clopas and his companion who were on the road to Emmaus. Then there is James the brother of Jesus (given the reference in I Cor. 15 and the leadership of James Jesus' brother in the early church). There are Matthias and Barsabbas called Justus, named in Acts 1 as fulfilling the requirements of witnesses to the resurrection. (We're up to twenty-one.) Luke 24 indicates a group of those who were "with the eleven" supposedly at Jesus' first appearance, which is probably some unspecified greater number who apparently attested that they actually saw Jesus risen and saw him eat and so forth on that occasion. 

Paul mentions 500 at once, and even if one thinks that Paul might have been mistaken in naming such a large number, it seems like there was some good-sized group beyond the eleven who claimed to have seen Jesus for themselves, probably in Galilee, and on a separate occasion from the occasions in Jerusalem when the eleven and others claimed to have seen him. (Notice that there is going to be some degree of independence among these occasions. In Tim's and my article on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, published in 2009, we considered independence from the perspective of number of witnesses, though we didn't go up as high as twenty-one! But here I'm talking about the fact that different instances have to be explained separately. This is relevant to attempted hallucination theories as well.) Now, all of these people would presumably have had to be involved in the conspiracy, especially those whose names are given or who were known individually. For if their names are given, they were offered to the people whom the disciples were evangelizing as specific witnesses who could discuss the matter, give accounts of how they saw Jesus, and so forth.

That's a lot of opportunities for people to change their minds and decide not to continue with this ridiculous hoax. A lot of opportunities for someone to "blow the gaffe" by admitting that it was all a hoax. The idea that all of these people had something to gain by doing this and that none of them would have reneged is enormously improbable. What did, for example, Joanna the wife of Chuza have to gain by lying and saying that she saw angels and Jesus risen? Nothing at all. Chuza was Herod's household manager. She could simply have returned to her previous life and gotten over her grief and disappointment at the crucifixion. James the brother of Jesus apparently wasn't even a follower prior to the crucifixion. He could have just continued with whatever his profession was. Why would he turn around after the crucifixion and decide to become involved in an elaborate hoax to found a despised sect when he wasn't even very impressed by his brother Jesus during Jesus' own lifetime, when he was followed by adoring crowds and was supposedly healing and raising the dead?

The alleged witnesses are not all equally tight-knit, not all equally under the influence of some charismatic leader. Their interests are not all the same. Jesus' own followers seem to have existed in concentric circles--the closest three (Peter, James, and John), then the Twelve, then the seventy, then some still larger group. We appear to have some in all of these groups who said that they actually saw Jesus risen, and at least one (James) who was in Jesus' own lifetime outside of all of these groups. It is highly likely that such a large, heterogenous group conspiracy would not have held together over time, especially as persecution increased with the beating of Peter and John, then the stoning of Stephen, the persecution from Saul of Tarsus, etc.

For that matter, even the ring-leaders--Peter, James, and John--had a life to return to. As John 21 shows us, Peter still had his boat. They could have gone back to fishing on the Sea of Galilee. It's important not to think of the disciples as losers with nothing else to do with their lives. They'd only been followers of Jesus for about three years. Jewish males were expected to have a trade or some way of making a living, even if they were followers of a rabbi for a while when young. Judaism provided a way of having a relationship with God. It wasn't as though they had no other way of giving meaning to their lives than by inventing these doctrines of the resurrection, etc., and hoaxing people into believing in the resurrection. Nor were Jews given to glorifying failed Messiahs! (After the Bar Kochba rebellion nobody suggested that he was risen from the dead!) The beating of Peter and John can hardly have been pleasant. In the highly, highly improbable event that they were carrying out a conspiracy at that point, one would have thought being flogged would have awakened them to the fact that this was not a promising career path.

Next, consider the question of why the disciples would have involved the women at all in such a conspiracy. This is of course a variant on the criterion of embarrassment that is often brought up concerning the accounts of the women at the tomb. To my mind it is an even stronger point when we are considering conspiracy. This isn't just a matter of someone's making up a pretty bedtime story. This is a matter of getting these five (at least) women unnecessarily involved and inducing them to say that they were the first to see Jesus risen, that they saw angels, and then counting on them to keep up their side of the story. Why do such a thing? Why involve them? In that social context, it is not as though their stories were especially likely to carry conviction. Nor were their stories necessary for such a conspiracy, and involving them only added to the risk of discovery, both due to additional numbers of conspirators and due to other social influences on the women. For example, what if a husband, father, brother, or other male relative told one of the women witnesses to stop all of this silly nonsense? Such a relative would have had much more legal and social authority over her than, say, Peter would have and might easily have questioned her and gotten the truth out of her.

And finally (for the moment), remember that the conversion of Paul then has to be accounted for in a completely different, separate way. Paul was no fool and was patently, burningly sincere in his belief in the resurrection of Jesus. To account for his conversion we must first imagine something or other that brought about his abrupt change on the road to Damascus. That leads us into all of the unconvincing attempts to do this, which seem to come down to some form of hallucination, however you slice it. And on top of that we must assume that in his various meetings with the apostolic leadership in Jerusalem he never detected that they were a bunch of hoaxing knaves making up a story out of whole cloth. This despite the fact that Paul was quite willing to criticize them and was positively proud of his independent judgement. This only adds to the already overwhelming improbability of the theory of conspiracy. And if one were to try instead to say that Saul the persecutor abruptly decided to turn around and join in a known conspiracy, which he knew was a conspiracy, to promote Christianity,...well...as the saying goes, explaining how overwhelmingly improbable that is will be "left as an exercise for the reader"!

Thursday, August 20, 2020

(Guest Post) Was there a guard at Jesus’ tomb?

 

(Guest Post) Was there a guard at Jesus’ tomb?

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

A guest post by Timothy McGrew

… ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή
Hippocrates, Aphorisms

Skeptical objections to the historicity of the Gospel narratives are numerous. They are also, for the most part, old news. When so many people have gone over the same ground so often, we should not expect much in the way of novelty. Still, every so often someone manages to state some objections so forcefully, or at least with so much bravado and so many footnotes, that they appear to be a new and devastating challenge to the basic factual accuracy of the Gospels.

Michael Alter’s book The Resurrection: A Critical Inquiry (2015) is certainly long enough to seem imposing, and somewhat to my surprise it has thrown my acquaintance V. J. Torley into a bit of a tailspin. Torley has written a very long, detailed, glowing review of Alter’s book -- a review that is practically a monograph in its own right -- in which he claims that the book is a “bombshell” that “demolishes Christian apologists’ case for the resurrection.”

