Murder at Golgotha Read online

  11

  Getting Rid of the Body

  For WHATEVER HAPPENED to Jesus' body in the immediate aftermath of its crucifixion on Golgotha, theoretically a few brief lines of the John testimony should suffice to answer all our questions:

  Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus— though a secret one because he was afraid of the Jews—asked Pilate to let him remove the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission, so they came and took it away. Nicodemus came as well—the same one who had first come to Jesus at nighttime—and he brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen clothes with the spices, following the Jewish burial custom. At the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in this garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been buried. Since it was the Jewish Day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there. (John 19:38-42)

  Joseph of Arimathea, the prime mover now coming under our investigative scrutiny, is an individual who goes unmentioned anywhere previously among the testimonies. Yet suddenly we find him boldly presenting himself to Judaea's highest authority to take responsibility for Jesus' dead body. So, who was he, and what was his motive?

  The John testimony says only that he was a disciple of Jesus who kept this association secret because of his fear of "the Jews." Exactly where Arimathea was is uncertain, a possible candidate being Ramathaim, which lay to Jerusalem's northwest, towards Samaria. The Matthew, Mark, and Luke testimonies are in certain respects more informative about Joseph than is John. Matthew describes him as rich, Mark as a "prominent member of the Council," i.e., the Sanhedrin. Luke, who also mentions Joseph's membership in the Council, adds that he was "good and upright" and lived "in the hope of seeing the Kingdom of God." There has been speculation that it may have been in Joseph's Jerusalem house that Jesus and his disciples ate the Last Supper, which would certainly make a lot of sense concerning the secrecy otherwise shrouding this house's ownership. Altogether more certain is that he owned the tomb in which Jesus was about to be laid, specifically described in the Matthew testimony as his own, new one, "hewn out of rock."

  Only the John testimony names Nicodemus as the man who apparently helped Joseph get Jesus' body to this tomb. From John mentioning that at some earlier time this same Nicodemus had come to Jesus at nighttime, i.e., again secretly, we know him to have been a prominent Pharisee who entered into deep theological discussion with Jesus on matters such as the Kingdom of God, and God's sending his son into the world to save mankind from its evil ways. According to John, Nicodemus procured a large quantity of myrrh and aloes for Jesus' burial. These were expensive perfumes, the myrrh probably having come via traders all the way from Arabia. Rather than for Egyptian-style embalming, as is sometimes supposed, their purpose was to counteract the bad smells which would quickly begin to come from the dead body as the decomposition process commenced. The large quantity, "about a hundred pounds," suggests that Nicodemus, like Joseph, was a man of considerable wealth.

  So, within twenty-four hours of Jesus' showing his disciples the virtue of performing degrading tasks, it fell to two wealthy—and no doubt fastidious—outsiders to tend his bloody, sweaty, dirt-encrusted corpse. And, most important, to save it from being dumped into some pit for common criminals, the fate for which it would otherwise have been destined. And as the John testimony conveys, the Passover Sabbath, when they—along with all other conscientious, God-fearing Jews—had to cease all work, was already imminent. The one piece of luck on their side was that, as the John testimony specifically states, "the tomb was nearby." Even so, haste was now needed for everything that they had to do.

  At the Gethsemane execution site, Jesus' naked, bloodstained body had to be released from the nails fastening it to the cross and lowered gently to the ground. For two, most likely mature-age Jews, this in itself would have been no easy task. After all, it was a four-man team of well-drilled, fully equipped Roman soldiers who had put it up there. Once they had got it to the ground, they most likely used a simple, stretcherlike bier to carry it to the tomb. To this day such biers can often be seen still being used for funerals in Middle-Eastern countries. So, how far did Joseph and Nicodemus have to carry the body at this point?

