Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE CLIMAX OF JESUS' MISSION §18.2
Luke 11.47), and there is no reason to doubt what we may describe as a valid sociological
observation.
Why would the first Christians not act out this pious instinct and tradition?
The only obvious answer, in the light of the evidence thus far reviewed, is that
they did not believe any tomb contained his body. They could not venerate his remains
because they did not think there were any remains to be venerated. 55 The
same point has to be made against the oldest alternative explanation for the
empty tomb: that the disciples had stolen the body (Matt. 28.13-15). 56 For if the
disciples had indeed removed the body, it is inconceivable that they would not
have laid it reverently to rest in some other fitting location. In which case, it is almost
as inconceivable that a surreptitious practice of veneration would not have
been maintained by those in the know and that some hint of it would not have
reached a wider circle of disciples. The consideration would remain relevant
however many or however few were involved in the deception. The story enshrined
in the tradition of the Gospels remains the stronger alternative: the first
Christians knew where Jesus' body had been laid (the memory may have lasted
through to the time of Constantine), 57 but they paid it little attention, because so
far as they were concerned, his grave was empty. He had not remained in the
tomb.
55.1 first put forward this argument in Jesus and the Spirit 120. In critique, Wedderburn
(Beyond Resurrection 63-65) thinks a likelier explanation is that they had difficulty in identifying
the body in a common grave (though he recognizes that the practice of collecting the bones
and putting them in an ossuary presupposes some way of identifying remains in such cases —
citing Brown, Death 1210) or that they would hardly wish to venerate a site where several bodies
had been casually disposed of— Crossan's 'limed pit' (chapter 17 n. 94 above); similarly,
B. R. McCane, '"Where No One Had Yet Been Laid": The Shame of Jesus' Burial', in Chilton
and Evans, eds., Authenticating the Activities of Jesus 431-52. But does that follow? Christians
soon venerated a cross, of all things! A tradition with such a firm core (that the tomb was
empty) is more likely to embody originating memory. Wedderburn also cites Carnley's dismissal
of the argument in view of 'the pious interest in the alleged site of the Holy Sepulchre in
our own day' (Structure 58; cf. Barclay, 'Resurrection' 23); but Carnley ignores the manifest
heightening of such 'pious interest' in the period following the Constantinian establishment.
The fact remains that evidence for such interest in a tomb (whether empty or undisturbed) in
the earliest decades of Christianity is wholly lacking. If anything, the puzzling end of Mark
16.1-8 attests the early problematic character of the earliest accounts of the tomb being empty,
whereas confidence in a martyr's exaltation readily went hand-in-hand with veneration of his
tomb (Stuhlmacher, Biblische Theologie 1.177-78). Lüdemann argues in somewhat contradictory
directions, both that Joseph of Arimathea attended to the burial of Jesus and that it was
known to be an ignominious burial, but also that the early Christians would have venerated it
had Jesus' tomb been known (Resurrection 45).
56. This was also the solution of Reimarus, Fragments 161-64, 212, and, somewhat surprisingly,
Jeremias, Proclamation 304-305.
57. See above, chapter 17 n. 105.
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