Why can't Christians Verify Exactly Where Jesus Was Buried?

[Pat Mustard]

Hi Aractus,
Thanks for your comprehensive reply. I know that Jesus's supposed friends and family didn't write the Bible, I was saying that despite all the commotion and supernatural events surrounding the tomb, everyone forgot where he was first buried.  This is very strange, if he was as popular as stated in the Bible and the tomb was already known from its wealthy owner.

It isn't at all strange. We didn't know where Ned Kelly's grave was for more than a century (we only found it five years ago), and he was very much a real person with legendary status attached to his escapades. And we would never have identified his remains without the use of DNA testing. That isn't available for Jesus since we don't know of any living relatives from his family's blood line (and even if we did after 2,000 years it'd probably be next to useless anyway).

As for Joseph of Arimathea's tomb, that was not Jesus's final resting place (nor was it ever intended to be). He was probably there for just the 2-3 days before his supposed resurrection, so why should anyone remember where it was? Can you remember other wealthy people's tombs from the first century?

First of all the Ned Kelly analogy doesn't work because we know Kelly was a real man, we have no idea whether Yeshua bar Yosef ever existed. There is plenty of independent primary and secondary documentation of Kelly's existence and quite a lot of his exploits, yet the very best we have for Yeshua is a 2 centuries later copy of a tertiary source which was originally written two generations after his supposed death. Plus what little of his life we have is contradictory and doesn't make sense, for example Yeshua was convicted under sanhedric law of basically being a heretic in Jewish religion, yet he was killed by a method used only under Roman law and in very specific circumstances, viz a man who rebelled against Rome or a Roman citizen convicted of treason. So as per the bible's telling we've a man killed in a way that he shouldn't have, and in a way no sensible Roman magistrate overseeing a client state (what Iudea was at the time) would have counternanced.

So it is pointless at this moment to talk about where Yeshua was buried because we haven't even come close to establishing whether he even lived.