I was baptized and this question after the fact has greatly bothered my faith, if anyone can give me a answer to this I would be very grateful.

Sincerely,

Daniel

Who spiced the body of Jesus?

Let’s look at a crime scene that took place yesterday. The police ask questions of anyone connected to the crime and everyone who saw what happened.

Not everyone will have the same level detail or tell exactly the same story. Everyone may have different parts of the story and everyone may be correct in their witness of the events.

Just because a gospel writer does not mention Nicodemus doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. Just because the women also prepared spices doesn’t mean that Joseph & Nicodemus had already spiced the body of Jesus. The women may not have been aware that Joseph & Nicodemus had spiced the body. Joseph & Nicodemus may have spiced the body in the tomb out of the sight of the women. In that day and age there was absolutely no reason for Joseph & Nicodemus to tell anything to a woman, a bunch of fishermen or anyone else for that matter.

Also note that the crucifixion was likely on Wednesday and the body of Jesus was placed in the tomb at sunset on Wednesday. The next day was the Passover, also considered a Sabbath day. The women purchased spices on Friday which is after the Sabbath (Mark 16:1 – Passover) and before the Sabbath (Luke 23:56 – Saturday). Remembering that the Hebrew day starts at sunset; Jesus would be in the tomb Thursday night; Thursday day; Friday night; Friday day; Saturday night and Saturday day; 3 days and 3 nights. Jesus was resurrected at sunset on Saturday, not at sunrise on Sunday morning. The stone was rolled back to let people in not to let Jesus out.

Also, the disciples may have remembered what Jesus said about being raised from the dead on the 3rd day, but they didn’t believe it (Mark 16:11).

Agreed that they were written in Greek, but why do you feel that it’s unlikely any of the 12 wrote them? Most New Testament scholars agree that at least Luke and John were written by their namesake. If Mark and Matthew weren’t, they were definitely written by someone close to Jesus and the first century Christians.

“Jesus’ followers were illiterate peasants.”

I’m not sure if we can make this call. Some of them were fishermen when Jesus invited them to join him. Philip is shown to be speaking Greek in John 12.

All of them were following a highly educated and intelligent (even if you doubt his divinity) Rabbi. It seems to me that Jesus would have taken some time to educate the people that were following him.

“If you can’t identify the writers with any degree of certainty, then their “testimony” becomes an anonymous repetition of un-examinable hear-say.”

Would you wish me to disregard your comment as un-examinable hear-say because I don’t 100% know that your real name is John? Probably not.

I do think it’s important to realize that the authors (no matter who they were) were writing in a vastly different culture than ours. Authorship and credit was clearly not as important back then as it is to us.

Whatever comes of the endless debate (and it will be endless because we will never know beyond a shadow of a doubt) the documents still exist and many many many people do believe that they have and will help people change their lives.

I would encourage you to pick up a few books on the subject of New Testament studies from a wide variety of people (people that genuinely believe it and people that don’t), and better yet read through the Bible itself. And even better yet, find a good Christian friend or pastor or a community online that can really take the time to help you think through some of these issues. They’ll be able to do a much better job than we will in answering your questions.

Granted that they were written in Greek, which we’d probably all agree upon, it feels unlikely any of the 12 wrote them. Greek was the language of highly educated, city-dwelling, upper-class folk of the day. Jesus’ followers were illiterate peasants.

If you can’t identify the writers with any degree of certainty, then their “testimony” becomes an anonymous repetition of un-examinable hear-say.

That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But it makes it less reasonable to accept the “stories” as any anything other than that: stories. Stories that may contain truth or may not.

JD

Are you sure that the only, or even the most likely, way it makes sense is that the whole scene was invented?

That’s one possible interpretation. But I can think of plenty of other reasons that the women may have done this. Maybe they wanted to pay final respects to their beloved teacher one last time, anointing the body the way Mary had done earlier? Maybe they wanted to assure themselves that Jesus really was dead, and that his body had been appropriately prepared? Maybe they vaguely remembered something from Jesus’ teaching about “three days” and wanted an excuse to go assure themselves that he was really dead and gone? Maybe they had another religious or personal reason for doing so? This was a group of people whose teacher had just been brutally executed and who feared the same thing might happen to them–who can say exactly what would motivate their actions? Some of these reasons might be more likely than others, but can you really say that you can’t think of *any* reasonable reason they might have gone to visit the tomb?

I guess the broader point is simply that we don’t know, because the Gospel account doesn’t deem their exact reasoning important enough to the core of the story. Remember how relatively brief the Easter account is–the Easter accounts just give us the major events of the story. All throughout the Bible there are plenty of places where it would be really nice to know what certain people were thinking, or why they made the choices they did. But jumping from this lack of detailed explanations to the conclusion that the account was invented for narrative reasons isn’t logical.

They’d have to unwrap the body to do it, and that would make them unclean.

The only way this makes sense is as an invention by the writer to give them some reason to go to the tomb on Sunday so they could dramatically “discover” Jesus’ body was gone.

I guess I don’t really see any contradiction in the account of Jesus’ burial that you do. All four Gospels identify Joseph as the main person who buried Jesus. Some of the accounts go into more detail about who else was present than others, but that doesn’t make them contradictory accounts–it just means that some of the writers recorded details that the others didn’t.

I don’t also see a problem with the timing of the spices. None of the accounts seem to place much importance on the exact timing, so it’s not spelled out. It’s clear that Joseph, Nicodemus, and/or the women applied the spices at some point at Jesus’ burial–it’s not critical that we know if they did this separately or together. It might be interesting to know, but I don’t see how it raises any serious questions about the burial account.

If the similarities and differences in the Gospel accounts interest you, much has been written about them over the years. There’s a brief overview here and many other books and websites if the topic interests you.

JD

They only remembered after the angel reminded them. That doesn’t speak well for them.