I’ll be happy to have my own ignorance corrected, but I’ve read that “it is against Mosaic Law for a body to be left on a cross after sundown” and that this law would apply especially to a day like Passover Sabbath. Thus in John 19:31
As to the “dearth of skeletal remains indentifiable as those of crucifixion victims,” Ian Wilson writes
The short version would be that People Make Shit Up. It’s really that simple. If someone came back to life and walked around, or if he turned a river to wine, or he healed the wounded, or he fed thousands of people by multiplying a single loaf of bread, or whatever, that person would have been remarked upon by contemporaries and gathered a sizable following of believers. As best can be told by the Bible, Jesus was at best a piss-poor copycat of John the Baptist; most of his followers were just his own family members; and he didn’t have anything in the way of non-family followers otherwise until John the Baptist died and he was able to convince a half-dozen ex-John followers to come follow him. Hardly anyone noticed him when he was alive, and in general when he tried to preach in public, he generally just pissed off the crowd and then had to run away.
Jesus’ church was a religious cult. Most cults are populated by fairly bright people who are, however, really hungry for social acceptance among their peers. If one person comes up with some insane thing and insists that it’s true, there’s a good chance that all of the others will buy into it and convince themselves that it’s true as well. In an environment like that, expecting a lot of rigorous truth about historical events is asking a bit much.
As to a theory for how this particular story started, my guess would be that it’s an artifact of Paul’s conquest of the Christian church.
Paul never met Jesus and yet he started his own “Christian” church without ever studying with anyone who had (or if he did, it wasn’t someone who had a deep array of knowledge on the topic). He preached for 3 years before going in to meet anyone who actually knew Jesus’ teachings. As such, for all of that time, he had to have a cover story for why he can profess to be a “Christian preacher”. Telling everyone that Jesus spoke to him from beyond the grave solved that problem.
The thing is though, whereas Jesus’ church was never very big and it was fairly poorly run, Paul was a master orator and salesman. He was able to start an ever-expanding franchise of churches no matter where he was. His church ended up propping up Jesus’ original followers financially, and it’s likely they pretty well had to accept and take in his story about the direct revelation of all Christian information into Paul’s head – regardless of whether what Paul was teaching matched up with what Jesus taught in any significant way.
And of course later, when people started to spread and edit documents that had been written about Jesus, they probably wanted to match up the stories as best they could. If one guy said that Jesus re-appeared after his death, well that means that he must have left his grave (so someone writes that in), it probably means that he appeared to others of his disciples (so someone writes in a story about that too), and so on.
I mean, ultimately there’s probably a good half-dozen plausible explanations that don’t require magic (though all of them reduce down to People Make Shit Up). That’s just one sequence of events that seems to match up with what we know and seems likely. But really, we’d need better documentation and dating to trace the actual genesis and spread of any one story.
QFT.
Must have been a hell of a bribe for the soldiers to gamble that the local provincial officials could somehow protect them if the governor found out they were asleep on duty. The Roman punishment for that (as usual) was pretty brutal.
Well, if you’re as quick to doubt the New Testament as I am, then it’s of course pretty easy to just discard the other part of the story.
A specious point, at best. All except for Mark claim that people saw him walking and talking in his physical body afterwards.
There is no evidence that the empty tomb story existed before mark, or that anyone made claim to have seen a physically resurrected Jesus before Matthew.
A point I made myself. The question is exactly what the Christophanies were to Paul and the original disciples. We have no testimony from the original disciples, and Paul appears to say that the “appearances” by Jesus were spiritual, not physical (in fact, he flat out says so in 1 Corinthians).
You can read Mark this way if you like, but the fact remains that Mark’s Gospel was still written at least 40 years after the alleged crucifixion by an author who neither witnessed anything or knew anybody esle who witnessed anything.
I would argue that we can read quite a bit into the fact that Paul says physical resurrections are impossible, that he makes no distinction between the nature of Jesus’ appearances to the disciples and to himself and to the fact that he says nothing at all about an empty tomb, since the resurrection is, to Paul, the most significant thing about his perception of Christ.
I would also point out that it’s not an argument for a magical resurrection to opine that maybe Paul just forgot to mention it. It’s incumbant on those making the assertion that the empty tomb tradition or a belief in a physical resurrection existed among the first followers to prove it. This, after all, is the premise we are being asked by the OP to explain. If the premise can’t be proven then there is nothing to explain. Prove anybody ever claimed to have seen a physically resurrected Jesus. Prove an empty tomb story existed before Mark. Explain why neither of these beliefs is expressed in Paul, Thomas or Q. If you can’t prove those beliefs existed before Mark (and believe me, you can’t), then there’s no possibility of “explaining” them.
Crucifixions operated under Roman law, not Mosaic law. the Romans didn’t give a shit about Jewish taboos.
You don’t provide a link to the source for this and I fail to see it’s relevance. Crucifixion nails were taken from victims? So what? They wuld have been taken right off the cross or from shallow graves. We have ample historical documentation about the disposition of crucifixion victims (and nails through bones do leave marks).
I’m not making an “argument for a magical resurrection”. I’m responding to Onomatopoeia’s suggestion that the resurrection tradition arose “some hundreds of years” after the death of Jesus. You and I agree that there is unambiguous evidence of a physical resurrection tradition in Matthew, which is less than a hundred years after the death of Jesus. And Matthew didn’t invent it out of whole cloth; there were existing empty tomb (Mark) and Christophany (Paul) traditions. We’ve no reason to suppose that Mark and Paul invented out of whole cloth either; it seems more likely that they in turn are in some degree reflecting preexisting traditions. Given that they are both writing during a time when many witnesses to the public life of Jesus would still have been alive, the risk of refutation if they had simply invented something would not have been insignificant.
