Ehrman on the Gospels' Burial Stories

I am rereading portions of Bart Ehrman’s “How Jesus became God” before Easter Sunday. Ehrman is an apostate and the most prominent contemporary scholarly critic of Christianity. In particular, I am reading the portions where he tries to undercut the resurrection. Why? I always try to read the best arguments from both sides; and I don’t exempt matters of religion; I don’t buy the idea that religion is simply a matter of faith. It is a matter of evidence plain and simple. If the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is sufficiently strong, then you should believe it; if it is not sufficiently strong, then you shouldn’t believe it. It’s really as simple as that. Many people on both sides of the debate keep being obfuscatory and keep denying this simple point–but they are wrong.

Anyways, one way Ehrman tries to undercut the veracity of the Resurrection is by attempting to show that Jesus was never buried in a well-known tomb. This would undermine the evidence for the Resurrection, for, as Ehrman says, “if there were no tomb for Jesus, or if no one knew where the tomb was, the bodily resurrection could not be proclaimed. You have to have a known tomb.” This, then, is Ehrman’s strategy. I should note that he used to believe that Jesus was buried in a well-known tomb, and that his tomb was found empty about three days later. But he has since come to change his mind. Here are two reasons he gives in his book for doubting the burial story of Jesus in a well-known tomb, and hence of his burial by Joseph of Arimathea.:

1. “There are numerous reasons for doubting the tradition of Jesus’s burial by Joseph. For one thing, it is hard to make historical sense of this tradition just within the context of Mark’s narrative. Joseph’s identification as a respected member of the Sanhedrin should immediately raise questions. Mark himself said that at Jesus’s trial, which took place the previous evening, the “whole council” of the Sanhedrin (not just some or most of them—but all of them) tried to find evidence “against Jesus to put him to death” (14:55). At the end of this trial, because of Jesus’s statement that he was the Son of God (14:62), “they all condemned him as deserving death” (14:64). In other words, according to Mark, this unknown person, Joseph, was one of the people who had called for Jesus’s death just the night before he was crucified. Why, after Jesus is dead, is he suddenly risking himself (as implied by the fact that he had to gather up his courage) and seeking to do an act of mercy by arranging for a decent burial for Jesus’s corpse? Mark gives us no clue.6 My hunch is that the trial narrative and the burial narrative come from different sets of traditions inherited by Mark. Or did Mark simply invent one of the two traditions himself and overlook the apparent discrepancy?”

My response: The Gospel of John says the following: “Later, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but SECRETLY because he feared the Jewish leaders. With Pilate’s permission, he came and took the body away.” (John 19:38) Note the word “secretly.” So Mark, in saying that “the whole council” of the Sanhedrin were against Jesus, very likely doesn’t literally mean “the whole council–even the members of which who were secretly admirers of Jesus”–were against Jesus. So this point by Ehrman has no force whatsoever against the veracity of Jesus’ burial by Joseph of Arimathea.

2. “In any event, a burial by Joseph [of Arimathea] is clearly a historical problem in light of other passages just within the New Testament. I pointed out earlier that Paul shows no evidence of knowing anything about a Joseph of Arimathea or Jesus’s burial by a “respected member of the council.” This datum was not included in the very early creed that Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5, and if the author of that creed had known such a thing, he surely would have included it, since without naming the person who buried Jesus, as we have seen, he created an imbalance with the second portion of the creed where he does name the person to whom Jesus appeared (Cephas). Thus, this early creed knows nothing about Joseph. And Paul also betrays no knowledge of him.”

My response: This is an argument from silence. All four Gospels mention Joseph of Arimathea in the context of Jesus’ burial. Why should we expect Paul, who is just uttering a short and ancient creed in 1 Corinthians 15, to mention Joseph of Arimathea? I don’t see any good reason why we should. This is a bad argument from silence. And Paul’s letters are not meant to be biographies of Jesus. They are letters, letters which presuppose a lot of facts about the life of Jesus, facts which his addressees would have been familiar with.

In conclusion, then, these two arguments that Ehrman brings up in his book against the tradition that Jesus was buried in a well-known tomb have no force at all.