I’ve been doing a bit of reading lately on the origins of Christianity. As such, it seems that some contend that 1 Corinthians 15 is an interpolation. Others contend that it represents a basic Christian creed that the earliest of Christians would believe.
My question is about the term “buried” that Paul uses. He doesn’t say that Christ was put in a tomb, which was found empty later. He says buried.
How would first century Jews have interpreted this? Would they have simply thought that Jesus was put in a tomb? I think the modern interpretation would be that Jesus was put six feet under. I’m not sure if this would be the case back then though.
So whats the dope on this? Is this a controversial passage (in terms of an empty tomb)? I’m still new to this, but I haven’t stumbled across any scholars bringing this passage up with reference to Jesus being six feet under - which makes me doubt that this passage has ever been though to reference Jesus being buried the way modern people are.
It doesn’t need to be an interpolation. Paul may not have been aware of proper burial rituals, and nothing in the Bible indicates that Paul had much contact with nor cared much about the Jewish branch of the church. If he got it wrong, so what? We’re talking about a guy who claimed divine knowledge from Jesus, went and found Jesus’ brothers, cousins, and/or disciples and told them straight out that he knew more about what Jesus believed than they did and that they had to change their doctrine to match. Whereas Jesus’ church was languishing in low numbers and poverty, Paul’s was spreading from town to town and taking in donations like all get-out. Paul simply wasn’t a guy that you could win an argument against, regardless of how wrong he might be.
The interpolation point is a bit of a tangent. I put it in the OP because I thought that if the question regarding the burial was answered maybe we could swing back and talk about potential interpolation of the verse.
I have no idea what you mean with regard to Paul not caring much about the Jewish branch of the church. Paul was jewish. Paul wrote to various churches about customs and such.
Christianity was a jewish movement and Paul initially persecuted the early Christians because of their perversion of scripture (presumably).
I agree that Paul was enormous with regards to spreading the faith.
Paul’s letters represent the earliest material for Christianity, he’s the closest we have to the ‘source’. So if he’s talking about a burial 6 feet under I think that provides some traction for the idea that the early Christians believed in a spiritual resurrection (not a physical one). This is because the earliest ‘story’ would not have included an ‘empty tomb’.
Of course, my memory of the New Testament is sketchy, my research is noobish, and right now I just have a litany of ignorant questions. This question about what Paul meant by ‘burial’ came up as I was reading a piece by Robert Price that argues that this verse is an interpolation.
I’ve never heard anybody claim that this passage is an interpolation. Every source that I’ve ever read on the topic treats this passage as authentic and central to Paul’s message in this epistle. I’d be curious to know who disputes it.
In Israel at the time, corpses would be embalmed with spices and placed in a tomb shortly after death, before decay had a chance to set in. After the body disintegrated, the bones would be collected and placed in an ossuary permanently. Most Jews believed that there would be a physical resurrection at the end of the world and the importance of burial was based on this belief.
In 1 Cor 15:4, Paul uses the Greek verb thapto, which means ‘to bury’. It is used through the New Testament and, as far as I know, none of the NT authors distinguished between the temporary entombment and the final burial of the bones. The word certainly could refer to the entombment, however, since in Acts 5 it is used in reference to a person who died only a few hours earlier.
Paul says nothing of an empty tomb, and shows no awareness of it at all. The empty tomb story is not attested in Christian mythology until Mark’s Gospel, at least 40 years after the alleged crucifixion, and is not found in the earliest layers of Christian literature (Paul, Q, Thomas).
It is exceedingly implausible from a historical perspective that a crucifixion victim would have been given over for burial. It just wasn’t done. In actual practice, bodies were either left on the cross to rot or buried commonly in lime pits. Denial of a proper burial was part of the punishment.
There is zero reason to think Paul was referring to an empty tomb since he never mentions that himself, and since he never mentions a physical resurrection (he only speaks of "appearances, does not say they were physical and denies that physical resurrections are possible). The most parsimonious and most historically plausible scenario is that Paul was referring to the normal Roman practice of dumping crucified criminals in a lime pit.
Yes, but it could also have reasonably meant entombed. Thapto meant literally “to bury,” but was also used in a more general way to refer to the interment or disposal of bodies. Neither deep burial, shallow pit disposal or entombment are necessarily excluded as reasonable possibilities. It’s not an especially helpful or specific word in this regard.
Yes, this is one of the reasons I was suspicious (granted, I thought I could be wrong with regard to what Paul didn’t say, I couldn’t remember anything about ‘the empty tomb’).
This was (roughly) my understanding too.
So do you think he was referring to the ‘lime pit’ with regard to the burial?