Since I am unimpressed by Alter’s arguments, I asked Torley to pick three particular arguments as test cases. He readily obliged, and in this series of guest posts I will evaluate the arguments that seem to Alter and Torley so powerful and convincing. Torley chose the three following points for this test:

1. Was there a guard at Jesus’ tomb?
2. Did Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple stand at the foot of the cross?
3. Was Jesus buried in a new rock tomb? (specifically, a tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea)

In each case, he believes, Alter has mounted a powerful argument that the Gospels get the answers to these questions wrong, and he has recapitulated those arguments that he finds convincing in the linked blog post. I think there is far less to this case than meets the eye.

Here is Torley’s summary of the argument that there was not a guard at Jesus’ tomb.

This story, which is found only in Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 27:62-66), is a transparent invention, and a very silly one at that. In Matthew’s account, the chief priests and elders go to Pilate on Saturday and ask for a guard to secure Jesus’ tomb, in order to prevent Jesus’ followers from stealing Jesus’ body and proclaiming that he had risen from the dead. Pilate accedes to their request. But this story fails to explain why the body could not have been stolen on Friday night, before the guard was posted over the tomb. Nor are we told why Pilate would have agreed to the Jewish leaders’ request, which concerned a purely religious issue that was of no concern to a Roman prefect. And how likely is it that Pilate, whom the Gospels depict as being pressured against his will by the chief priests into ordering Jesus’ crucifixion, would have turned around the following day and granted their request for a guard? Finally, the story is at odds with Jewish law, as it involves the chief priests and Pharisees ordering people to work on the Sabbath, which was forbidden in the Ten Commandments given to Moses: “Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates” (Exodus 20:9-10). Even Gentiles employed by Jews were not allowed to work.


Torley rejects the story that there was a guard at the tomb for the following four reasons:

A. It is mentioned only in Matthew’s Gospel, not in the other three.

B. This account fails to explain why the body could not have been stolen on Friday night.

C. We are not told why Pilate would agree to the Jewish leaders’ request. In particular:

1. The request concerned a purely religious matter, and we would not expect Pilate to care much about such things
2. Pilate had just been pressured into ordering Jesus’ crucifixion, and therefore any further request would be unlikely to meet with a favorable reception

D. The Jewish rulers would not have made such a request of Pilate, since a gentile employed by a Jew would not be allowed to work on the Sabbath.

Let us consider these reasons in turn.

First, only Matthew’s Gospel mentions the setting of a guard at Jesus’ tomb. It is not clear how much weight Torley intends this fact to bear by itself. But as the argument from silence in such cases is generally terribly weak, it is hard to see why it should be significant just here. Many of the events of antiquity crop up in only one source. The conditions that have to be met for an argument from silence to be strong are rather stringent and are rarely met in historical work. (For details, see my paper “The Argument from Silence,” Acta Analytica 29 (2014), 215-28.) As Torley has not attempted to argue that the silence of the other evangelists meets the probabilistic challenge laid out there, I will not belabor the point.

Second, Torley objects that the account does not explain why the body could not have been stolen on Friday night. In making this objection, he assumes that the request was made on Saturday morning. For the moment, suppose it was; even so, the objection has little force. There are simply too many plausible ways for the rulers to fail to make the request on Friday. Pilate might have left pointed instructions that he wasn’t to be bothered further that evening. The Jewish leaders might have left someone of their own to keep an eye on the tomb overnight. Failing that, they might still have thought that it would be better than nothing to have a guard set for the remainder of the time period specified.

But it is not even clear from the text that the request was made on Saturday. The Jews reckoned the beginning of the Sabbath with sundown on Friday, so for all the text says, they may have made the request on Friday evening as soon as they ascertained the location of Jesus’ body. In his work The Burial and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, According to the Four Evangelists (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1827), Johann David Michaelis argues that the language of Matthew, with its peculiar turn of phrase (ἥτις ἐστὶν μετὰ τὴν Παρασκευήν, hardly necessary after Τῇ δὲ ἐπαύριον unless something more specific than the generic succession of days is intended) actually indicates that the request was made just past sundown on Friday:

Literally translated, on the following day, which is after Friday. As it is self-evident that one day must follow another, and it requires no author to tell us this, the meaning is, “on the following day, immediately after the end of Friday,” or in other words, immediately after sunset, with which, according to the custom of the Jews, the day ends, and the sabbath begins. This mode of speaking seems singular in Greek, but in Hebrew, from the same word [ערב] signifying “evening,” “holy evening,” or, as we should say, “vespers,” it becomes more intelligible. The meaning is, that from an apprehension the body might be stolen in the night, they did not wait until the following morning, they went immediately to Pilate that same evening, which now no longer belonged to Friday, but formed part of the sabbath, and requested a guard. [100; cf. the German edition, 83]


Various other New Testament scholars, not all of them conservative (Doddridge, Paulus, Kuinoel, Thorburn) concur in Michaelis’s analysis. Meyer dissents, but without adducing any reasons other than his disagreement with these authorities regarding the meaning of the expression τῇ ἐπαύριον. He does not engage with Michaelis’s point regarding the parallel Hebrew expression [ממחרת ערב השבת] at all.

The second objection, then, is either very weak (if Michaelis is wrong) or completely misguided (if he is right). This is hardly the sort of reasoning that should lead us to discard a contemporaneous narrative account of a public event.

The third objection is that Matthew’s narrative does not tell us why Pilate would acquiesce in the request of the Jewish leaders. On the face of it, this is a very odd way to object to historical evidence. Many narratives recount events without affording us an explanation for them, and sometimes we are left to guess what that explanation might be. So what?

But perhaps this problem is just a matter of wording; perhaps the real objection is that the two considerations Torley mention are supposed to make it unlikely that Pilate would grant a guard at the tomb. Is it so?

The first consideration is that Pilate, as a secular authority dealing exclusively with non-religious matters, would have had no reason to grant a request of this sort -- perhaps also that the Jewish leaders would not have had the temerity to put it to him. But this consideration misses the mark entirely. The matter of Jesus’ death, though of religious importance to the Jewish rulers, had far wider ramifications. An imposture might well raise civil trouble in Jerusalem, particularly as it was swollen at this time with hundreds of thousands (Josephus, Jewish War 2.14.3 (Loeb #280), estimates three million) of Passover pilgrims. Jesus’ popularity with the crowds was well known. Unrest at Passover had led to disastrous results within living memory, notably on the death of Herod the Great, as Josephus describes in his Antiquities 17.9.3 (Loeb #213-18). Preventing civil unrest lay squarely within Pilate’s sphere of responsibility. On this count, the matter is exactly the sort of thing we would expect the Jewish rulers to request of Pilate. It is a mark of authenticity rather than of inauthenticity.

The second consideration is that Pilate, whom the Jewish leadership had (according to the Gospels) maneuvered into having Jesus crucified against his own better judgment, would have been unlikely to grant them a further request. This point deserves close consideration, because it has a significance that has escaped Torley and Alter. According to the Gospel narratives, Pilate did not believe Jesus had done anything worthy of death. He allowed the Jews to have their way on this matter only because he feared that they would send a twisted version of events to Rome, destabilizing his governorship and perhaps leading to his being recalled in disgrace. For the sake of their argument, Alter and Torley need to grant at least this much authenticity to the Gospel narratives. In a subsequent post, I will return to this point, as it substantially undermines a claim that Torley and others have made in support of the second and third objections.

