(December 9, 2013 at 12:39 pm)Minimalist Wrote:Quote:RC: 3. After he was dead Jewish law required removal from the cross, lest the "hanged" one be accursed by remaining overnight. And the Sabbath was approaching.
As long as we are dealing with facts..or the absence of them...how about the fact that when the Romans crucified someone they did not allow the body to be taken down for burial. It hung there until it rotted off and then was tossed in a trash heap. That was the whole point of crucifixion. The message was clear: DON'T FUCK WITH US OR THIS COULD BE YOU!
The idea that they would go through all the trouble of crucifying someone and then grant him the honor of a proper burial reeks of special pleading.
BTW, there is no "fact" at all to sustain the idea that anyone named jesus was crucified at all. It's just a story. Literature.
There are lots of examples of the Romans allowing the always-feisty Jews to bury the crucified, unless they were crucified for treason or insurrection, in which case you are 100% right. But not allowing the burial of Jews crucified for non-state crimes risked riots, which would look bad on the Prefect's performance reports back to Rome. There is an example (only one found so far) of a crucified Jew whose bones went into an ossuary with the nail still through his ankle bone, it having been bent over on insertion and un-removable. It was a sort of special pleading, but for all Jews, not just Jesus. Read up on the burial practices of Jews, and the centrality of that. Even today one of the most important "committees" among at least the reasonably observant Jews is the "Khevra Kadisha" society responsible for caring for and burying the dead.