I’m not claiming that the physical resurrection tradition is true; just that it’s much more ancient than Onomatopoeia suggests. In particular, when Onomatopoeia talks about “the concept of Jesus rising from the grave” it seems relevant to observe that the empty tomb is among the oldest documented traditions about Jesus that we have.
Ok, you’re right about most of that (except for the part about Mark a lot of witnesses to the life of Jesus being alive when Mark was written. There wouldn’t have been many, if any, and since Mark was writing outside Palestine for a Gentile audience, it is vansihingly unlikely that any of them would have been aware that Mark’s book even existed).
This skeptic’s explanation is that it never happened. None of it. If there was a historical person called Jesus (which, I don’t know but I doubt), the Gospel story has nothing to do with him, being a much later fabrication.
My theology is getting a bit rusty, but my recollection jibes with the accounts given by Dio and Sage Rat. Another point, which I think is important, is that the Gospels and Acts were written in the context of a sectarian dispute with the Gnostics, who were claiming Jesus was a trancendental deity and had only seemed to die on the Cross. To the proto-orthodox Christians (whether they were at this point a minority or majority is unknown), this was a dangerous heresy. So the books compiled emphasize Jesus’ humanity, give him a real human death and a physical resurrection. IOW, the Gospels and Acts were doctrinal works, not history. On this view, Paul’s failure to mention these elements is evidence of their relatively late introduction (by decades, not centuries).
As I say, my theology is getting rusty, so please feel free to correct, clarify or dispute this understanding.
Cite? To imagine local custom would be irrelevant is to be ignorant of how foreign rulers maintain control.
I wrote “Ian Wilson.” Oh, now works are valid only if found via Google? 
Cite?
Sorry if I seem snarky, but lately I see SDMB “regulars” making ex cathedra pronouncements, ofen without citations (and often incorrect 
).
Well, I’m not Dio, but it didn’t take too much looking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion#Ancient_crucifixion
Which seems to make it pretty unlikely that it was common to take them down at sundown. The next paragraph also mentions the one set of remains that we do have has marks on the bones, presumed from a nail (Really, were you questioning that? A nail leaves a mark in everything else solid.)
So has the op been answered?
The skeptic’s answer is mainly that the accounts of the events after were popularized long after whatever the events actually were, and there is no reason, according to the skeptics, to believe them to be at all accurate. As historical evidence goes these accounts are pretty weak. There was, per the skeptics, no reason for the Romans of the time to disprove an assertion that did not exist at the time. And no way to disprove it by the point it was a popularly held believe, and in any case, the Romans’ style wasn’t to debate with other belief systems. They destroyed or absorbed but they did not debate.
None of which will or should change the mind of a believer whose believe is based on faith, not evidence.
Merry Christmas!
It’s funny you would assert this since crucifixion itself was against Jewish law. Crucifixion was a purely Roman method of excution and was used in the provinces only for crimes of sedition. We know from ancient writers like Suetonius and Ulpian that burial of these victims was steadfastly refused from the time of Augustus on (since you’re ok with just citing authors, I would suggest looking for Raymond Brown’s Death of the Messiah and John Crossan’s Historical Jesus for more details). We have no corroborating evidence at all of Governors in the provinces making exceptions to this rule to suit local customs. If they cared about local religious laws in Judea, they wouldn’t have used crucifixion in the first place.
Your lack of a link provides no context and explains no credentials or sources for the name you quoted.
Scabpicker already got this one.
I wouldn’t dismiss that so easily; the Romans were smart enough to avoid provoking their subjects over trivial issues.
One argument I’ve read is that Jesus was originally a local troublemaker executed by the locals according to Jewish law (which would fit some of the early writings that describe him “hanging on a tree”), and the story got changed to a crucifixion (or, as the author snarkily referenced it, “crucifiction”) because that had more resonance with potential converts’ resentment of the Roman authorities.
You’re talking about a story in the Babylonian Talmud:
The story also says this Yeshu had five disciples (one named Matthai, i.e. Matthew), but that they were all executed too.
It is not clear whether this story was intended to refer to the Christian Jesus, but the Babylonian Talmud dates from no earlier than the 4th Century, and if it does refer to Jesus, the scholarly belief is that it is post-Christian polemic.
The Sanhedrin did not have the authority to hang anybody during the Roman period anyway.
Pilate was notorious for provoking the Jews and was called back to Rome more than once for it.
And given the nature of the charges against Jesus (ostensibly for claiming to be the “King of the Jews,” but it was at least for some kind of perceived sedition. Crucifixion was only applied for crimes against the state), and since it was forbidden by Roman law to return the bodies of those executed for treason, it would have been both highly unlikely and completely out of character for Pilate to have allowed such a thing. Doing so would have been tantamount to an admission of innocence, and a de facto insult to the Emperor, (the real king of Judea).
There is no documentary evidence for the Romans allowing locals to remove bodies from the cross to suit their own religious customs, and even the Sanhedrin could not have allowed a proper burial since Jesus was ostensibly convicted of blasphemy, and a proper burial under those circumstances was against Jewish law.
How long do you think a corpse would last in ancient Jerusalem? Especially after the treatment it got. Remember, it’s not like Jesus died, was resurrected, and then instantly everyone knew about it. I could swear that the disciples didn’t even talk about it forty days or something.
Also, why would the Romans care?