But the consideration is relevant here only if there is no other reason that Pilate might have felt moved to grant such a request. And even assuming that Pilate was thoroughly unhappy with the Jewish leaders by this time, such a reason lies ready to hand. The theft of a body and proclamation that the individual in question was alive was the sort of scenario a Roman governor under Tiberius could not safely ignore. Some sixteen years earlier, one Clemens, a slave of Caesar Augustus’s grandson Agrippa Postumus, stole the ashes and bones of his murdered master and spread the rumor that Agrippa had in fact escaped the attempt on his life. As he resembled his dead master in age and physique, he went so far as to impersonate him in some of the towns at twilight. Tiberius, who had become sole emperor after the death of his adopted father Augustus in that very year, feared a conspiracy and had Clemens apprehended, interrogated, and slain in a private part of his palace. (See Tacitus, Annals 2.39-40.)

So this second consideration, as well, turns out not only to pose no problem for the authenticity of the narrative but actually to be a point in its favor. These are the sorts of details that modern critics, even those professing to examine historical matters very minutely, are apt to overlook because they are not intimately familiar with the historical context.

The fourth objection is that the Jewish leaders would not have asked Pilate to set a guard at the tomb, since it was the Sabbath day, and Jewish law would have forbidden them to hire a gentile to do such work on the Sabbath. Yet again, the objection seems to me to be fundamentally misguided, and in two ways. First, even supposing the objection to be fairly stated, there is no guarantee that the Jewish authorities would be particularly scrupulous in the matter of hiring a Roman guard to do their work, as they had already shown their willingness to hold a trial by night in prima facie violation of their own rules.

But as it happens, the text does not bear out the idea that they were hiring anyone. Rather, they were making a request to Pilate, as the civil governor, that he would secure the tomb with a guard. Nothing in Jewish law as interpreted at the time would prevent them from making such a request.

I conclude that on the first point, Alter’s argument, as summarized by Torley, completely fails to undermine the credibility Matthew’s account of the setting of a guard at the tomb where Jesus had just been buried. Indeed, some of the particular considerations raised against that account are actually points that count on the other side, showing a minute consistency with the historical context and recent historical events that have escaped the notice of these critics.

In my subsequent posts, I will examine Torley’s two remaining challenges.

[UPDATE: See the comments thread below for an argument of Torley's on a related point.]

Was Jesus Buried in Joseph of Arimathea's New Tomb?

 

Was Jesus Buried in Joseph of Arimathea's New Tomb?

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

A Guest Post by Timothy McGrew

In this post, I conclude my critical examination of three points in V. J. Torley’s lengthy review essay, wherein Torley summarizes Michael Alter’s even more lengthy book on the resurrection. The previous two posts are here and here.

Torley’s third selected claim, taken from Michael Alter, is that the story of Jesus’ burial is improbable at multiple points, which therefore provides evidence that the Gospels have been substantially factually changed and are not historically reliable.

Here, as in the two previous points, Torley’s method (and presumably Alter’s) is that of a priori history. The idea is to say, at our distance of time, what would not have been done, to infer that therefore it was not done, and to conclude that an account that says that it was done must be false.

This is a terrible way to do history.

Prima facie, the Gospels are early documents that have some claim to be historical sources concerning practices of the time. To decide on the basis of highly indirect inference (often amounting to nothing more than bare assertion) that some practice related in the Gospels “would not” have happened, even in an entirely non-miraculous portion of the account, is to attempt to do history from one’s armchair. But history is intrinsically empirical. We would have to reject a great many things that did undoubtedly happen in secular history if we were to apply such a method consistently.

Torley begins by denying that Jesus’ body would have been buried properly except (at most) in a common grave.

The major support for this denial comes from further assertions by Bart Ehrman, who suggests that there was a hard and fast rule that those convicted of “high treason” were not allowed to be properly buried.

To begin with, the only thing that this assertion seems to have going for it is the mention in Ulpian (cited here by Craig Evans in support of Jesus’ burial) of a possible exception to the allowance of burial in the case of those convicted of high treason:

At present, the bodies of those who have been punished are only buried when this has been requested and permission granted; and sometimes it is not permitted, especially where persons have been convicted of high treason.

There is also the fact that, in times of total war (such as at the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70), the Romans apparently did not permit burial of those crucified. That is all. But on this slender basis Ehrman (followed by Alter and Torley) manufactures a hard and fast rule that no one convicted of a crime against the Roman state, even in a time of peace, would ever have been permitted decent burial. He then argues further that Pilate would have extended this prohibition to Jesus.

The evidence for such a rule is nonexistent; and as I have argued in my previous post, the idea that Jesus was convicted of high treason is nonsense. The record of Jesus’ trial indicates that Pilate himself did not believe that Jesus was a threat to the state and that he merely gave in to pressure to crucify him. According to the Gospels he actually told the crowd that he found no guilt in Jesus on that score, and his references to Jesus as the king have more than a touch of sarcasm in them. As Torley himself says, what Pilate thought is what is important. It was up to Pilate whether to allow Jesus’ body to be properly buried. We have no reason to believe that he was bound by some definite rule requiring him to go one way or another. And, as Craig Evans points out, Josephus makes it clear that it was a fairly frequent practice for the Romans to allow people to bury the bodies of those crucified.

It requires a great deal of cherry picking to manufacture these kinds of difficulties in the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ trial. On the one hand, Ehrman & co. need to use the Gospel accounts to make their argument that Jesus was “convicted of high treason.” This comes from, e.g., the leaders’ accusation of sedition and their statement that if Pilate lets Jesus go he is not a friend of Caesar. They then want to lean on their inference that Jesus was “convicted of high treason” to argue against a different part of the documents, just as soberly stated -- namely, that Jesus was buried in a tomb. This is not a principled use of historical data.

Torley’s next objection to the burial narrative is that, if the Romans had allowed anyone to take Jesus’ body for burial, it would have been the Jewish leaders rather than a friend of Jesus. He then further reasons that, on the assumption that the Jewish leaders had custody of Jesus’ body, they would have accorded it a dishonorable burial rather than an honorable burial.

This, again, is the purest a priori history. The claim that Pilate would not have given the body to a private individual but rather to the chief priests is unfounded. Pilate was under no illusions; he knew that they were procuring the death of an innocent man. There is not the slightest reason to think that the governor who had just denied their request for a rewording of the placard over Jesus’ head would deliberately reserve the body for their disposal. In carrying out the execution, he had taken out of their hands the only weapon they could have wielded against him with Caesar. The Jews were not going to send a delegation to Rome to complain to Tiberius that Pilate had crucified a self-appointed “king” but hadn’t been mean enough about his dead body afterward.