  Our investigation has already recorded that Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as originally built by the first Christian emperor Constantine the Great, houses both Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, and the claimed site of the tomb in which he was laid, both of these being within the same single church building. The Golgotha site is on the southern side of the church. The site of the tomb, enclosed beneath an uninspiring but historic shrine (often referred to as an edicule), is at the church's eastern end, a mere forty yards to Golgotha's northwest. Theoretically, therefore, the tomb that Joseph had to make available for Jesus was indeed "nearby'' to where he had been crucified.

  The present-day Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a most bewildering building, a rabbit warren of different chapels operated by different Christian denominations, dating from different times in Jerusalem's long history, and always under repair. Can we really believe that this was the true location where, two thousand years ago, two highly stressed but purposeful Jews carried Jesus' dead body then laid it down to prepare it for burial? The present interior edicule, or shrine, marking the purportedly exact tomb site, dates only from the nineteenth century. However, there can be no doubt that it is the successor of a whole series of earlier versions, all of which were built on this same spot. In the manner of a Russian doll, each shrine encloses whatever remained of its predecessor, all ultimately starting with the original "discovery" of Jesus' tomb itself, as made by emperor Constantine the Great's mother, Helena, back in the year A.D. 326. But so much rests on whether Empress Helena, who can have been little less than eighty at the time, really did discover the true location.

  Much as in the case of the testimonies that we have about Jesus' life, the documentary evidence that we have about the original circumstances in A.D. 326 is far from as first-hand or contemporary as we would wish. The most detailed information comes from Rufinus, an Italian-born priest who lived two generations after the events. Rufinus mentioned as perhaps the best clue to Helena having correctly identified the tomb that there was found within it "the board ... on which Pilate had placed an inscription written in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew." This is of course the trilingual placard labeling Jesus as "King of the Jews," displayed on Jesus' cross, reputedly brought back from Jerusalem to Rome by Empress Helena and preserved in Rome's Chapel of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme to this day.

  And the presence of that seemingly still-extant placard within the tomb discovered by Helena has as much considerable evidential value for our own time as it does for those living at the time of its rediscovery back in the fourth century. For it makes a lot of sense that Joseph and Nicodemus would not have left Jesus' placard affixed to the cross upright, where it could only have been quickly cast away as rubbish. They would therefore have been very likely to have brought this with them to the tomb, along with his body. It was, after all, a kind of epitaph for him.

  Furthermore, sufficient clues exist in and around the present Church of the Holy Sepulchre to indicate that it was founded on an area that genuinely had been used as a cemetery in Jesus' time. The excellent Blue Guide to Jerusalem has this to say of the Church's Syrian Chapel immediately to the east of the present-day shrine:

  Through a hole in the masonry . . . entrance can be had to a dark, rock-cut tomb typical of the first century B.C./a.D., part of which was cut away when the rock around the Tomb of Christ was removed in the fourth century. A sixteenth-century tradition located the tombs of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus here. The antechamber of the original tomb may have lain to the east, and the tomb chamber may have contained ten hokhim, or burial places with an ossuary [bone box] in the floor. The ossuary and several kokhim are still visible. This tomb and a tomb on the south side . . . reinforce the evidence that the Tomb of
Christ was part of a cemetery outside the walls in the first century B.C./A.D.

  So, just as we have seen that the "traditional" site of Golgotha makes good historical sense, so too does the equally "traditional" site of Jesus' tomb within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This is the case even though all the efforts to enshrine the tomb (repeatedly ruined by equally strenuous Moslem efforts to destroy it), have made its original appearance all but unrecognizable. Which immediately raises the question: how much can modern-day archaeology still tell us of what the typical first-century, rich Jewish man's rock-cut tomb would have looked like?