I was thinking about this stuff over this weekend (because of ‘the rapture’) and I was thinking about what we definitively know about the first Christians. I don’t know much, but it’s my understanding that there isn’t a lot conclusively known about their first beliefs.
The Gospels seem - to me, at least - kind of like fictional ‘back story’ accounts for Christian beliefs. There was an early creed and a mythology sprung up.
An interesting kind of parallel occurred to me. HP Lovecraft wrote clearly fictional stories in the 20’s and 30’s. He wrote about ‘The Necronomicon’, a fictional book - which people thought (and still think) was real. In fact, I saw a ‘celebrity ghost stories’ with Maryland Manson who said that when he was young he spoke incantations from the Necronomicon.
Now, this is clearly a fictional book - I think Cecil even did a column on it. This ‘version’ was written in 1980 (which is what, something like 50 years after the fact?).
I can’t help but note the parallel of people creating a fictional ‘religious book’ from a clearly fictional story, other people believe it’s genuine AND the gospels (which were written something like 30 or 40 years after the fact - Mark at least). Now, I know that there was no intentional ‘fiction’ on the part of the gospel writers.
Wrong. There was no distinct “Jewish branch of the church” in the mid-first century. There was the church, with members born Jewish and gentile side-by-side. Paul’s letters tell us that he cared deeply about ensuring that he passed on the traditions of the apostles accurately and Acts tells us that he actively sought converts among the Jewish communities in the Greek cities he visited. For you to say that Paul didn’t care much about Jewish converts is the exact opposite of the truth.
Wrong again; Paul never said any such thing, and in fact said the exact opposite, namely that he submitted his gospel to the apostles in Jerusalem because he viewed their approval of his message as necessary. “It was because of a revelation that I went up; and I submitted to them the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles,…for fear that I might be running, or had run, in vain.” [Gal 1:22-23] In 1 Cor 15, the chapter that’s the basis for this thread, Paul’s statement that he was passing on the tradition of the apostles is equally clear. This article looks in depth at how Paul viewed the apostolic tradition and his own revelation. Your statement about what Paul did is the exact opposite of the truth,
First of all, Jesus’ church and Paul’s church were one and the same. Secondly, I’d be interested in knowing how you know the numbers of converts anywhere in the opening years of the church. The only numbers we have come from the book of Acts and they suggest the exact opposite of what you claim.
I think it’s the most likely interpretation, but we can’t say anything for sure about Paul. We don’t even really know for sure if he was talking about a real, historical person (though I lean to HJ over MJ).
It should also be pointed out that Paul claimed to have received all his information directly from his visionary experiences of Jesus and “not from any man.” We’re talking about psychosis here, so who knows what he saw?
There is quite a lot of scholarship in this direction. Jesus mythicists, in particular, argue that the Gospels are entirely fictional and were written to retroject a mythical character into a historical context. I think that’s overreaching, but I do think the Gospels were written to provide some kind of biographical details for a figure that Gentile believers of the Pauline mission knew little or nothing about.
I also agree that the authors weren’t intentionally or cynically lying and fabricating. They probably had some oral tradition (at least a sayings tradition), and to fill in gaps, they looked largely to the Hebrew Bible, which they believed sincerely could give them clues and information (however cryptic) about Jesus.
I would recommend this article by N. T. Wright, which is a quick summary of a lengthy book he wrote on the topic. He acknowledges a spread of Jewish beliefs concerning life after death but the key point is the following:
So while not all Jews believed in the resurrection, those who believed it and used the term believed in a physical resurrection and not a purely spiritual one.
Concerning the issue of the burial of criminals, archaeologists have recently found an entombed body of a crucifixion victim with a portion of the nail and the wooden cross still attached to his feet, hence we know that in at least some cases, victims of crucifixion did receive individual burial rather than a mass grave. I’ll try to find the reference for that tonight.
ITR is right about the traditions in the 2nd Temple period, though I don’t know that never practiced more convential burial in more remote historical periods.
The word thapto wasn’t just used in reference to the burial of bodies, but in reference to the burial of anything. Bodies were just one thing that could be buried, but when that word was used in reference to bodies, it could broaden out to pretty much any form of interment.
Yeah, I suppose that’s true. I lean to a HJ myself, simply because it seems the most parsimonious.
Actually, I think Dr. Price uses something like this as evidence that 1 Cor 15 is an interpolation. He suggests that Paul ‘contradicts himself’ in 1 Cor 15 since he didn’t receive the information from ‘any man’. The following from the website I posted earlier:
I think I agree with you that it’s overreaching. I feel that it’s more likely that the historical facts were mythologized.