Torley implies that the reference in Mark to Joseph of Arimathea as a respected member of the council means that “even if Joseph of Arimathea played a role in Jesus’ burial, as the Gospels narrate, he would have been carrying out the chief priests’ wishes.” This inference is bizarre. Joseph of Arimathea was an individual acting on his own. He could perfectly well choose to do something the chief priest would not have wanted him to do -- allowing for the sake of argument that the chief priest really would have had an objection to Jesus’ burial. There is no reason to assume that Mark’s mention of his being a member of the council means that he was carrying out the council’s wishes about the body. In fact, Mark expressly says (15:42) that he “took up courage” to ask for the body, a point that fits very nicely with John’s statement that he had previously been fearful to admit that he was sympathetic to Jesus (John 19:38). Mark’s own narrative thus implies that Joseph was doing something that he realized could be risky in some way.

Once again, we see here the strange attempt to pit one part of the narrative speculatively against the other even though the narrative itself is quite coherent. Torley is rejecting Mark’s own account of what Joseph did with the body -- wrapping it in linen and burying it in a rock-cut tomb. But he (apparently following Alter) arbitrarily selects a different bit of Mark’s narrative (that Joseph was a member of the council), speculates without justification, and in direct contradiction to the narrative we have, that perhaps this means that Joseph was acting on behalf of the council, and then uses this speculation as a further way to reject the story of the burial, on the grounds that Joseph “would have” been carrying out the wishes of the council. Once again, this manner of handling of Mark’s information is historically irresponsible.

For all we know, Pilate might have delivered the body of Jesus to the chief priests had they asked. But our only historical sources, the Gospels, say that Joseph of Arimathea went in himself (“boldly”) and asked permission to bury the body. The suggestion that certain passages of the New Testament “reflect an older tradition that the Jewish leaders were granted custody of Jesus’ body, after he had been taken down from the Cross” is without foundation. The specious pretense to the contrary arises from an overreading of the implicit pronouns in the Greek verbs in Acts 13:29, which hardly require that all and only the same individuals be in view as those who condemned Jesus a few verses earlier. The actions were done by Jews, and Paul would not be expected to stop to expound on the differences among the members of the Sanhedrin for the purposes of giving a quick verbal outline of the story of the resurrection to the Jews in the synagogue at Antioch of Pisidia.

Torley next rejects the idea that Jesus was buried in a tomb, but his reasons appear to turn merely on the question-begging assumption that the Gospels’ story of Joseph of Arimathea’s personal intervention is false. He quotes Jodi Magness to the effect that there is no evidence that the Sanhedrin or Romans maintained rock-cut tombs for executed criminals. But who ever said that they did? The whole point of the story in the Gospels is that this was an individual act by an individual man (Joseph of Arimathea) who had become sympathetic to Jesus or who, at a minimum, felt that the crucifixion was sufficiently unjust that he wanted to provide honorable burial for Jesus.

Torley relies on Matthew Ferguson to cast doubt on Joseph’s intervention on the basis of a pure and extremely weak argument from silence -- the absence of any specific mention of Joseph of Arimathea in the creed in 1 Cor. 15. But the absence of Joseph from the creed says nothing about Paul’s own knowledge. By Paul’s own description the creed was delivered to him (15:3) and was therefore not a statement of his own crafting. And in any event, a creed is a brief summary. That is the point of our calling it a creed. In such a summary of course there would be no reason to include such specific details as precisely how Jesus was buried, by whom, or in whose tomb. On the contrary, there would be reason to omit them. This argument is a peculiar sort of sleight of hand, in which one distracts attention from the explicit statement that Jesus was buried by noting that this brief summary does not repeat some other specific details of the Gospel accounts.

Here it is worth noting another implied argument from silence -- namely, the statement that “even” Jodi Magness “freely acknowledges” that archeology does not prove the existence of Joseph of Arimathea! This is simply not worth mentioning as an argument. It has no probative force. If we had only one of Plutarch’s Lives, much less four, that mentioned a given Roman senator, it would be no argument at all to say that we have not also found archeological remains of that particular senator. That is simply not how history works. Millions of people lived and died in the ancient world leaving, 2,000 years later, no record of their existence, much less archeological evidence. We have four different records that describe Joseph of Arimathea in varied but mutually consistent terms. Even one sober record of his doings would be sufficient to give us grounds to believe that he existed.

Torley next borrows from Raymond Brown the claim that the location specified for Joseph’s tomb as near Golgotha would have been undesirable or unsuitable. But this is the merest assertion. What insight does Brown have about what were considered desirable neighborhoods for burial and precisely how far away (in a radius, perhaps?) a desirable burial location was supposed to be from a place sometimes used for execution? There is no reason, for example, to think that a garden could not have been located relatively near to Golgotha and hence have provided a pleasant burial spot. It is not as though we have documents specifying a number of miles, feet, or yards that a desirable burial place had to be from a place of execution, together with a sufficient notion of the “nearness” of Joseph’s tomb to make its location unlikely. The claim that there is something improbable about the statement (John 19:42) that Joseph’s tomb was relevantly near to the place of execution is sheer hand waving. Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Torley also uncritically accepts Brown’s assertion that the Gospel authors or their sources invented the claim that Jesus was buried in a new tomb for apologetic purposes. It should be obvious that the mere fact that Brown says this does not have any argumentative cogency, but Torley’s (and Alter’s?) method apparently is to treat any such assertion from any scholar as if it automatically shifts the burden of proof. At that point all that they ask is whether the account “could have some historical basis.” Again, this is poor methodology.

Torley rejects the claim that Jesus was buried behind a rolling stone on the ground that we have found only a small number of rock tombs with such a stone. But this is a very weak argument. Indeed, it can be turned on its head. We do have evidence that there were rock tombs with rolling stones at Jesus’ time, precisely as recounted in the Gospels. One cannot reasonably reject testimony on the basis of these statistics. Even if we could accurately and confidently infer the approximate percentage of tombs that had this feature and the wealth of their owners from our archeological discoveries (a fallible inference at best), we could easily think of parallel cases in our own time where a single sober attestation would overcome the minor burden of proof. My elderly neighbor, a decade or so ago, owned a red Cadillac and kept it in lovely condition. Should readers discount my testimony to this fact because the vast majority of Americans do not own Cadillacs, and most Cadillacs are not red?

The Gospel authors had nothing to gain by inventing a round stone for Jesus’ tomb. A rectangular stone would, if anything, be even more difficult to move than a stone that could be rolled. In light of the way that these critics are handling the narratives, I have to wonder whether, had the Gospels specified a stone that could not be rolled, we would be told that this was an apologetic invention to magnify the power of God, or of Jesus, or of the angel who shifted the stone.