  As archaeological surveys have revealed, besides the rock-cut tomb already mentioned as accessible from the Syrian Chapel, there are a number of other examples to be seen in and around Jerusalem. From these, and from early Jewish writings about burials, we can determine that the typical rich man's burial was in two stages. First the body would be laid out full length on a ledge cut to seat-height within the tomb's cavelike interior. Sometimes this ledge was arched, a feature called an arcosolium. The tomb's entrance would be sealed up with a large rolling-stone boulder, and the body would then be left for several months or more to rot down to bare bones. Then the bones would be gathered up and put into a stone ossuary, or bone box, of the kind that we earlier noted for Caiaphas and for Jehohanan. This ossuary would then be placed in a niche cut into rock, leading off from the ledge on which the body had first been laid. In the course of time several ossuaries might be placed in a single niche, then further niches, known to Jews as kokhim, cut into the rock radiating out from the central "laying out" area. Apart from the two-stage burial process, the rock-cut tomb was therefore similar to the family vault that would later become popular in Christian Europe. What was special in Jesus' case, as emphasized by all our testimony writers except Mark, is that his was a new tomb, in which he was the first-ever occupant—an unusual "privilege."

  Can we take our investigation any further? Despite all the long centuries of construction work over the site of Jesus' tomb, is it still possible that we might be able to reach, and learn more from at least something of the tomb's original rock surface? An Oxford scholar, Dr. Martin Biddle, has spent more than a decade investigating the site in order to find ways to save the present earthquake-damaged edicule/shrine from collapse. One of the best ways would be to take the whole structure apart, piece by piece, then put it back together again. During this process it should be possible to reveal at least something of the tomb's original fabric. At the time of writing, Biddle is waiting for the church's various governing bodies to decide on the implementation of at least some of his proposals. But the politics that surround the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Boman Catholics, and others all having a say in the running of the place—make any decision-making slow and cumbersome in the extreme.

  Whatever more might eventually come to light concerning this particular tomb site, the likelihood that it was the original rock-cut tomb to which Jesus' body was carried that fateful Friday is far stronger than we might expect. But however pressed for time Joseph and Nicodemus were, they could not lay the body, bloody and naked, onto the cold rock just as it was. Somehow or other it had to be provided with a decent, scripturally approved covering. . . .

  *—The close proximity of the reputed crucifixion and burial sites of Jesus. [A] A reconstruction of the fourth-century Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, as it was built by Emperor Constantine the Great following the discovery of the alleged sacred sites by his mother, Helena. [B] Ground plan of the same. Note how both the location of Jesus' crucifixion and of his tomb could be comfortably housed within the same building, as has continued through successive rebuildings of the Church to the present day.

  12

  Material Evidence

  HOW WAS OUR VICTIM'S body treated after death? With typical brevity, John testified:

  They took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, following the Jewish burial custom. (John 19:40)

  This obviously means that Joseph and Nicodemus swathed Jesus' body in some kind of linen material. But how many were these cloths, and of what shape? And what exactly was "the Jewish burial custom" that they were following here?

  The Mark testimony describes Joseph of Arimathea as purchasing what almost all English language translations of the gospels call a Shroud. In the English language this word specifically means a burial wrapping. Mark, Matthew, and Luke then agree that Joseph wrapped Jesus' body in this same. But important to remember is that all four of our testimonies were written in Greek, not in the English of modern-day translations, however authoritative. In the original Greek, Matthew, Mark, and Luke's word was sindon, which had no specific burial wrapping meaning, and could be used of any large piece of cloth that a living person might wear as an everyday garment. Thus in the Mark testimony's account of Jesus' arrest at Gethsemane, one of those described as present at the time was a young man who had "nothing on but a sindon" (Mark 14:52). The arresting squad tried to grab him, only for the young man to leave his sindon behind in their hands and run away naked. So a sindon was a large linen cloth that could be used for any number of purposes. While one such purpose was as a Shroud, the word did not mean "Shroud" as such.

  Throughout the John testimony the word sindon never appears once used in the context of Jesus' burial. Instead the word for the cloths associated with the burial preparations is othoniois, a plural form, seemingly signifying the usage of more than just a single large sheet. But if so, how should we see Jesus having been wrapped?

