Why Look?

The Crucified was not left to be covered over with earth as executed Jews usually were.  Roman custom permitted the body to be handed over to friends or relatives.  It was not a disciple - we are told - but an individual sympathizer, who appears only at this juncture, the councilor Joesph of Aramathea, apparently not later a member of the community, who had the body buried in his private grave.  Only a few women were witnesses.  Mark at an early state attaches importance to the official notification of death.  And not only Mark, but also the ancient profession of faith, transmitted by Paul, stresses the fact of the burial which is beyond doubt.  But although there was a great religious interest at that time in the graves of the Jewish martyrs and prophets, oddly enough there never arose a cult at the grave at Nazareth. 

Hans Kung: On Being A Christian 

As has been mentioned here before, the start of my real conversion started when, sometime in the mid-1990s,  I read John Dominic Crossan's Historical Jesus.  But even then there were things Crossan said that I questioned, one of those was his certainty that the story of the burial of Jesus in a tomb was false and that his body was almost certainly left for dogs or birds to devour or merely thrown in a ditch.   I remember reading that wondering why he felt so sure when the only documentation of what happened was exactly what Kung says is "beyond doubt" is in line with the above passage.  And, considering how much stock he and his fellow Jesus Seminar members put on multiple attestation, all four of the canonical Gospels but also the earliest New Testament writings that preceded those in the form we have them attest to the burial, most of them mentioning the tomb of Joseph.  It would seem to be a lapse in method for him to hold that more poplar modern position on this.   As much as I esteem his scholarship and his writing, I have to say that my skepticism about Crossan has grown over the last quarter of a century.   I do doubt his motives which are too much in line with modern ideology for me to be comfortable with.  As Walter Brueggemann has said, like so many other scholars, Crossan wants to reconstruct Jesus to fit his preferences.  

The point that Kung makes, that there was no cult of the grave of Jesus in the earliest years of Christianity - even in the earliest community in Jerusalem, the pre-Christian Jesus movement is certainly interesting.  The earliest proposed location of the tomb doesn't seem to trace before Constantine sent his mother Helena to find the tomb.  

You get the feeling that when a local community got visited by the Emperor's mother with the request to find the Tomb of Jesus that one was going to be found.   And so one was, as was a hill with three crosses on it, or so the story goes.  I find the absence of a tradition going back to the Jerusalem community which included witnesses to the death, burial and Resurrection more convincing than the supposed location of the tomb.  The later proposed tombs, the "garden tomb" discovered in the 19th century and a more recent one found by a cabloid TV huckster and self-created expert aren't even as interesting as the first one. 

I think no such site of cultic devotion arose in the earliest community because they didn't think his body was there.  I think they figured it wasn't important, as Luke reported the "the two men " said to the women who went to the tomb to anoint the body, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen."