Historian explains why Jesus ''mythers'' aren't taken seriously by most Historians

[Wyrd of Gawd]

One interesting problem in reconstructing a plausible scenario for the development of first-century Christendom---one that is easily though lazily addressed by the Christ-mythers, as every other historical question of some perplexity is presumably treated by them ("It's all fiction! Like Charles Dickens! Boy, solving that was just so simple for me!")---is the absence of any interest or mention by the disciples of a location for Jesus' tomb, if he was even really buried as they proclaimed from early on. It is a far bigger problem for Christians, in my view, considering the importance, both from the standpoint of its significance in religious worship and for their apology of a death and resurrection (however that may have been initially interpreted), that one can imagine such a location might have possessed. For the historian it seems to be a question that is much more open ended in terms of speculation over what actually happened when Jesus' corpse came off the cross, and how that affected the texts they came to write just decades afterwards.

It's definitely a problem for Christians, but I can't see how it's much of a problem for anyone else.  The tomb doesn't appear at all in the earliest account of the supposed resurrection of Jesus - that of Paul in 1Cor 15.  There he is trying to make the case that the resurrection was real and was a prefigurement of the coming general resurrection when the apocalypse happens.  He's arguing against an idea the Jesus sect in Corinth seem to have had that it was somehow figurative and not a precursor of the apocalyptic general resurrection, so if Paul knew of an empty tomb story, it's strange that he doesn't mention it here.  Yet he doesn't.  Instead he puts the emphasis on the various "appearances" of the risen Jesus, including the one he saw in a vision.

So what we seem to have here is a very early form of the belief in a risen Jesus - one that involves "appearances" and visions, not a physical revivification.  One that involves a "spiritual body" that is somehow different to a normal body.  And one that makes no mention of things like Jesus eating fish, letting people poke their fingers into his wounds and leaving behind an empty tomb.  There is also no mention of the revivified Jesus' flying bodily into the heavens after a while.

It's only later, when the story has changed and the resurrection has become more literally physical, that we lose these references to visions and get a physically revived Jesus.  He can still walk through walls or (strangely) appear to be someone else until he is "recognised" as Jesus and then disappears.  But he has all the physical attributes that Paul's "spiritual" risen Jesus doesn't.  This includes an empty tomb.

As Ehrman points out in his most recent book, we can see remnants of an earlier tradition whereby Jesus was not lain in a conveniently available tomb at all and was instead disposed by the Temple authorities to prevent his rotting corpse polluting the Passover.  Peter's sermon in Acts 13:27-29 seems to reflect this earlier tradition:

"Those who lived in Jerusalem and their rulers...requested Pilate to have him killed; and when they had fulfilled all that was written of him they took him down from the tree and placed him in a tomb."

Similarly, in some early manuscripts of gJohn there is a variant reading of John 19:38 that "So they (the Jewish leaders) came and took away his body."  Justin (Dialogue 97.1) says "For the Lord too remained on the tree almost until evening, and towards evening they buried him" in a context that, again, implies the "they" here are the Jewish leaders.  The Gospel of Peter likewise says "And then they [the Jews] drew out the nails from the hands of the Lord, and laid him in the earth" (gPeter 6).  Finally, the gnostic Secret Book of James has the risen Jesus detailing to his brother the hardships he endured in his death and says he was shamefully buried "in the sand".

So we have elements here of an earlier tradition or traditions where (i) it is the Jewish leaders who dispose of Jesus' body, not his followers and (ii) he is "laid in the earth" or buried "in the sand", not neatly tucked away in a tomb, ready for a physical resurrection and subsequent bodily ascension into heaven.

The tomb first appears in gMark, along with an otherwise unmentioned follower called Joseph of Arimathea, who pops up solely to provide this tomb and then disappears again.  The tomb seems to appear to serve two purposes.  Firstly, it is necessitated by the evolving beliefs about the resurrection, which have now gone from being a matter of visions and perhaps "spiritual bodies" to a physical event.  Jesus being disposed of by the Jewish authorities, probably by being buried in a mass grave, no longer works.  So now we get a conveniently supplied tomb for the body to rest in, waiting to physically rise from the dead.  The other purpose it serves is the supposed fulfilment of "prophecy" as found in the book that provides a lot of the theological and exegetical framework for the story of the death of Jesus, Isaiah:

"He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death" (Isaiah 53:9)

So to fulfil this we get a tomb provided by a rich man, Joseph of Arimathea.  All this explains the lack of interest in the location of his tomb - there was no tomb and Jesus was, as Paul says and the remnant traditions indicate, simply unceremoniously buried by the Jewish authorities, probably in a common mass grave.  By the time the stories of the tomb evolved they were circulating amongst late first century Christian communities in the diaspora, who simply assumed this "tomb" was still there somewhere near Jerusalem but who, living in Greece, Syria or Egypt, had never been there.

Joseph of Arimathea got the body and ate it because he believed what Jesus had said about eating his flesh and drinking his blood to gain eternal life.  That's why Jesus hasn't been around for the past 2,000 years.  Joe had him for dinner.