Torley on The Resurrection: Take Two

Conversation Side Conversation
81

Hi @swamidass, @AllenWitmerMiller, @Freakazoid and @dga471,

First, I’d like to thank @swamidass for inviting me back to the conversation. I’ll try to respond to your strongest points, but I have a lot of other things I need to do, so I shall keep my remarks brief.

Before I address your specific arguments, I’d like to go back to what I wrote in the very first paragraph of my original post on Michael Alter’s book:

Prior to reading Michael Alter’s book, I believed that a Christian could make a strong case for Jesus’ having been raised from the dead, on purely historical grounds. After reading the book, I would no longer espouse this view.

Please also note that I continue to believe in Jesus’ Resurrection. I just don’t believe in arguing for it, anymore. The arguments, as I see them, are full of holes. I’d like to briefly explain why.

In order to establish a resurrection with a high degree of probability, you need to be able to establish the following facts with a high degree of probability:

(i) that the individual in question existed, and died;
(ii) that the individual’s dead body disappeared from its grave, and could not be found anywhere else;
(iii) that the individual was seen, heard and touched by honest, reliable witnesses whose testimonies independently agreed with one another.

If you can’t establish all three of these facts, then you don’t have a good case for a resurrection. Period.

With reference to Jesus, fact (i) is not seriously disputed by any New Testament historian.

Fact (ii) can only be established if (a) Jesus was buried in a publicly known grave, in a publicly known location, (b) this grave was subsequently found empty, and (c) no-one else claimed to have found Jesus’ body.

Let’s grant (c). I have argued that an independent historian would query point (a). Some of you (notably @Freakazoid) have pushed back on this point. As far as I can tell, all you’ve shown is that a good case can be made for Jesus’ having been buried in a known grave. Let’s grant that. However, the location of Jesus’ body within this grave is vitally important. If it was a new tomb, there’s no problem, but not all the Gospels say that it was (Mark’s doesn’t), and many eminent Biblical scholars (including Catholic priest Fr. Raymond Brown and also Dr. Jodi Magness, whom @Freakazoid cites and whom I myself cited in my original post) think Jesus was simply buried in a new burial niche in the wall (or loculus) inside Joseph of Arimathea’s family tomb, where there would have been other bodies as well.

This is of vital importance, because as you’re all aware, after the third day, in Jewish practice, bodies were deemed unrecognizable. In first century Palestine, the identifying features of the face of the corpse were held to have deteriorated by the fourth day. This means that the only people who could have identified Jesus’ body as missing from its tomb were those who visited the tomb on the third day (i.e. Easter Sunday).

Now let’s look at (b): Jesus’ grave was found empty. If we look at the Gospels, we find that the only people who are commonly agreed to have visited the tomb on the third day are Mary Magdalene and an unspecified number of women. But if we look at the Resurrection narratives, the only people who are commonly agreed to have seen the risen Jesus are his apostles. (Mark implicitly acknowledges an appearance of Jesus to his apostles in Mark 16:7.)

What that means is that we have no solid assurance that the witnesses to Jesus’ Resurrection personally took the trouble to check for themselves that his tomb was empty. Think about that. To be sure, John’s Gospel says that Peter and John visited the tomb, but that’s just one Gospel out of four, and a late one at that. John’s account may have also been motivated by a desire to rebut skeptics by providing credible witnesses (two men) who could attest to Jesus’ tomb being empty. Be that as it may, we don’t know that the apostles personally verified the empty tomb, on the third day. (They may have gone to the tomb later on, but by then it would have been too late to ascertain that none of the bodies in the tomb was that of Jesus. And in case you’re thinking, “Well, there wouldn’t have been any other newly deceased bodies,” ask yourself: what about the two thieves? Can we be sure that Joseph didn’t put their bodies there temporarily, as well?)

What’s more, none of the Jewish high priests or Roman authorities visited Jesus’ tomb on the third day. The only people who claimed to have found the tomb empty were his friends: specifically, Mary Magdalene and an unspecified number of women.