  For our investigation, this causes us immediately to confront more questions. What do we know of whatever normal Jewish burial customs applied when the bodies of the rich were laid in rock-cut tombs? What sort of wrappings would their bodies have had? And what might the wrappings have been if it was a crucified criminal who was being buried?

  As evident from early Jewish historical sources, the normal burial method, when a Jew died peacefully of natural causes, was for his or her body to be washed and then dressed in Sabbath-best clothes. Additionally there might be a cloth around the face to keep the jaw from dropping, and binding strips to keep the arms and legs in position. The John testimony very clearly describes this of Lazarus when Jesus called him to come out of the tomb after he had lain there "dead" for four days.

  The dead man came out, his feet and hands bound with strips of material, and a cloth around his face. (John 11:43-44)

  Jesus tells the astonished onlookers "Unbind him, let him go free." Clearly Lazarus was not wrapped in any Shroud, and his bindings had only to be untied for him to be able to return to normal life. And we may infer that had he continued dead, his body, his clothes, and the bindings would all have disintegrated together during the ensuing year or so, prior to what remained being gathered up and placed in an ossuary.

  But in the case of Jesus the circumstances were very different. The clothes that he had been wearing at the time of his arrest had been taken away from him when he was being prepared for crucifixion. No disciple was anywhere in evidence offering Joseph and Nicodemus some spare garments that Jesus might have brought with him from Galilee. And Jesus' body was covered in blood, life blood that contemporary Jewish thought regarded as too precious to be sluiced away, and therefore had to be kept intact together with the body.

  Thus, as has been pointed out by the Jewish scholar Victor Tunkel, when a Jewish soldier died covered in wounds on a battlefield, he was neither washed, nor were his blood-stained garments removed from him. Instead the prescribed procedure was to wrap him just as he was, clothes, boots, and all, in a large, all-enveloping sheet known in the Jewish language as a sovev. In the case of Jesus, his bloody injuries were equivalent to ones sustained on a battlefield. All the more reason, therefore, for him to be provided with an all-enveloping sovev as a decent covering. Arguably, this was one and the same cloth which Matthew, Mark, and Luke referred to as a sindon in their testimonies.

  But even with such a
sovev or sindon procured, all would have been far from smooth sailing for Joseph and Nicodemus that fateful Friday. As all modern-day morticians are well aware, rigor mortis can set in quickly in the case of individuals who have died a violent death. Jesus' body would have hung some long time dead on the cross while Joseph of Arimathea hurried to Pilate's Praetorium to ask for his body. Joseph may well not have gained an immediate audience, and a centurion then had to be dispatched to the execution site to report back with confirmation that Jesus was definitely dead. All of which meant that Jesus' arms very likely became rigid and locked in their crucifixion position, and would have stayed that way after he had been brought down from the cross. Definitely a problem, therefore, for anyone arranging his body for burial, and trying to get it through the narrow entrance of a rock-cut tomb.

  As has been pointed out by British medical examiner the late Professor Taffy Cameron, the solution for Joseph and Nicodemus would have been to forcibly break the hold of the rigor at the body's shoulders. Jesus' arms, although stiff, could at least have then been brought together so that the hands met over the pelvis. Exactly as in the case of Lazarus, bandagelike strips of cloth would then have been used to tie them in place, and the body thereby readied for its laying in the sovev or Shroud.

  Is there any possibility that that original sovev or Shroud might still be extant? That is certainly the claim posed by the very existence of the so-called Holy Shroud preserved in Turin's cathedral. And it is one not to be discounted merely because of the single, overhyped carbon-dating test carried out in 1988. Uniquely of any known ancient grave cloth, the Shroud's fourteen-foot length seems to have been chosen specifically so that the body could be laid on one half and the other half brought over the head and down to the feet in the all-enveloping manner of the Jewish sovev. Further illustrating its conformity to the requirements for a Jew who had died a bloody death, it bears an imprint which we have already documented, includes bloodstains as from crucifixion and from a lance-thrust in the side, stains which quite evidently no one had washed away prior to the body being laid in the cloth.