Torley considers Jodi Magness’s claim that Jesus was buried in a single niche in Joseph’s family tomb, presumably with other bodies, and he rejects it. Here I agree with him. The theory that Jesus was buried only in a niche with other bodies in the same tomb is bald conjecture in any event, and there is no need for any such concession. Why not take at face value the claim that Jesus was buried in a new tomb? After all, Joseph of Arimathea himself was still alive, so if he had had the tomb made for himself, it likely wouldn’t have been needed yet.

Here again, Torley throws in a forceless argument from silence -- that Mark doesn’t mention that the tomb was new. But so what? By this sort of argument, we would have to say that any tiny detail not found in Mark is automatically suspect, which begs the question against the possible historicity of other Gospels and makes it impossible for an investigator to gain additional knowledge from sources other than the one designated the earliest. But unless we assume that any Gospel later than Mark is adding its information without historical warrant (which, again, would be question begging against the other documents), the mere fact that Mark may have been the earliest Gospel written does not create any presumption against small details added elsewhere. Indeed, as Lydia has argued in Hidden in Plain View, later Gospels sometimes interact with earlier Gospels in explanatory relationships, in both directions. This is the mark of historicity in multiple narratives of the same event.

Torley asserts without argument that surrounding a body with spices was not a Jewish practice, that it was an Egyptian practice instead. Embalming may well not have been a common Jewish practice, but of course the Gospels do not say that Jesus was embalmed, nor would there have been time for embalming on the Gospels’ own accounts. Simply wrapping the body in spices (it is not completely clear whether they were dry spices or ointments) in between the windings of the burial cloth would have been relatively quick, and Torley gives no argument against John’s explicit assertion (John 19:40) that burying a body with spices was customary for Jews. Interestingly, both the Jewish Virtual Library and the Jewish Encyclopedia, sources that presumably have no Christian axe to grind, treat John’s narrative as a source of information about the use of spices in Jewish burial practices, and neither cites any evidence indicating that burial with spices was contrary to Jewish custom. In fact, the Jewish Encyclopedia cites a specific Talmudic reference to the use of spices in burial:

A BENEDICTION MAY NOT BE SAID OVER THE LIGHTS OR THE SPICES OF THE DEAD. What is the reason? — The light is kindled only in honour of the dead, the spices are to remove the bad smell. Berakoth 53.a

Torley quotes and accepts uncritically Byron McCane’s claim that the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ burial are progressively elaborated, which Torley follows up with the comment, “So much for the historical accuracy of the Gospel accounts, then.” But McCane’s claim, like other developmental theses concerning the Gospels (see here and here), is supported by cherry-picked details written up with a seasoning of rhetoric. Here is McCane:

Virtually all studies agree that as the tradition develops, every detail in the story is enhanced and improved upon. Mark begins the written tradition by saying that on Friday evening, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the Council, requested the body of Jesus from Pilate, wrapped it in linen and sealed it in a rock-cut tomb. Never again would the story be told so simply. Joseph of Arimathea becomes a “good and righteous man” who did not consent to the action against Jesus (Luke 23:51), and then evolves into a secret disciple of Jesus (Matt 27:57; John 19:38). The “rock-cut” tomb in Mark becomes a “new” tomb (Matt 27:60), “where no one had yet been laid” (Luke 23:53). John not only combines those descriptions – the tomb is both “new” and “where no one had yet been laid” (John 19:41) – but also adds that the tomb was located in a garden. In Mark Joseph wraps the body in linen — nothing more – but subsequent Gospels describe the linen as “clean” (Matt 27:59) and claim that the body was bathed in vast quantities of perfume (John 19:39). By the time of the Gospel of Peter, during the mid-second century CE, Christians were going so far as to assert that Jesus had been sumptuously buried in the family tomb of one of Jerusalem’s most powerful and wealthy families. [Emphasis added]

This paragraph is wildly misleading. It is not that Mark’s story of the burial is “told so simply” while the later versions are progressively more “evolved.” What we actually find in the Gospel stories of Jesus’ burial is the kind of non-systematic, non-contradictory variation of detail that characterizes independent, truthful testimonies. For example, only Mark 15:44-45 mentions that Pilate was surprised to learn that Jesus was already dead and that he called the centurion to confirm that this was so. This detail is not found in any of the later accounts, even in the other Synoptic Gospels. Only Mark mentions that Joseph of Arimathea purchased the linen cloth. Mark 15:47 mentions, but John (the later Gospel) does not, the important fact that there were women who saw where Jesus was laid, and the names of some of those women, as does Matthew. These do not constitute contradictions (see below). They do, by their variation, constitute counterexamples to the claim of gradual evolution and elaboration.

Luke mentions the women but omits their names. John does not name any women or mention their involvement at the time of the burial, though he mentions Nicodemus, who is not named in the Synoptics. Mark says that Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the council, but John doesn’t. On McCane’s spun account, this was apparently because John was “improving upon” his being a member of the council by causing him to “evolve” into a secret disciple of Jesus. But this is misleading. If anything, John’s account might reasonably be regarded as more disapproving, since John expressly says that Joseph had previously been afraid to admit that he was a disciple of Jesus, as had said of Nicodemus earlier in his Gospel. Mark says that Joseph went “boldly” to Pilate (“took up courage” is a more literal rendering), but none of the other Gospels refer to boldness. Luke calls him a righteous man and is careful to state that he did not consent to the actions of the council, but John does not bother to get into his relationship with the council at all. Matthew alone mentions that the tomb was Joseph of Arimathea’s own tomb; neither Luke nor John does so, though they both (obviously) assume that he had access to it. The Synoptics state expressly that the tomb was “cut out of the rock,” but John does not, though he mentions the stone at the door in Chapter 20, which assumes that it was a rock tomb. It is false that subsequent Gospels, plural, state that the linen cloth was clean. In fact, only Matthew does so, though he does not include the mention of Joseph’s purchasing it. And so forth. This is not development or evolution. It is independent variation with different details mentioned in different accounts.

Notice that two facts that are arguably more important from an apologetic perspective appear in Mark but not in John, while the statements in the burial account that McCane uses to claim that John’s account is “improved” are of less apologetic value. Mark says both that Pilate confirmed that Jesus was dead by calling the centurion and also that specific, named women knew where Jesus was buried. John doesn’t have either of these but says that the tomb was in a garden and that Jesus was buried with large amounts of spices. The former are more relevant to the justification for the resurrection. We can be quite sure that, if John included while Mark did not mention the claims about the women and Pilate, we would hear that these were later apologetic additions to the burial account.