Now, before we even consider the Resurrection appearances, ask yourself what an independent historian would conclude at this point. Some of the apostles were (in all likelihood) later martyred for their faith in Jesus, thereby proving their sincerity, but none of the women who visited the tomb were martyred. How reliable is their testimony? And assuming that they visited a family tomb (as many historians believe), how certain can we be that they didn’t make a mistake about the exact location of Jesus’ body within the tomb? Only if we can be fairly sure that it was a new tomb can we rule out that kind of mistake.

Now let’s go on to fact (iii): the risen Jesus was seen, heard and touched by honest, reliable witnesses whose testimonies independently agreed with one another. What would an independent historian conclude? Again, the verdict would have to be: we don’t know. Despite the numerous discrepancies between the Gospel narratives, there seems to be a general agreement that Jesus’ disciples believed that they saw and conversed with him. Luke and John add that they touched him and ate with him, but this is uncertain, as Matthew, Mark and St. Paul (in 1 Corinthians 15) fail to corroborate this point. Leaving this point aside, a historian could still poke huge holes in the apologist’s case here.

First, there is no general agreement as to when and where the risen Jesus appeared to his apostles.

Second, there is no general agreement as to what he said, when he did appear to them.

Third, we have no record of the apostles attempting to verify that they all saw and heard the same thing, when Jesus appeared to them.

Fourth, even if they did so, it is still doubtful whether their testimonies agreed independently of one another. For St. Paul (citing an early Christian creed) and Luke both attest to Jesus having appeared to Peter before appearing to the other apostles, and according to Luke, Peter went and told them what he’d seen. If Luke’s account is correct, the apostles’ expectations would have been biased by what Peter saw and heard, creating an expectation on their part as to what Jesus would say and how he would appear, if he were to appear to them. Thus from a historian’s perspective, we cannot be sure that we have eleven independent testimonies from the apostles who saw and heard Jesus.

Taken together, these arguments vastly weaken the force of fact (iii), and I see no way that its probability on purely historical grounds could be assessed at over 50%.

The same goes for fact (ii).

Two of the key facts required to establish Jesus’ Resurrection are open to reasonable doubt, from a historian’s standpoint. The moral of the story? Don’t call on historians to bolster the credibility of the Christian faith. They won’t help you, because they can’t. Besides, it’s not their job to do so. If you want to rekindle your faith, read what the Gospels say about the character of Jesus, and read the story of the early Church. Call the Resurrection credible if you like, but please, don’t call it probable. That’s not an honest reading of the evidence.

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Hi @AllenWitmerMiller,

Thank you for your response.

Many Young Earth Creationists claim that Ken Ham has trumped mainstream science and think that that explains why most scientists ignore him. No. That silly claim doesn’t help Ham’s credibility. It will be the same if people make bombastic claims about Ehrman.

I’m glad you raised this point. First, Ehrman is a bona fide Biblical scholar with a solid publication record behind him. He may be rather “far-left” in his views on some points (e.g. Jesus’ burial), but he is a scholar, and Ken Ham is not.

Second, evolutionists have taken great pains to refute the view of the creationists by publishing the evidence for evolution online, so that ordinary people can access it. By contrast, very few scholars have challenged Ehrman’s views on Jesus’ burial online. Craig Evans is the only notable exception I can think of, and I respect him for that. The others? Not so much.

And recycled and uninteresting material just doesn’t come up on the radar for most academics, theologians included.

Uninteresting to whom? I imagine that for an evolutionary biologist, the task of rebutting the claims of creationist X for the umpteenth time must be pretty uninteresting, too. Nevertheless, they take the trouble to do it, because they really care about truth, and because they realize that if they don’t defend it publicly, a lot of people aren’t going to believe what scientists say, anymore.

The moral of my story should be obvious. If Ehrman is seriously mistaken in his claims, then it is the task of scholars who care about truth to refute his ideas in a public forum, regardless of whether these ideas be interesting to scholars or not. Souls are at stake.

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I think it is safe to say that if significant numbers of Christians were aware of Ehrman—and sufficiently disturbed by his scholarship—you’d see more and more scholars dealing with him. Until then, not so much.

Also, I wasn’t comparing Ken Ham and Dr. Ehrman’s academic credentials. (Obviously not.) I was comparing the claims of their enthusiastic fans who truly believe that Ham and Ehrman have somehow managed to trump mainstream scholarship. My point was that neither has done so.

