Someone stole the body!

[Minimalist]

Yes, and even worse is that history and archaeology cannot identify any place called "Arimathea."   And even worse than that the usage X of Y is not consistent with the Jewish aristocracy which would have been the patronymic X son of Y.

Um yes we can, from the reference in the gospels. Which is pretty much all the evidence that exists for the naming of a lot of ancient localities.

You let me know when you find it, Danny.

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.co...bably.html

In the first place we have no idea where the location of the town of Arimathea is, whereas we do know the location of other Biblical cites like Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, Capernaum and Damascus. According to Roy W. Hoover, “the location of Arimathea has not (yet) been identified with any assurance; the various ‘possible’ locations are nothing more than pious guesses or conjectures undocumented by any textual or archaeological evidence.”[1] More than likely Hoover means we don’t have any other textual reference to the town in any ancient text apart from those influenced by the Biblical narrative, and there is no archaeology confirming the location of this town. No wonder that Luke’s gospel, written to the Greeks from some place in the Roman Empire after the gospels of Mark and Matthew, had to explain why they had never heard of this town before, so it says Arimathea was a “Jewish town,” one which they probably weren’t so familiar (Luke 23:51).

You know, even in Shakespeare's time he always had to have a group of soldiers, or kinsmen, or officials show up after the hero died to cart the body off stage.  There were no curtains.  It wouldn't do to have the dead guy get up at the end of the play and walk away.

Just a literary creation to get the body off the stage!