On the Invention of Joseph of Arimathea

Composed byCygnus on August 05, 1999

What was considered the absolute worst thing that you can do to a person after they have died in the ancient world? Non-burial. This was the highest disrespect that could be done. It is for this reason that the Romans would insist on the body of the recently crucified being kept on the cross. There were exceptions as we learned from Josephus (Life 75) but even this was rare.

As one famous scholar has stated, "if one had the influence to be granted burial after crucifixion, he generally would have had the influence to avoid crucifixion. If one did not have the influence to avoid crucifixion, one probably did not have the influence to be granted burial."

Having the leader of the movement crucified and left to rot would have been the ultimate of insults for the newly formed Jesus movement. Without getting Jesus to the grave so he could rise again, the whole movement folds. How could this be done, though?

Who would have asked Pilate for the body? After all, here was someone who had just been crucified for a state or religious crime. Associating with such a criminal was viewed with great suspicion in the ancient world.

Now, in the gospel story, we are told that one Joseph of Arimathea requested the body of Jesus for burial. As has been done by my colleague Radar, here is the list of verses describing this man:

Mark 15:43 - "Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus."

Matthew 27:57-58 - "When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who was also a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus; then Pilate ordered it to be given to him."

Luke 23:50-52 - "Now there was a good and righteous man named Joseph, who, though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action. He came from the Jewish town of Arimathea, and he was waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus."

John 19:38 - "After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body."

Looking at this, we can see the evolution of Joseph of Arimathea:

First, he is a respected member of the council who is also waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven.

Then, he is a rich man who is not only waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven but is a secret disciple of Jesus.

Next, he is a good and rich man who disagreed with the council because he was waiting for the Kingdom of God.

Lastly, he is a secret disciple of Jesus.

Now, the evolution of Joseph of Arimathea is not a clear-cut indication that he is a Markan invention. It simply shows that each author tweaked the man for his own purposes.

The real problem with the above is that we now have a man who is working both sides of the fence. The Sanhedrin Council was the group that had just convicted Jesus and sentenced him to death. The Sanhedrin was a group of Jews being largely Sadducees. The Sadducees were the most pious group of Jews around, adhering to the letter of the Torah. Jesus taught a message completely contrary to the Torah in many instances and it is unthinkable that a Sadducee would agree with him.

Further, not everyone who wanted access to Pilate got it. Joseph of Arimathea's status as a Sadducee would not have guaranteed him an audience with Pilate. Matthew, being more knowledgable about the workings in Judah, makes Joseph of Arimathea rich. Here is the necessary factor to get Joseph of Arimathea in.

The author of GLuke, not knowing of the need for influence to gain an audience with Pilate, does not make the necessary change to Mark that Matthew does. He further shows his ignorance of Israel by claiming that Joseph was from the Jewish town of Arimathea. In no other writing anywhere in the world that would lend this claim credence is the town of Arimathea mentioned. That is simply due to the fact that the town, like the man who comes from there, are fictional.

John, so far removed from knowledge about the Sanhedrin and the Sadducees and the bulk of the other gospels, does not even name Joseph of Arimathea as a member of the council. He claims that Joseph is a secret disciple of Jesus for fear of the Jews. What John fails to know is that Joseph of Arimathea is represented in the three other gospels as being one of the Jews that the other disciples feared!

After learning all of this evidence that shows that there was motive to create Joseph of Arimathea and that there never was a town by that name in the first place, I found the following as I was looking through the Jesus Seminar's The Acts of Jesus:

{pp. 159-161}

The burial. The ultimate insult in the ancient world was to let someone go unburied. To honor one's father and mother meant seeing to their proper internment. That is why Jesus' saying was considered so radical: "Leave it to the dead to bury their own dead" (Luke 9:60). For Jesus, it seems, leaving someone without the customary burial rites was a possibility in view of the absolute demands of the kingdom. But what about his followers? Were they as liberated from convention?

We have observed over and over again that the passion narrative originated as a scribal composition some years, even decades, after the death of Jesus. We lack substantial evidence that anecdotes about Jesus' trial, crucifixion, and burial were circulated during the oral period. What then can we expect from this account of Jesus' burial, which the Fellows of the Seminar think is the earliest of the written versions?