This is an interesting topic and I thank @vjtorley for joining us again!

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Why would establishing one and three not be enough.

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Hi @dga471,

Thank you for your response. You write:

We also don’t know how much an account of Josephus (or several of the others you mentioned) is representative of Pilate on a day-to-day basis. It could be that Pilate was a level-headed, fair ruler who just had a bad day and responded brutally, and what gets recorded are the bad things. Of course, I could be wrong. My point is that there is a lot of uncertainty here in assigning the prior probability of Pilate condemning Jesus (versus him not condemning Jesus),
P(S1)/P(S2)=0.1. It could be 0.01. It could be 0.2. Or it could be 0.5, if perhaps Pilate was feeling good that day and wanted to toy with the Jewish authorities instead of simply acceding to their request to execute someone they hated.

The example of Pilate was the weakest of the three examples I cited, and I readily grant that if that were the only odd-looking claim to be found in the Gospel Passion narratives, I wouldn’t be unduly troubled over it.

I have to protest, however, when you write that the prior probability “could be 0.5, if perhaps Pilate was feeling good that day and wanted to toy with the Jewish authorities.” Yes, it could, but you have to bring in gratuitous additional assumptions to bump up that probability. Anybody can play that game. The whole point about a prior probability, however, is that it excludes such gratuitous assumptions, arguing only from what we know. And given the guy’s track record as a cold-blooded killer, the prior likelihood that when faced with an angry mob baying for Jesus’ death, he would respond by saying, “But why? What harm has he done?” is surely quite low. (Interestingly, of all the Gospel accounts, Matthew is the only one who provides a semi-credible reason why Pilate might have been reluctant to condemn Jesus: Claudia Procula’s dream. Perhaps Pilate was superstitious.)

As a physicist, a result like the above would raise eyebrows on the soundness of this whole business of trying to micro-analyze the Gospels and assign priors based on limited historical data.

If you want to know how real historians assess the accuracy and reliability of a source, you might like to read this short response by a medieval historian.

Please note that I’m not saying that historians have to use Bayesian logic. Most don’t. That’s fine. The only reason why I brought up Bayes (whom I never mentioned once in my original post on Alter’s book, except briefly when discussing the McGrews’ approach, not mine) was to show that I was not simply appealing to low prior probabilities when discussing the 17 claims which I cited (as you and @swamidass suggested previously), but rather, to the fact that the evidence of the Gospels themselves wasn’t strong enough to swing the balance of probabilities the other way.

Now, when it comes to purely psychological probabilities, I agree that in some cases, it gets a little iffy. But when we’re talking about statements in the Gospels which go against legal or cultural conventions (which are much weightier than the psychological tendencies of a single individual), or which appear to be highly mythological, or which appear to be mutually contradictory, then it is the duty of an independent historian to be skeptical of such claims.

Of the 17 doubtful claims which I cited, only a couple could be described as purely psychological. Let’s look at them very briefly.