As for the amount of spices with which Jesus was buried according to John (about 100 Roman pounds), apparently we are to take the sheer quantity to mean that the account is “probably fictional” at this point. But why think a thing like that? For example, why deny that, at a minimum, the author believed that Jesus was buried with such a large quantity of spices? Apparently only because Michael Alter can invent the theory that John was trying to make Jesus’ burial sound more imposing than that of Gamaliel. But this is unsupported conjecture. (In passing -- if burial customs involving spices were Egyptian rather than Jewish, how can John be competing with the burial of Gamaliel in relating Jesus’ burial with a large quantity of myrrh and aloes?) Incredulity about the proposition that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus with such a large quantity of spices is no argument in itself. In fact, the combined details that Matthew says that Joseph was rich (Matt. 27:57) and that John, who does not mention Joseph’s wealth, mentions a large quantity of spices fit together quite well.

Torley takes McCane’s account of how Jesus “would have been buried” as the way he was buried (if he was buried at all) and makes this rather striking statement:

When we read the Gospels, however, we find that these unpleasant details are progressively airbrushed with the passage of time...

What unpleasant details? The unpleasant details that McCane has simply made up, with no support whatsoever for the claim that this is how Jesus was buried -- things like his being placed within a cave reserved for condemned criminals. To say that the Gospel authors have “airbrushed” something that we have no historical reason to think happened at all is quite astonishing. Simply because someone has baldly claimed that Jesus “would have” been given a dishonorable burial, the Gospel authors (even Mark) now all stand accused of having “airbrushed” out the details of a dishonorable burial as envisaged by McCane in their accounts of how Jesus actually was buried. This is no way to do history.

Torley lists several alleged contradictions among the Gospel burial accounts, but all of these are manufactured; they are not contradictions in the texts at all.

The first contradiction is allegedly about who took Jesus down from the cross. I have already addressed the claim that Paul says that the Jewish leaders personally took Jesus down from the cross in Acts 13:29, but Torley alleges further a contradiction between the claim in Mark and Luke that Joseph took Jesus down and the claim in John that Joseph and Nicodemus did so. But there is obviously no contradiction between saying that Joseph did so and saying that Joseph did so with Nicodemus.

Similarly, Torley alleges a contradiction from the fact that John does not mention the women as present at the burial and that the Synoptics do not mention Nicodemus. To say that non-contradictory variations are contradictions is simply a failure to understand how witness testimony works and how reliable history works. It is normal for one account to mention things that another account does not mention. For John not to mention the women is not for John to say that the women were absent at the burial. Indeed, the account in John 20 implies that Mary Magdalene (named in the Synoptic accounts of the burial) did know where the tomb was. But it shows this in an indirect fashion by describing her coming to the tomb on Sunday morning. Variation is a virtue in the accounts. It shows their independence without contradiction and allows us to gain additional information. It would not be a better indication of historicity if all of the accounts named precisely the same people at each step.

Torley claims that there is a contradiction concerning whether Jesus was buried with a linen shroud, mentioned in the Synoptics, or with linen cloths, mentioned in John. But this is a trivial difference, not a contradiction; the shroud may well have been the principal burial garment with other smaller cloths involved as well.

Torley alleges a contradiction between John’s account of the large amount of spices used by Joseph and Nicodemus and the statements in Mark and Luke that the women came on Sunday morning bringing spices. But this is not a contradiction about “whether Jesus was buried with spices.” The women may well have wanted to contribute their own spices and perfumes (Luke 24:56) to honor Jesus’ body, bringing them several days later. To give a modern example, if we heard that there were many flowers at a funeral this would not create a contradiction with our hearing that someone brought flowers to the grave at a later time. (This is not, of course, to say that the function of flowers at a funeral is identical to the function of spices and perfumes in Jewish burial. I am merely pointing out that multiple people may wish to contribute to a practice honoring the dead.)

Torley also alleges a contradiction between Luke 23:56, which says that the women prepared spices prior to the Sabbath and Mark 16:1, which says that the women bought spices when the Sabbath was ended. (This was probably not early Sunday morning but rather after sundown on Saturday, based on Mark’s wording.) But Mark names three specific women who bought spices when the Sabbath was ended, while Luke does not name the women who prepared spices before the Sabbath. Later, when listing the women who came to the tomb on Easter, Luke 24:10 not only names Joanna, not named in Mark, but also says that there were “other women with them.” There is no contradiction between saying that “the women” prepared spices that they already had on Friday night and saying that some specific women purchased spices later. It is important in investigating historical matters to use a modicum of real-world imagination. Some of the women could have already had some spices on hand while others had to buy them. Or some of the women may have decided that they wanted more. This is just the normal way that human life works. Members of groups do not all do exactly the same things at the same time.

Finally, Torley claims that the Gospel authors must be altering the facts because their details contravene Jewish law. Here he cites Leviticus 23:6-7, which forbids “regular work” on 15 Nisan, and Nehemiah 10:31, in which those rebuilding Jerusalem after the captivity (in the 400s B.C.) promise as part of a reform not to purchase from neighboring peoples if they bring merchandise or grain to sell on the Sabbath or on a holy day. The inference is that at the time of Jesus’ death four and a half centuries later, there would have been a universally recognized prohibition against any buying or selling on 15 Nisan. On the assumption that Jesus died on 15 Nisan, this supposedly means that the references or implications in both John and Mark to purchasing things for Jesus’ burial must be fictitious. John mentions that Nicodemus brought spices and Mark says that Joseph purchased the linen cloth. One infers (though John does not expressly say so) that Nicodemus bought the myrrh and aloes at that time. The same verses in Leviticus are supposed to have prohibited the women from “preparing spices” on Friday afternoon per Luke 23:56, as this would (on Torley’s and presumably Alter’s reading) have constituted work.

While I think it is correct (in both the Synoptics and John, for that matter) that Jesus died on 15 Nisan, the claim that all purchases would have been forbidden in that place and time on that day is overly rigid. Jewish interpretations regarding what constituted work and what was permitted on which days are remarkably diverse. These interpretations even varied geographically. Here is a sample from the tractate Pesachim:

[In] a place where [the inhabitants] were accustomed to do work on the eve of Pesach until noon, we may do [so]; [in] a place where [the inhabitants] were accustomed not to do [so], we may not do [so]. One who goes from a place where they do [work], to a place where they do not do [work], or from a place where they do not do [work] to a place where they do [work], we place upon him the stringencies of the place he came from, [or] the stringencies of the place that he went to. And a man should not deviate [from the established customs of a place], on account of [the] disagreement [to which such conduct may lead].... [In] a place where [the inhabitants] were accustomed to sell small domesticated animals [sheep, goats, etc.] to gentiles, we may sell [them to gentiles]; [in] a place where [the inhabitants] were accustomed not to sell [these animals to gentiles], we may not sell [them to gentiles]. In all places, we may not sell [gentiles] large domesticated animals, calves or foals of donkeys, [whether they are] intact or broken [injured]; Rabbi Yehuda permits [the sale of] a broken [one]. Ben Betera permits [the sale of] a horse.... [In] a place where [the inhabitants] were accustomed to do work on Tisha Be'Av, we may do [work; in] a place where [the inhabitants] were accustomed not to do work, we may not do [work]. And in all places, Torah scholars must abstain [from work thereon]; Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, says, "Truly, every one should make himself [in this respect] a Torah scholar." And the Sages say, "In Yehuda, they would do work on the eve of Pesach until noon; and in the Galilee they did not work at all [on that day]." And [with respect to] the evening [of the fourteenth of Nissan in places like the Galilee], Beit Shammai forbids [work], but Beit Hillel permits [it] until the sunrise.

