Second Point: Joseph of Arimathea
This remarkable correspondence of independent traditions is convincing evidence that Paul’s four-line tradition summarizes the basic events of Jesus’ passion and resurrection, including his burial in the tomb. In the pre-Markan passion source and the pre-Pauline tradition delivered to the Corinthians, we thus have evidence from some of the earliest, independent sources in the New Testament for the burial of Jesus in the tomb.
And there are more; further independent testimonies to Jesus’ burial by Joseph are also found in the sources behind the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John. Although the majority of scholars agree that Matthew and Luke used Mark’s Gospel as one of their sources, the differences between Mark’s account of the burial and those of Matthew and Luke suggest that they also had other sources than just Mark. Moreover, since scholars generally agree that the Gospel of John was written independently of the other three Gospels, we have yet another independent source for the burial in John’s account. Finally, there are the early sermons in the Acts of the Apostles, which probably preserve the early preaching of the apostles. These sermons also refer to Jesus’ interment in a tomb. Thus, we have the extraordinary number of at least five independent sources for Jesus’ burial, some of which are extremely early.
Second Point: Joseph of Arimathea
The Gospels describe Joseph as a rich man, a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin. As a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin that condemned Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea is unlikely to be a Christian invention.
The Sanhedrin was a sort of Jewish high court made up of seventy of the leading men of Judaism, which presided in Jerusalem. There was an understandable hostility among early Christians toward the Jewish Sanhedrists, for Christians blamed the Sanhe-drists for engineering a judicial murder of Jesus at the hands of the Romans. The apostolic sermons in Acts, for example, go so far as to say that it was the Jewish leaders who crucified Jesus (Acts 2.23, 36; 4:10)!
Therefore, Jesus’ burial by Joseph is very probably historical, since it would be almost inexplicable why Christians would invent a story about a Jewish Sanhedrist who gives Jesus a proper burial.
For these and other reasons, the wide majority of New Testament scholars concur that after his crucifixion, Jesus was buried in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea. According to the late John A. T. Robinson of Cambridge University, the burial of Jesus in the tomb is “one of the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus.”3 But if Jesus’ body was thus interred, then, as explained, it is very difficult to deny the fact that the tomb was later found empty.