a. (i) Was the Last Supper a Passover meal? (ii) And did Jesus tell his disciples to drink blood? (i) Unlikely because certain key aspects of the Passover meal are missing. (ii) Unlikely because to a Jew, eating blood was taboo.
b. Did Jesus die on the Jewish Passover? Unlikely because the Gospels record the Jews doing various things on Good Friday which would have violated the Passover.
c. Do the Gospels accurately represent Jesus trial before the Jewish Sanhedrin? Unlikely, because the Jewish high priests would have been breaking just about every rule in the book - even back in the first century.
d. Was Pontius Pilate reluctant to convict Jesus? Unlikely because he’d previously killed innocent Jews on several occasions without any compunction, and he continued to do so in later years, as well.
e. Judas’ betrayal of Jesus and the accounts of his death Unlikely because the accounts grow in the telling from Mark onwards, and because the two accounts of his death are flat-out contradictory.
f. The chief priests’ mockery of Jesus on the Cross Unlikely because they would have been too busy slaughtering lambs in the Temple, if the Crucifixion was on the eve of the Passover.
g. The story of the good thief: fact or fiction? Unlikely because it’s only found in Luke (whose motivation for including it seems to be theological) and because the good thief would have had no way of hearing about Jesus’ innocence while languishing in jail.
h. Jesus’ last words on the Cross: fact or fiction? Unlikely because the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ last words completely contradict one another, and no-one would have been standing close enough to hear Jesus’ words anyway.
i. Did Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple stand at the foot of the Cross? Unlikely because it goes against standard Roman practice: male disciples in particular would not have been allowed near the Cross.
j. The three hours of darkness: fact or fiction? Unlikely because similar mythological claims are found in both Jewish and Greco-Roman literature.
k. The earthquake at Jesus’ death: fact or fiction? Ditto.
l. Was the Veil of the Temple torn in two? Unlikely because it’s nowhere mentioned in Jewish records, even though other, less significant incident relating to the Temple from around that time are mentioned.
m. Were Jewish saints raised at Jesus’ death? Unlikely because only Matthew’s Gospel mentions such a marvelous incident, and because it would have surely resulted in mass conversions, if it happened.
n. Blood and water from Jesus’ side? Unlikely because no-one would have been standing close enough to see it, and because the story appears motivated by John’s desire to show that Jesus (like the Paschal lamb) didn’t have any of his bones broken.
o. Was Jesus buried in a new rock tomb? Unlikely because if he was buried, it would have either been in a tomb reserved for criminals (as per the usual practice) or (temporarily) in a family tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea.
p. Was there a Guard at Jesus’ tomb? Unlikely because the story itself is massively internally implausible.
q. The women visiting Jesus’ tomb on Sunday: does the story add up? Unlikely as it stands, because (i) the women would have been traveling without men to escort them, (ii) they would have been trespassing (and violating Roman law) by entering a private tomb, and (iii) the Gospels don’t explain how the women planned to roll away the “very big” stone. Something is missing from the story.

As you can see, most of the rest are historically improbable because they go against cultural, religious or legal norms, or because they appear to incorporate mythological elements, or because they are either blatantly contradictory or massively internally implausible. In these cases, unlike the purely psychological improbabilities, historians would need solid reasons for crediting the Gospel accounts. Apologists haven’t provided any; all they’ve done is play a defensive game of showing how these unlikely claims could be true - which is setting the bar too low. No historian would buy that. The apologists haven’t established their case. That was all I wanted to say.

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Have you ever seen Bart debate the historic validity of Jesus? He uses the Gospels as strong independent eye witness testimony in these debates.
I don’t see how he can turn around and argue against the burial in Joseph’s tomb given it is articulated clearly in all 4 Gospels.

I am about 20% through Michaels book and I appreciate you writing about it. Whether I agree or not with his conclusions he did very detailed work.

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About Pilate.

The only thing we really know about him is that he had absolutely no respect for Jewish temple. So, the possibility that he was amused by a guy claiming to be the messiah despite the temple being opposed to him would be a rather big one.

Of course, this is simply conjecture. Just as claiming that Pilate would never spare a prisoner is.

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Good question. Taken together, facts one and three would only establish that Jesus was somehow alive again, not that he had risen from the dead. (As Bishop N. T. Wright is fond of pointing out, for first-century Jews, a resurrection would have made no sense without an empty tomb.) I should add that lots of people have visions of deceased family members, and on occasion they even talk to them and touch them, as well. (To be fair, I haven’t come across any case in the literature of a post-mortem apparition to eleven people, however.)

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I’ve watched Bart debate on numerous occasions. I think he would agree that the Gospels contain genuine nuggets of historical information about Jesus, which scholars can reconstruct, but he would also argue that the Gospels contain numerous accretions, and cannot be trusted as reliable overall (by modern standards).

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I’m not trying to demonstrate anything till I can get a straight answer from you. There are many words by typed (and copied from the internet) but very little in terms of answers.

Gish Gallop

You have not yet explained why we are calling your argument a Gish Gallop. Instead you turned calling the arguments of Christian apologists (not here apparently) Gish Gallops too. Duane Gish was a creationist, so in using the term we are saying up front that a lot of Christians make dumb arguments. The fact that you emulate them doesn’t some how rectify the problem.