This passage does not directly address the questions of whether buying and selling were permitted in Judea on the afternoon of 15 Nisan at the time of Christ or whether preparing spices counted as “regular labor.” But it does illustrate fact that what precisely constituted “work” and when it was permitted varied tremendously and were subject to rabbinic dispute and differing rulings. In view of this diversity, merely citing Leviticus provides virtually no evidence that a prohibition against “ordinary labor” (מְלֶ֥אכֶת עֲבֹדָ֖ה) would debar the women from preparing spices. “Preparing” might be an extremely light activity taking place within their own homes.

Luke 23:56 even emphasizes that they did rest on the Sabbath “according to the commandment.” There is something highly misguided about taking a verse that shows an explicit awareness of Jewish laws and customs, explicitly stating that the women observed Jewish law, to be describing an activity that broke Jewish law. Luke did not need to go out of his way to mention that the women prepared spices on Friday before the Sabbath. If he were depending upon Mark only for his account, he would have had no reason at all to invent and insert this detail. The insertion of the detail (that they prepared spices on Friday) serves no literary or theological purpose. That Luke does add that detail and simultaneously says explicitly that the women did not break Jewish law provides reason to believe that he had what he took to be factual information about what the women did, when they did it, and why.

As for purchases on 15 Nisan, we are, again, in a worse position than the Gospel authors were to know whether purchases would have been considered (in that specific place and time) to be contrary to the Jewish law by the prohibition on “regular work” on that day. Interestingly, even on the Sabbath itself it was (according to some rabbinic rulings) possible to “purchase” (in a sense) necessary items by leaving something in trust rather than paying cash. Thus, from the tractate Shabbat:

MISHNA: A man may borrow of an acquaintance jugs of wine or oil (on Sabbath), provided he does not say to him: “Lend (them to) me.” A woman may also borrow bread from her acquaintance. If the man is refused (by his acquaintance), he may leave his upper garment (as a pledge) with the lender, and settle his account after Sabbath. Thus, also, in Jerusalem, the custom was, if the eve of Passover fell on a Sabbath, a man might leave his upper garment with the vender, take his paschal lamb, and settle his account after the holiday.

All four of the Gospels show a keen awareness of the fact that Jesus was crucified on the day before the Sabbath and of the need to observe the Sabbath. If these early accounts indicate that purchases were possible on a Friday, 15 Nisan, but that the body had to be buried before the Sabbath began at sundown, then it is not justified for us to insist that purchases of all kinds were forbidden on 15 Nisan and to infer that the mention of purchases must be invented.

Mark had no need to refer to a purchase on the day of Jesus’ death anyway. He could have said that Joseph brought a linen cloth rather than that he bought it. If he wanted to emphasize that the cloth was not dirty, he could have said (like Matthew) that it was clean, but he did not need to mention specifically that Joseph purchased it. Mark’s own account shows an awareness of Jewish law concerning observing the Sabbath, and specifically its relation to burial and mourning for Jesus (Mark 15:42, 16:1). It thus constitutes evidence that such a purchase was possible on that Friday before sundown.

John actually does not say explicitly that Nicodemus bought the myrrh and aloes at that time, though it is not an unreasonable inference that he did so. John 19:39 literally says only that Nicodemus came “bearing” a large amount of a mixture of aloes and myrrh. If we infer that Nicodemus procured the mixture at that time, then this is yet further evidence, complementary to Mark, that it was not impossible to purchase things in the ordinary way on 15 Nisan. It is even possible, though not the most probable theory, that Joseph of Arimathea and/or Nicodemus, whose age we do not know, had on hand large amounts of these spices for later burial of themselves or family members and decided to use them at this time, as Mary of Bethany in John 12 apparently decided to use a valuable box of ointment to honor Jesus. Or it is possible that Nicodemus, perhaps working together with Joseph, left something valuable as collateral for the large amount of myrrh and aloes, as in the reference to leaving one’s garment as a pledge on the Sabbath. Given that Mark apparently independently refers to purchasing a different item (the linen cloth) on that day, the most likely conclusion is simply that, in Jerusalem at that time and place, purchasing at least some goods was not impossible on 15 Nisan, just prior to the Sabbath, in order to complete a burial before the Sabbath.

All of these issues -- what counts as work, when and whether purchases are allowed, what counts as buying and selling -- were open to minute variations of interpretation of religious law and were discussed extensively in oral rulings outside of the text of the Torah itself. Under the circumstances, it is historical arrogance to allege that authors far closer to the facts made up details for no particular reason on the basis of our own interpretation of Jewish law.

I have now reviewed Torley’s three test cases, using his summary of Alter as a foil. All of the arguments Torley offers dissolve under examination. To the extent that his summary affords us an accurate representation of the arguments in Alter’s work -- and I leave that question aside here as something that is between the two of them -- I think it is fair to say that they are grasping at straws. But they have raked together a great number of them, and the sheer quantity of their objections may leave some people with the misimpression that they have amassed a case of real weight and solidity. It is a most unfortunate illusion.

Did Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple stand at the foot of the cross?

 

Did Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple stand at the foot of the cross?

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

A guest post by Timothy McGrew

In this post, I continue my critical examination of three points in V. J. Torley’s lengthy review essay, wherein Torley summarizes Michael Alter’s even more lengthy book on the resurrection. The previous post is here.

When I asked Torley to select three test cases for examination, the second of his choices was the question of whether Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple stood at the foot of the cross, a description (allowing for some latitude in expression) drawn from the narrative of John 19. Torley finds this detail highly doubtful. Here is his objection, in his own words:

John’s Gospel records the presence of Jesus’ mother at the foot of the Cross, along with the beloved disciple (who is generally presumed to have been the apostle John, although about 20 other individuals have been proposed as candidates), but this, too, is probably fictional: Jesus was crucified as an enemy of the State (“King of the Jews”), and as such, the Romans would have shown him no quarter -- and they certainly would not have allowed him to enjoy a final conversation with his mother. To quote the words of the late Dr. Maurice Casey (1942-2014), author of Is John’s Gospel True? (1996, London: Routledge, p. 188) and a former Professor of New Testament Languages and Literature at the Department of Theology at the University of Nottingham: “The fourth Gospel’s group of people beside the Cross includes Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple. It is most unlikely that these people would have been allowed this close to a Roman crucifixion.” As Dr. Bart Ehrman, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has pointed out in an online essay titled, Why Romans crucified people, the whole aim of crucifixion was to humiliate the victim as much as possible. And when political criminals like Jesus were crucified, the warning to the public was unmistakably clear: this is what happens to you if you mess with Rome. No niceties were observed and no courtesies allowed.

