Weber, William

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JOSEPH OF AKI.MATHAEABY WItXIAM WEBERTHE account of the death of Jesus in John xix, 31-37 has re-vealed two different versions of how Jesus was buried. The firsttells us that he was treated exactly as all other Palestinians thatwere crucified. That is to say, his legs were crushed and his re-mains thrown into a nearby natural or artificial cave whose entrancewas closed with a stone. That agreed with the Mosaic law andsatisfied the Jews.But in verse 33 ff., Jesus is handled differently. His legs arenot broken. Only his side is pierced to make sure of his death.P.ut the spear is driven into his heart so carefully that not a singlerib was broken.The strange behavior of the Roman soldiers is explained in verse35-37. They had to fulfil two Old Testament predictions whichtold what was to happen to the body of the Messiah after his death.L'n fortunately the Old Testament does not contain such prophecies.The author of verse 33 ff had to invent them. He also had to leaveout the last words of the original Johannine account. The latterread: "The soldiers therefore came and broke their legs and tookthem OM-oy." The underscored words have been omitted.The thus mutilaterl text causes it to appear as if Jesus alone wasburied as described in verse 38-42 whereas the corpses of the evil-doers were left lying at the foot of their crosses. That was of courseconsidered as perfectly proper by Gentile Christians but not by theJews of Palestine. According to them, no crucified criminal couldbe left on the cross or on the ground over night. The chief priestsand the Pharisees would therefore see to it that the Roman soldiersremoved the three victims from the cross and interred them so asto satisfy the law of the Jews. They certainly did not go into the550 THE OPEN COURThouse of Pilate nor to the place of execution in a body. For thatwould have rendered them unclean so that they could not haveeaten the Passover. But they may have sent one of their men tothe governor to obtain from him a written order for the centurion tocrush the legs of the evildoers and have their bodies inhumed at theregular burial-ground.Verse 38-42 continues and ends the story begun verse 33. Bothparts have been written by the same man and at the same time aboutthe year 150. They form one whole and are distinguished by thesame characteristic idea. All that is done with the body of Jesusis the literal fulfilment of some Old Testament prophecy and, whatis even more important, these prophecies are spurious inventions.Isaiah Hi, 13-liii, 12 contains a poetic description of TheServant's Martyrdom and its Rczvard. The poem was understoodearly as referring to the Messiah. Stanza 9 reads in the AuthorizedVersion wrongly:They made his grave with the wickedAnd with a rich man in his death;Although he had done no violence.Neither was any deceit in his mouth.The author of John xix, 38-42 followed this corrupt text and putthe body of Jesus in a new tomb which as such was bound to belongto a rich man.But in The Scri'aut's Martyrdom and its Rczvard. as in otherancient Hebrew songs and poems each two successive verses andsometimes three, form as Bishop Lowth discovered in 1753. the so-called parallelism of members. That means : The leading thoughtof the first verse is repeated in the second verse. If three versesform a unit, the same idea is expressed three times in differentwords.A grave with the wicked is not identical with a grave of a richman. For as far as our civilisation reaches back, neither all richmen were wicked nor all wicked men rich. Besides, rich ])eople atJerusalem would 1i,n<lly have chosen the immediate neighborhood ofa golgotha for a familx- tomb.The Rev. T. K. Cheyne has restored the original text in hisBook of the Prophet Isaiah. New York, 1898. It reads accordingto him:JOSEPH OF ARIMATIIAKA 551And his grave was app<iinted with the rebelliousAnd with the wicked his tomb,Although he had done no injustice,Nor was there deceit in his mouth.In footnote 125, he states: "One so grievously afflicted must(as people thought) be a grievous sinner, and was therefore buriedapart from other men, beside notorious criminals. The well knownrendering of .W. ami zfitli the rich in his death, is more thanprobably based on a corruption of the text. To be with the richafter death would moreover be a distinction inconsistent with thecontext.Jesus was crucified because the chief priests and the Phariseeshad accused him before Pilate of being a pretender to the throne ofDavid and. accordingly, a dangerous enemy of the Romans. Assuch he was crucified and treated exactly as the notorious criminalswho died together with him. When the governor sent orders tobreak the legs of the three and remove the carcasses to the placewhere all such bodies were interred. Jesus was treated just as hisfellow-victims of the justice of Rome. None of the friends anddisciples of Jesus had influence enough to be admitted to thepresence of the governor. Even if they had been prominent enough,their petition for the body of Jesus would have brought them to thecross as his fellow-conspirators.L'nder such circumstances, we are compelled to admit : Jesushas found indeed his grave with the rebellious and his tomb withthe wicked as the prophet had foretold. Consequently, John xix.38-42, just as John xix, 32b-37. offers fiction, not fact, and is ofpost-apostolic origin, based upon a corrupt text of the Book Isaiah.As John xix. 38-42 is connected organically with John xix, ,32b-37.it has to be credited to the author of the first passage which belongsto the middle of the second centurv-. This date will have to beverified as a matter of course.The three Synoptic Gospels contain also the story of the inter-ment of Jesus by Joseph of .Arimathaea. The three versions