What Happened to Jesus' Body? Was He Buried on the Day of His Crucifixion?

Episode Outline:
0:00 What likely happened to Jesus’ body after the crucifixion?
1:07 Bart and Megan on heat, marriage, academic spouses, and meeting through scholarly circles
5:15 What a typical Jewish burial looked like in the first century
7:38 Why burial mattered so much in antiquity and what it meant to be denied one
9:12 In what circumstances authorities deliberately withheld burial
10:10 What Jewish and Roman practices were regarding criminal burials
11:07 What the canonical Gospels say happened to Jesus’ body after death
15:05 Why Roman crucifixion practice and Jewish burial custom clash in Jesus’ case
18:11 Josephus, Jewish burial customs, and whether crucifixion victims were exceptions
23:41 Archaeological remains of crucified victims and what they do—and do not—prove
27:41 Do we have evidence that crucified bodies were ever removed quickly after death?
29:59 Why Bart rejects the Gospel portrait of Pilate reluctantly yielding to Jewish pressure
33:53 Bart’s conclusion: Jesus was probably not buried the afternoon of his death
36:58 Why most scholars still accept Joseph of Arimathea’s burial story
38:32 If there was no tomb, why did the empty tomb narrative develop?
40:37 Course promo: Jesus, the Secret Messiah and the Gospel of Mark
42:19 Weekly Update: upcoming lecture on when life starts according to the Bible
44:54 Listener Q&A: crucifixion versus resurrection evidence, Joseph of Arimathea, early Christian numbers, and Acts as genre
53:45 Final summary: Bart argues Jesus was likely left on the cross and not given Joseph of Arimathea’s same-day burial

Episode Description
All the Gospels agree that on the day Jesus was crucified, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body and took it from the cross to bury in a tomb. What almost no one realizes is that this would have been unprecedented, so far as we know, in the Roman world, where part of the humiliation of crucifixion was for the corpse to be left on the cross to decompose and be ravaged by scavenging birds for days before being disposed of. Did the Romans make an exception for Jesus? Is that plausible? Or is the story of his burial by Joseph a later legend? This is obviously an issue of enormous significance. If Jesus was not buried that afternoon, how could he have emerged from the tomb "on the third day"?

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Megan asks Bart:

- Before we delve into the decidedly non-standard post-mortem experience of Jesus’ body, could you tell us a little bit about what a typical Jewish burial would have looked like at this time?

- Would it be fair to say that regardless of wealth or social status, burial was very important?

- Are there circumstances in which someone would be deliberately denied a burial?

- Did the Roman or Jewish authorities have proscriptions around the bodies of criminals?

- What do the canonical gospels say happened to Jesus’ body immediately after his crucifixion?

- The Roman law and Jewish practices are obviously at odds here, so when you have circumstances where a Jewish person is crucified, do we follow Roman law, or Jewish practice?

- Josephus indicates that Jews buried their crucifixion victims, and we have a couple of burials of crucifixion victims; how does that interplay with what the Romans were trying to do with keeping their rule?

- I mentioned that we have the remains of some crucified victims that have been buried, how do they add to the argument here?

- Do we have any examples of people being taken off their crosses sooner than we might expect?

- Since Pilate found him innocent, wouldn’t he have been open to having him decently buried?

- How likely is it that Jesus would have been buried on the afternoon of his crucifixion, and would his body have been given to Joseph of Arimathea for burial?

- Scholarly consensus?

- What do you think about the empty tomb?