Here is Maurice Casey’s comment in a fuller context:

The fourth Gospel’s group of people beside the cross includes Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple. It is most unlikely that these people would be allowed this close to a Roman crucifixion. If they had been, and they included people central to Jesus’ life and ministry, it is most unlikely that Mark would merely have women watching from a distance. If a major male disciple had approached this close, it is likely that he would have been arrested.

Torley objects for the following reasons, which are not really independent of one another:

1. Jesus would not have been allowed “a final conversation with his mother,” since he was crucified as an “enemy of the state.”

2. It is unlikely that the Romans would have allowed Jesus’ mother and one of his disciples to get this close to a Roman crucifixion, since Jesus was crucified as “a political criminal.”

Casey, in the portion not quoted by Torley, adds a third argument:

3. Mark would not have failed to mention the presence of one of Jesus' disciples and his mother close to the cross if they had actually been there.

The first and most important thing to notice about these objections is that Torley presents them with no evidence whatsoever. He hands off the evidential burden to Casey and Ehrman. And neither Casey nor Ehrman substantiates these claims with a single reference to the primary sources, either Christian or non-Christian.

Let’s look into this problem in detail, starting with the claim that Jesus was crucified as an “enemy of the state.”

Individual Romans regarded particular people at certain times as enemies of the state, but that did not mean that these people were crucified or even brought to trial. (Cicero thought Mark Antony was an enemy of the state. It didn’t get him very far.) Those who were charged with majestas -- high crimes against the Roman state or the person of the Emperor -- could, if convicted, be punished by death, though that was by no means always the sentence handed down. Sometimes they lost their property but not their lives; sometimes they merely had to petition for clemency in order to suffer no long-term penalty at all.

The more specific charge of treason (perduellio) covered a cluster of particular offenses: stirring up an enemy against the state (as in the case of Vitruvius Vaccus), surrendering a citizen to the enemy (as Popilius Laenas), or (as in the case of Fulvius) losing a Roman army through what was considered to be criminal negligence in the defense of the state. None of these offenses is even close to anything ever asserted about Jesus of Nazareth.

Suppose, for a moment, that Jesus had indeed been crucified as an enemy of the state, in the sense of majestas. What would this have to do with the question of whether some of Jesus’ family or followers would have been allowed close enough to the cross to speak with him?

Not much. Neither Casey nor Ehrman produces a single case where people not themselves criminals were forbidden to come close to a crucifixion. There are no legal protocols for where people may stand to watch a crucifixion, much less special protocols for special classes of crucifixions. As far as common practice, crucifixion was in general a public spectacle designed to horrify the onlookers. A Roman governor had, to say the least, no obvious motive for restraining people from seeing up close what happened to those who fell under the condemnation of Roman law. Casey’s description of the situation -- that allowing Mary to stand near enough to her son to speak with him would be allowing him to “enjoy a final conversation with his mother” -- is risible on its face. Jesus was being brutally tortured to death in one of the most humiliating, terrifying ways ever devised by man. There is nothing enjoyable for either mother or son here.

But was Jesus crucified “as an enemy of the state”? The only reason anyone might have for characterizing Jesus as an “enemy of the state” or a “political criminal” is the accusation, reported in the Gospels themselves, that Jesus made himself to be “Christ, a king.” But according to those same narratives (Luke 23, John 18), Pilate questioned Jesus particularly on this very point and decided that the charge was spurious -- so much so that he repeatedly attempted to induce the Jewish rulers to relent on their demand for crucifixion and be content with a flogging. Mark 15:10 specifically states that Pilate knew the charges were trumped up and that Jesus was being delivered to him, not because he was really a political enemy of Rome, but “out of envy” (διὰ φθόνον).

Since it is Pilate’s judgment, as provincial governor, that matters in such a case, the picture afforded by the narratives is consistent with his allowing the crucifixion to take place but not insisting on any specially harsh circumstances in its being carried out. The Jewish rulers did not really believe that Jesus was an enemy of the Roman state, and Pilate did not believe it either. That was merely the pretense by which they induced him, under threat of a complaint to Caesar, to carry out the execution. So far as our first-century sources tell us, not a single person involved believed that Jesus was guilty of majestas -- not Pilate, not the Jewish leaders, not even the thieves crucified on either side of him.

Pilate was doing a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, the Jewish rulers were insistent that Jesus be crucified, and they were implicitly threatening to complain to Caesar -- something they did with regard to some of Pilate’s other actions. On the other, even a rather calloused Roman governor might naturally scruple at crucifying a man he himself believed to be innocent and harmless simply to pacify the locals. The Gospel narratives give us an account of how events unfolded that is consistent with what we know of human nature. If we start picking and choosing which bits of the narrative we will take seriously with no better ground than our desire to make the facts fit a particular theory, we have abandoned all proper historical methodology. By such means, one can “prove” virtually anything from any texts whatsoever.

What of the second objection? The claim appears to be that there was a more general practice of keeping people far away from the crucifixion of political criminals. But this objection, too, is fabricated out of whole cloth. There is not one historical source named as evidence that people who were not themselves considered to be criminals were always or even commonly kept at a distance from a Roman crucifixion outside the context of a military campaign. There is no reference -- in Torley’s piece, in Ehrman’s blog post, or in Casey’s entire book -- to even one occasion where anyone not already in trouble with the law is arrested, turned away, or even verbally warned for standing too near to the foot of a cross at a public crucifixion in a time of peace. Again, one might even argue to the contrary that the Romans were all too willing to let the public see the agony of crucifixion up close as a deterrent. Crucifixion was supposed to be terrifying to the public.

It is no objection to point out that John 19 records two brief sentences (totaling nine words in Greek) that Jesus spoke to Mary and the beloved disciple. Ordinary conversations of much greater length take place at a distance of four or five yards constantly. There is no reason to suppose that the presence of a few unarmed peasants within that radius, able to hear a few words that Jesus said, would pose any difficulties for the quaternion of armed soldiers carrying out their duties.

Casey's argument from silence (point 3) is as bad as such arguments generally are. Those who would like more examples of the argument's general weakness in historical work are welcome to search through the references in my paper “The Argument from Silence,” Acta Analytica 29 (2014), 215-28.

In short, the objection to the presence of Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple near the cross during the crucifixion is entirely bereft of evidential support. When the supposed exclusion of non-crimnial bystanders from the scene of crucifixion, even very close up, is advanced as if it were an established fact by those who should know better, it is nothing more than a scholarly bluff.