How would you respond to the charge that the account of Jesus burial is invented, because the Jews would not allow an idolator like Jesus a proper burial?
Question:
How would you respond to people who say “The Jews thought Jesus was an idolater and therefore would not have allowed Jesus to have a proper burial”?
Answer:
I will allow what the Jews said of Jesus, as recorded in the gospels, and as recorded in Jewish writings in the first two centuries to speak to what the Jews thought of Jesus. From the gospels and from the Talmud, we can glean that the Jewish opponents of Jesus had multiple charges against Jesus. He was called a pretender to the role of Messiah. He was called one who falsely claimed to be God. This would be blasphemy! He was called a deceiver and one who leads the Jews astray. He was called a law-breaker. But, there is one thing that the Jewish leaders did NOT charge Jesus with, which is idolatry. Jesus did not propose the worship of other false gods. Jesus did not support the worship of the Roman or the Greek or the Egyptian gods. No, he never did this, nor did he himself ever worship other false gods. Nor could even the ones who killed Jesus have the nerve to make this clearly false accusation, as they would have been laughed at for such a blatantly false claim about Jesus.
So, whoever is saying this is probably just blowing smoke, and knows very little about the actual Jewish responses to Jesus. I am confident that whoever is saying this has no evidence to support their claim. It is reasonable to propose that the Jewish leaders would not have allowed a proper burial to Jesus because of his blasphemy, or of his (according to them) false teaching, but, no, they would not have denied him proper burial because of being an idolator, which even his opponents dared not to attempt to do.
I assume that whoever is saying this is trying to “prove” that the account of Joseph of Arimathea providing a burial site to Jesus is an invention because the Jews would not have allowed this to Jesus. Well, we can make such a proposal, and some responsible scholars have done this, but when the one doing this rather ignorantly proposes it was because they considered Jesus an idolator, they are exposing their clear lack of understanding of the historical record of Jewish claims about Jesus. We should interact with people who know what they are talking about, not people like this who make stuff up, exposing their lack of understanding of the historical Jesus.
John Oakes