Mark's story begins to take on the hues of fiction immediately with the mention of Joseph of Arimathea (15:43). The Seminar concluded that Joseph was a Markan invention: after all, Mark describes him as "a respected member of the Council" - the Council that had just condemned Jesus - and as someone who was looking for the kingdom's arrival (v.43). That is backhanded Christian apologetic: Jesus' opponents are fashioned into friends and supporters after the damage has been done. And Joseph is from an unidentified place, Arimathea. Storytellers like to invent names and places because they give versimilitude to their fictions.

In Mark, Joseph is only a respected member of the Council and someone looking for the kingdom. In Matthew, he takes on stronger hues: he is now a rich man and a disciple of Jesus, but not a member of the Council (Matthew evidently felt it incongruous to have someone who just voted for the death penalty reverse himself so completely: Matt 27:57). Luke retains Joseph's Council membership, but describes him as a decent and upright man, who was in reality a normal politician: he was a member of the Council but he did not go along with the Council's decision and action (Luke 23:51). Like Matthew, Luke is struggling to soften Mark's incongruities. Luke follows Mark in having Joseph anticipate the coming of the kingdom.

Joseph is bold enough to go to Pilate to ask for the body (v.43), as though Pilate were likely to be concerned about the disposition of crucified bodies. Mark has an amazing amount of very specific information about all of this: Pilate is surprised that Jesus died so quickly; Pilate interrogates the Roman officer in charge, and when satisfied, grants the body to Joseph. On what grounds could we imagine the transmission of such specific bits of information? The Fellows were inclined to the view that such information had not been transmitted in anecdote and story but was imagined by Mark.

Mark's narrative is the result of Christian reflection on the fate of their Lord and the hope that he was properly buried. That hope has to be set alongside Roman expectation and the protocol of crucifixion.

In Roman practice, those crucified were guarded while they slowlt and painfully died lest friend and relative take them down and revive them or give them proper burial. (The Roman officer on duty during Jesus' crucifixion was probably there to prevent the women from helping Jesus: Mark 15:39-40). The corpses were left to rot in the sun or serve as carrion for scavengers; if they were buried, it was in a shallow open pit where crows and dogs could get to them. The Jewish historian Josephus tells the story of the discovery of three friends who had been crucified during the siege of Jerusalem (66-70 C.E.). He reported his discovery to General Titus (to become emperor 79-81 C.E.), who ordered the three friends to be taken down and given medical attention. Two of them died anyway; a third survived (The Life, 420).

During the same siege, Josephus reports that those seeking to escape from Jerusalem were taken prisoner by the Romans, flogged and tortured, then executed, then crucified - hung on crosses where they could be seen from the walls of the city as a warning to the others. Five hundred or more were thus treated daily; the carnage grew to such a level that space could not be found for the crosses, nor crosses for the bodies. The Roman soldiers in a rage nailed their victims to the crosses in different postures to amuse themselves (Josephus, Jewish War, 5.449-51).

Josephus and other ancient sourcces attest to the fact that both the Romans and the ancient Israelites crucified both those who were alive and those who had already been executed. Both were intended to produce unrestricted shame: the victims were publicly exposed, naked, unburied, and left as carrion.
Not only does Joseph retrieve the body of Jesus, he also buys a shroud, wraps Jesus' body in it, and places it in a tomb hewn out of rock - the kind reserved for the nobility - and seals the opening with a stone (v.46). The picture of the tomb was probably inspired by Joshua's treatment of the five kings he had defeated (Joshua 10:16-27). The relevant part of the story is when Joshua brings them out of the cave where they have been hiding and executes them: (vv.26-27):

²⁶Joshua killed them [the five kings] and hung them on five trees, and they hung there until evening. ²⁷And when the sun had set, Joshua gave the orders and they took them down from the trees and threw them into the cave where they had been hiding. And they rolled stones up against the cave, stones that remain to this day.

Earlier in the story Joshua had ordered hi men to roll stones against the mouth of the cave where the kings had been hiding. They were thus imprisoned in their own hiding place.

The tomb sealed with a stone and the presence of the women, are, of course, narrative preparation for what is to come. The details of Joseph's role in the burial make sense only as part of the story of the empty tomb to follow. The note about the women observers is cut from the same cloth: they need to know where Jesus was buried so they can perform the mourning and burial rites after the sabbath day of rest is past (v.47). The burial is a fiction because it goes with the empty tomb story, which is the central fiction in Mark's passion narrative. There is nothing in Mark's narrative that can be colored anything other than black.

I rest my case. Joseph of Arimathea is a Markan invention to get Jesus from cross to grave in preparation for the rising.

Cygnus