Yes, this is what I think happened. The followers knew some tradition and went through the Hebrew bible to fill in the history they had expected Jesus to fulfill. Off the top of my head this would make sense of the ‘virgin birth’, the ride into town on two donkeys, etc.
There was the Jerusalem cult after Jesus (led, ostensibly, by the “pillars” of James,Peter and John) and there was the Pauline movement to the Gentiles. We know virtually nothing about what the Jerusalem group believed because we jhave no writings from them, or any primary testimony. We do know that Paul says they clashed with him over the necessity of keeping Jewish law, and of requiring circumcision for converts. Circumstantially, the evdience seems to show that the Jerusalem group still saw itself as Jewish, and not as a new church. We don’t know how they viewed Jesus. We don’t know if they thought he was God. We know nothing of their Christology at all. Paul’s Christology was (according to his own words) his alone, derived from his own visions.
Paul’s Gentile movement is the one that became “Christianity” after the original movement was lost in the destruction of Jerusalem. We have no surviving records of what they believed. Your assertion that “Jesus church and Paul’s church was exactly the same” is unsupported by any historical evidence, seems to be contradicted by what little we do know and is essentially just an expression of religious faith, not a statement of demonstrable fact.
Price’s argument is interesting. It hadn’t occured to me to see those passages as contradictory before, and I can see his reasoning for it. I’m not convinced that Paul himself couldn’t have just said one thing on tuesday and another on wednesday, though. He was kind of a hustler and could be facile with the facts.
Interesting. This is worth drilling down a little.
Crucifixion bodies were a) usually buried commonly in lime pits and b) it was part of the punishment. What’s the evidence, the cite? I find a) highly plausible if only because of poverty. Actually I find b) plausible as well, but for separate reasons.
2.a. I don’t see why Roman soldiers couldn’t have been bribed to release the body of a deceased Rabbi popular in the hinterlands. Heck, I’d think it likely, except I quite honestly don’t know enough about the era. I’m not sure whether the chaos of an execution during a local politically-charged holiday would have made such under the table dealings more or less likely.
2.b. All 4 gospels say that a man named Joseph of Arimathea arranged for Jesus to be given a burial: Matthew says the guy was rich.
We can impute that Peter et al believed in the resurrection given the language in Corinthians. Whether that resurrection was suppose to be physical, spiritual, both or whatever is another matter.
The cites are voluminous and are found in multiple accounts from historians and writers of the period. Those accounts are supported by the almost total lack of extant remains of crucifixion victims. Of the tens of thousands of people crucified by the Romans, the remains of only one have ever been found. Crucifixion was not just intended to kill but to terrorize. Bodies on crosses were often guarded to keep family members from giving them proper burials. This is well attested in ancient literature.
Theoretically, they could have. It’s not impossible. It would have been very dangerous for them, though. Crucifixion in the provinces was only imposed for crimes against the Roman state. Accepting a bribe to let the family or friends give the body a burial was, in itself, a crime of sedition.
It’s possible that it happened, though. There is that single example of a cruicifxion victim being found in an ossuary in a family grave (that victim, was a 14 year old boy, though, so that family might have been given some kind of clemency given his age). Bribery is not impossible, but not likely for a dirt poor peasant who was crucified for stirring up shit at the Temple durinmg Passover.
The Gospels are fiction, and not independent. There was no such town as “Arimathea.” The name literally means “good disciple town” in Greek, which indicates that the character is a fiction created by Mark.
We don’t know what Peter believed, but the language in 1 Corinthians ays only that Jesus “appeared” to various people after the crcucifixion. It does not say anything about the nature of those appearances, and (most significantly, in my opinion) Paul does not draw any distinction between the appearances to the discples and to himself. He just includes himself at the end of a list of people that Jesus “appeared” to. That would indicate that Paul so those other appearances as basically visions like his own.
There’s also the fact that the empty tomb is not mentioned in the earliest layers of Christian literature or in the sayings traditions, like I said.
Thanks DtC. Let me continue on this thread for completeness. I understand that pre-modern European penal systems routinely treated the monied classes different than peasants. Executioners could be paid off to make the experience more or less excruciating. Jesus had followers from outside the city. The 4 gospels depict Joseph Arimathea as working out a side deal directly with Pontius Pilate, which strains my credulity. But is it plausible? And is it proper to depict Rabbi Jesus as a peasant? Might he have been a step up in some way? Or didn’t it matter given that he faced execution?
I find it interesting that all 4 gospels mention Joseph Arimathea: it suggests that something was in need of explanation. (They also depict female followers witnessing the crucifixion at a distance.)