I’m still waiting on this question too…Why do @dga471 and I call your argument a Gish Gallop?

In response to Mike, you write:

Your case is severely diminished by this. Moreover, this is an absurd argument for the goal of demonstrating that there is " a rational reason to question the reality of Jesus’s resurrection". I’ve already granted this from the get go. There is always rational basis to question a man rising from the dead, no matter how much historical evidence there is. Why write a 800 page book to make an obvious point? (I digress).

Let us start with this. You have admitted now to putting forward several week arguments. is the argument about communion (the blood drinking ritual), one of the strong or one of the weak arguments? If is one of the weak ones, perhaps you could just concede the point, and then tell us what you think your strong arguments are. If it is one of your strong ones, we can drill deeper into it.

Methodology

  1. What you are describing are activities, not a methodology.
  2. Correct, you have not applied it elsewhere, which makes us doubt its validity as a consistent way of understanding the bast.

You have explained why this is important to us. You still have not brought forward a coherent methodology. Reading all the arguments out there for the resurrection, and then regurgitating the arguments against them from other sources is not a methodology for adducting what are valid arguments or not.

I’m not sure there is value in hammering the question again. I suppose I will just draw attention to the fact that you do not have a historical methodology, and see if there is a way to make sense of your gallop regardless. I’m doubtful though…

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Thanks for adding the qualifier @vjtorley. This is an important concession. By modern standards, you cannot be referring to modern historical standards of inquiry into the 1st century, but the standards of modern understanding of contemporary events. Is that right? If so, it is an example of an invalid historical methodology.

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Look at his description 12 minutes in where he claims that the Gospel’s are 4 independent sources. I ask on what basis he is discounting the claim around Joseph of Arimathea?

He is cherry picking based on what?

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Hi @swamidass,

Thanks once again for inviting me back on the thread.

Obviously, @MJAlter is not a neutral historian (or a historian of any sort). This is not an attack on his character, but just a brute fact of direct relevance to your claim. I’ve asked you for evidence that any historian has been convinced by his arguments. None has been produced.

I have never claimed that Michael Alter’s arguments have convinced anyone, except myself. Instead, I’ve claimed that Alter has convincingly demolished Christian apologists’ case for the Resurrection. If you wish to take issue with that, then I suggest you respond to the highly condensed rebuttal which I presented in comment #81 above. That’s about as short as I can make it, and I believe it expresses the essence of Alter’s case.

You flooded the conversation with dozens of weak arguments that are individually easy to refute, but in some total would take too much too much time to deal with in totality. When we have presented explanations of problems with specific arguments, you have essentially ignored them, retreating back to the gallop.

I’ve tried to respond to as many comments by @Freakazoid and @dga471 as I could. As for “weak arguments”: please take a look at the list of 17 unlikely claims in comment #85 above, and ask yourself: do most Biblical scholars today credit these claims?

On some of the claims (a, b, and perhaps o and q) opinion is divided. On others (e, h, j, k, l, m, p) opinion is virtually unanimous that they are factually false. I think most scholars would be fairly skeptical with respect to c, d, and probably f and g. I’m not sure what most Biblical scholars say about i and n.

I’d also like to respond briefly to your remarks about claim a, and the institution of the Eucharist. Please recall that I cited a scholarly article by a Catholic priest who acknowledged that the Eucharist had evolved a long way from what Jesus said and did at the Last Supper. I wasn’t talking off the top of my head. Your main point is that all of the New Testament sources agree it goes back to Jesus. That’s a valid point, but it’s also a valid point to argue that for a Jewish rabbi to ask his followers to drink blood was simply unthinkable, back in the first century. (It’s still unthinkable in the 21st!)

You may say that Jesus was speaking metaphorically, but even as a metaphor, the notion of drinking blood would have been deeply offensive to Jews living in Jesus’ time. Alter adds: “Eating human flesh, even symbolically , occurs nowhere in all Jewish tradition” (2015, p. 80). Drinking someone’s blood didn’t have a positive meaning in Judaism either, even as a metaphor.