havebeen derived in spite of minor differences from a common source.That in turn is based uf)on John xix. 38-42 although certain changeswere made. In the first place, Xicodemus is omitted. Neither henor his ointment are mentioned in the first three Gospels. The Syn-552 THE OPEN COURToptics have the body of Jesus wrapped only in one Hnen cloth. InJohn, not only linen cloths but also a surprisingly large quantity ofspices are used. Nicodemus furnishes about a hundred pounds ofmyrrh and aloes.The Synoptic Gospels, at least. Matthew xxvi, 12 and Mark xiv,8, had a very good reason for rejecting Xicodemus and his oint-ment. Shortly before the death of Jesus, a woman of Bethanyemptied an alabaster cruse of exceeding precious ointment upon thehead of Jesus. The disciples criticized that extravagance, but Jesusdefended the woman and said : In that she poured this ointmentupon my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. \'erily, I sayunto you : Wherever this gospel shall be preached in the wholeworld, that also what this woman has done shall be spoken of fora memorial of her.Jesus therefore was certain of finding his last resting place onearth with the wicked. He foresaw that no service of love anddevotion could be given to his mangled remains. The more thank-ful he was for what the woman had done. It was as if he had toldhis disciples:O, love as long as love you can !O, love as long as love you may!Too fast the fatal hour draws nighWhen with the cursed I must stay.John xix, 38-42 is clearly not based upon the correspondingpassages of the Synoptic Gospels. It is moreover without doubtthe original continuation of the immediately preceeding verse 32b-37. The assistance of Nicodemus was suggested by John iii. 1 ff.Thus if one of the two parallel burial accounts has been borrowedfrom the other, the Fourth Gospel holds the original text. In adapt-ing it to the Synoptics, the phantom "ruler of the Jews" whothreatened to usurp the praise belonging to the woman of Bethany,was sent back to the sliadows of the night from which he had comeand took along his one hundred pounds of embalming ointment.The three Synoptic versions do not differ very much from eachother. Mark and Luke introduce Joseph of Arimathaea as acounciler, whatever that may be, in order to explain why he couldask Pilate for the body of Jesus. Matthew presents Joseph as arich man and owner of the new tomb in which Jesus was laid.JOSEPH OF ARIM ATHAKA 553That was a protest against the disgraceful fact that the three otherGospels put Jesus into a stolen tomb. Fairy tales, however, arenot subject to the rules of ethics. The leading idea was to havethe burial of Jesus agree exactly with the corrupt text of Isaiahliii 9.If Joseph of .\rimnthaea and Xicodcmus had been really secretdisciples of Jesus, they would have cnme forward after his deathand their names would be found in the Acts. For the period of thefirst unfolding of tlir ifraiit of mustard seed. The .\cts are verycomplete and perfectly reliable if we take care to remove the post-apostolic, legendary additions. For instance, the legend of thetwelve apostles has been especially harmful. I'or it causes us toconsider the book which could treat only of two apostles, Peterand Paul, as a very incomplete account of what was achieved from29 to about 60 .\. D.The absolute silence of .\cts as to Joseph of .\rimathaea proveshim to be a person that never existed. If John xix, 38-42 should beaccepted as source of the Synoptic story, the question would arisefrom whom Polycarp obtained his knowledge of Joseph. Certainlynot from John I For Joseph of .\rimathaea does not belong to theJohannine account of the burial of Jesus. Moreover, Polvcarpcannot have visited .\nicetus, the bishop of Rome, before the year157. That renders it more than doubtful whether he was evenbom when John visited Smyrna in the year 70.So near the beginning of the 15th of Xisan when the Passoverwas eaten, no Jew would have lingered at the place of execution.If any one, except John, has watched the interment of the threecrucified men. that man could have been only the orator, or in-terpreter of the high priest. It was a vital question for Caiaphas,not Pilate whether the remains of the three men were committedto the ground or not. It might therefore be not impossible that theorator carried the written order of Pilate to the centurion atGolgotha and stayed there until the bodies had been put into thecharnel-house.That representative of the high priest had no sympathy withany Jew who had become obnoxious to the chief priests. Heknew little about the Jews of Palestine. For he had to be a nativeof Rome, the son of a wealthy Jewish family who had received a554 THE OPEN COURTthorough Roman education, was familiar with the Roman law, andcould act as diplomatic middleman between the high priest and thegovernor.Clearly, only a Jew born, raised, and educated at Rome, couldfill that important position. The one mentioned Acts xxiv, 1 calledhimself Tertullus. If the orator's name when Jesus was crucified,was Joseph, his full name must have been Joseph of Rome, not ofArimathaea. The Syriac noun Arimathaea would not exclude that.For it may mean Rome. But Joseph of Rome would never haveplaced the corpse of Jesus into any tomb and least of all into anotherman's tomb. He was present only to watch whether the Romansoldiers satisfied the Jewish law concerning the burial of criminals.But here again, we have to face the question : Who told Polycarpof that man. Such information cannot have come from an eye-witness. We have therefore to regard Joseph of Arimathaea as alegendary figure, invented in all probabilit}' by Polycarp himself.

Joseph of Arimathaea.

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Joseph of Arimathaea.

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