In what is probably the oldest account of the resurrection of Jesus, found in 1 Corinthians 15, the Apostle Paul writes: “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve” (15:3–4). Paul wrote 1 Corinthians in the early summer of 54 ad,[1] but these words—actually a mini-creed—are up to twenty years older than this letter to the Corinthian church. Paul had “received” this teaching from earlier Christian witnesses, possibly in Damascus just after his conversion in 34 ad or at most three years later when he went up to Jerusalem to met Peter and James. This would place this text within a few years, at most seven, from the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.[2] Having a text this close to the actual events is vital to determining the facticity of the resurrection of Jesus.
This creedal statement begins with the fact of Jesus’ death, an historical event that is beyond any reasonable historical doubt.[3] The nineteenth-century rationalistic explanation of the resurrection popularly known as the Swoon Theory, namely that Jesus was not really dead when they took him down from the cross, only comatose, and that he came to in the tomb, and later appeared to his disciples, is utterly implausible. Everything in the biblical record points to a real death. And, as Craig Evans rightly notes, “why his disciples would have viewed a seriously injured, limping Jesus” as risen from the dead in a glorified body stretches one’s credulity to the breaking point.[4] No, as this early Christian creed affirms, “Christ died…in accordance with the Scriptures.”
The next distinct declaration—“he was buried”—is easily glossed over, but is very significant historically to the affirmation of the resurrection.[5] There is abundant evidence within Scripture to show that proper burial of the dead was an extremely important part of the Jewish religion.[6] Biblical examples:
Concern with proper burial of the dead continued well beyond Jesus’ day. The rabbis considered the burial of the dead to be nothing less than a sacred duty. So important was it, that it was deemed more important than the study of Torah, the circumcision of one’s son, or even the offering of the Passover lamb.[7] As Craig Evans sums up:
The commands of Scripture, taken with traditions regarding piety,… corpse impurity, and the avoidance of the defilement of the land, strongly suggest that under normal circumstances…no corpse would remain unburied—neither Jew nor Gentile, neither innocent nor guilty. All were to be buried.[8]
Jesus was thus buried in accordance with this strong Jewish custom.
In Jewish tradition, burial was on the day of death and was followed by seven days of mourning, a tradition derived from Scripture (see Genesis 50:10; 1 Samuel 31:13). Mourning took place at the tomb or even within the tomb, hence the necessity of perfuming the body of the deceased, since by the sixth or seventh day putrefaction would have set in. Then, it was customary in Jesus’ day, for the family and friends to come to the tomb a year later to place the deceased’s bones in a container called an ossuary, a practice called ossilegium. Understandably it was vital to know which tomb the body was placed in so that one could return to mourn and then perform the ossilegium a year later.[9]
To be continued
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[1] Jerome Murphy-O’Conner, Paul: His Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 162.
[2] William Lane Craig, The Son Rises: The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus (1981 ed.; repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000), 47–48.
[3] See the excellent essay in this regard by Craig A. Evans, “The Shout of Death” in his and N.T. Wright, Jesus, the Final Days: What Really Happened (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 1–38.
[4] “The Silence of Burial” in his and Wright, Jesus, the Final Days, 65. See also Frank Morison, Who Moved the Stone? A Skeptic Looks at the Death and Resurrection of Christ (1930 ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 96; Richard Swinburne, Was Jesus God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 122.
[5] In what follows, I am deeply indebted to the fine essay by Evans, “The Silence of Burial” in his and Wright, Jesus, the Final Days, 39–73.
[6] See, for example, Genesis 50:24–26; Deuteronomy 21:22–23.
[7] Evans, “The Silence of Burial” in his and Wright, Jesus, the Final Days, 49.
[8] Evans, “The Silence of Burial” in his and Wright, Jesus, the Final Days, 52.
[9] Evans, “The Silence of Burial” in his and Wright, Jesus, the Final Days, 41–46, 69–70.