What’s more, by the early second century, there can be no doubt that the early Church interpreted the Eucharist as the literal body and blood of Christ. Thus St. Ignatius of Antioch, a bishop who lived around 110 A.D., warned Christians in his Epistle to the Smyrnaeans to shun Docetist heretics who “abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again.” That’s as literal as you can get. This was the faith of the early Church. No metaphor here. So on your own account (not mine), the early Church must have introduced major innovations into Jesus’ teachings on the Eucharist. But a skeptical historian might justifiably ask: if innovation could occur in the early second century, why not the first?

Please note that I am not claiming that Jesus did not institute the Eucharist. What I am claiming is that an objective historian would find the claim that he did, doubtful.

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You are always welcome here @vjtorley. I hope we see you more.

Great. Maybe we are even in agreement. I’m not so concerned with the Christian apologist any way, but the neutral historian. He might have demolished archetype of the Christian apologist, but he does not appear to have touched the historian.

It seems that this conversation has been far reaching. Let me think about the right way to move us forward with some better guard rails. Perhaps focusing on the communion example might be helpful.

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Hi colewd,

He talks of multiple independent sources from the first century, but he doesn’t mean the Four Gospels. He means the documents and oral traditions they’re based on: Mark, Q, L, M and possibly John.

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I agree. Thanks for the correction.

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The question which confronts us in the 21st century, when assessing an ancient document purporting to be historical, is: should we believe its claims? Now, as Ehrman himself has acknowledged in his debates with Craig Evans, the Gospels may be fairly reliable by first-century standards. But if someone is going to argue that it’s unfair to apply 21st-century standards of historical accuracy to the Gospels because they weren’t written for people in the 21st century, I would reply: “Fine. By the same token, we have no right to appeal to the Gospels when attempting to convince people living in the 21st century that the Resurrection is historically probable, either. That means: no Resurrection apologetics.”

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Now a days we prefer documentation by video and photograph. That is an example of 21st century standards. We do not have photographic evidence of the Ressurection. So we do not have strong evidence by modern standards.

Applying this logic systematically through history, it is equivalent to Ken Ham’s “were you there?” Retort. Nothing stands against this argument if it is valid, which is good indicator it is not valid. It is nihilistic argument that leaves all of history unknowable till as recently as 100 years ago. It is anachronistic, and does not even create space for making sense of history on its own terms.

99

However, and I keep repeating this:

An agreement between two contracting parties, originally sealed with blood; a bond, or a law; a permanent religious dispensation. The old, primitive way of concluding a covenant, “to cut a covenant”) was for the covenanters to cut into each other’s arm and suck the blood, the mixing of the blood rendering them “brothers of the covenant” (see Trumbull, “The Blood Covenant,” pp. 5 et seq. , 322; W. R. Smith, “Religion of the Semites,” pp. 296 et seq. , 460 et seq. ; compare Herodotus, iii. 8, iv. 70).

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Hi @Freakazoid

Freakazoid

Blog posts don’t mean anything. Most people don’t have blogs, NT scholars included. They care about what other scholars publish in actual books and articles.

Quite a lot of scholars do have blogs: Ben Witherington, Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, Craig Evans, James McGrath, Craig Blomberg and Mark Goodacre, to name a few. Here’s a list of 50 blogs by theology professors. Cheers.

Yes, I am claiming that he is either ignorant or willfully mispreprenting his audience. I can’t see any reason why he wouldn’t cite someone like Jodi Magness (what’s particularly galling is that she teaches at the same university that Ehrman does). Other scholars include Craig Evans, John Granger Cook, Rachel Hachlili, Shimon Gibson. And those are just the specialists on the subject.

I finally managed to get hold of Cook’s article, and I agree it’s not as cut-and-dried as Ehrman makes out. Whereas I might have said previously that an impartial historian would rate the likelihood of Jesus receiving a decent same-day burial at 40%, I’d now put the figure at about 75%.

Ulpian specifically says “The bodies of those who are condemned to death should not be refused their relatives; and the Divine Augustus, in the Tenth Book of his Life, said that this rule had been observed. At present, the bodies of those who have been punished are only buried when this has been requested and permission granted; and sometimes it is not permitted, especially where persons have been convicted of high treason. Even the bodies of those who have been sentenced to be burned can be claimed, in order that their bones and ashes, after having been collected, may be buried.”

Ehrman addressed this argument in his blog article, Did Roman Law Require Decent Burials?. As you point out, his argument is that these laws didn’t apply to political criminals convicted of high treason. He writes:

Do we have any evidence that Roman authorities allowed someone like Jesus, who was crucified – and especially one crucified as an enemy of the state, guilty of high treason — to be given a decent burial on the day of his execution, as opposed to the general practice of leaving the bodies on the crosses to be subject to the ravages of time and scavenging animals? The answer is that the passage(s) that Craig quotes in fact do NOT provide any such evidence at all.

As I said above, it’s probably not as cut-and-dried as Ehrman claims, and a lot hinges on the precise charge against Jesus. Craig Evans thinks Jesus wasn’t convicted of high treason. Here’s an alternative point of view, from an online blogger named Gary:

The Gospels state that thousands of Jews greeted Jesus as the King of the Jews who would bring about the re-established Davidic Monarchy on his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Even Jesus’ disciples were expecting a military revolt—some of them were carrying weapons of war. Jesus’ disciples assaulted an officer of the law. They were not pacifists. Jesus, yes. His disciples, no. They believed that they were leaders of a revolution against the hated Romans and that they would rule over the new Davidic kingdom with Jesus. They had quarreled over which of their princely thrones would be closest to Jesus. With Jerusalem bursting at the seams with Jews from all over the world for the Passover holiday, the city was simmering to explode with revolt. Jesus was very much a threat to Roman rule that Passover weekend… if the gospels are historically accurate.

I can’t claim expertise in this area, but it seems to me that neither side in this dispute has landed a knockout blow.

But enough of that. Let’s assume Jesus was buried (as I believe he was). What then? You write:

The Gospels indicate that Joseph is a member of the Sanhedrin and an admirer of Jesus. There’s no need to separate the two by him acting as a private citizen. He acts on behalf of the Jewish council by burying the body but does it in a rock tomb. All the Sanhedrin would care about was that the burial was dishonorable. The major two elements for this would be not being buried in the family tomb and no mourning. This happens in the Gospels so the Sanhedrin wouldn’t really care that Joseph buried Jesus in a rock tomb. In fact, a new tomb makes the burial more dishonorable. Furthermore, Magness thinks that her position is compatible with the empty tomb theory. The women and disciples would be referring to the empty loculus in the tomb, not the empty tomb itself.

If Joseph of Arimathea had a tomb, it would probably have been a family tomb, not a new one. People back then liked to be buried with their ancestors. The question of whether the tomb was new is important, because if it was a family tomb and Jesus was simply placed in an empty loculus in the tomb, that weakens the evidence that Jesus’ body went missing on Easter Sunday morning, by making it much harder to demonstrate.

And I already explained why Casey is wrong. He uses a quote from Barrett that doesn’t actually support his point.

Perhaps I missed something. Can you please quote me the passage in Casey where he quotes Barrett to buttress his point? Thank you. Actually, I’ve just managed to dig up the exact page where Casey makes his statement. I can’t see anything about Barrett. Unfortunately, I can’t access Casey’s footnotes online, so maybe he cites him there. You also write that “Corley published her article in a Westar journal, which is way out there in terms of skeptical biblical studies.” But surely what matters is whether her arguments stack up. Here’s what she writes in her 1998 article, “Women and the Crucifixion and Burial of Jesus” ( Forum New Series, 1(1):181-217):

The rabbinic sources cited by Strack-Billerbeck and others commonly marshaled to support such a contention [viz. that Jesus’ mother might have been allowed near the Cross – VJT] either deal with such hypothetical situations that they are hardly germane or describe religious, not state executions … Commonly cited as evidence are Y. Gittin 7.1 (330) or Baba Metzia 83b. For example, Baba Metzia 83b describes R.[Rabbi] Eleazar weeping under the gallows of a man hanged for violating religious law (rape of an engaged woman; Y. Gittin 71 describes a wildly hypothetical situation involving divorce. (1998, p. 196, note 117)

Is Corley right here or not?