Why Skeptics Don't Think Jesus Was Buried But I Do: The Mark Series pt 67 (15:42-46)

all right i'm gonna explain some stuff today uh that is a little complicated and can be a little bit involved and a little confusing potentially so i hope and have been praying that i would have wisdom on how to explain it well and simply without you know dumbing it down right to explain it well but without dumbing it down that's my goal you know they tell me that the internet is where religion goes to die have you heard that before i've heard that before because i've spent a lot of time dealing with skeptics and non-believers and people who are on the fence on the internet they tell me the internet is where religion goes to die but they also tell me that the internet's full of low quality research and poor argumentation yep that's that's what i want to say and let's talk about a specific example of this um if you can successfully refute the resurrection of jesus like you you have refuted christianity like christianity literally does stand or fall in the resurrection of christ this historical claim that he bodily rose from the dead that is so central that there just is no true christianity apart from that claim right there's there's all sorts of peripheral things about christianity that that you might say okay well this i've changed my mind on this i've changed my mind on that but not the resurrection man you can't change your mind on this so the internet tells me the internet and they tell me this with scholarly support sort of at least from some scholars maybe a minority uh that jesus was never buried and that joseph of arimathea in mark the gospel of mark we're reading right now that this this is a legend that he never took the body of jesus and put him in a tomb the argument in short their argument is that both of these things are historically unlikely so unlikely that the stories you read about in the gospels are inventions they're made up now this goes completely against the actual historical evidence like the evidence strongly supports the burial of jesus which again lends support to the empty tomb well it supports the burial and the empty tomb which lends support to the resurrection of christ because when you put all the facts together it's the most reasonable explanation of the evidence but what i'm going to do right now is we're going to read here in mark chapter 15 because this is our verse by verse study going through the whole gospel of mark i cover you know i stop and cover things like apologetics like today theology or controversial topics and challenging questions and all that sort of thing to the best of my ability anyhow so we're going to be today reading in mark 15 verses 42-46 this is the story they say is legendary get it in your head and then we're going to talk about the argument against it coming from scholars like dr bart airman and and the reason again why i use his stuff is because all the skeptics i deal with online largely quote his material on this particular topic and so we're gonna look at that stuff and responses from scholars such as dr craig evans all right here we go jesus is buried that's the title at least here in the in the nasb now mark 15 42 let's read the passage again they say all of this is made up and we'll talk about why and why i believe they're wrong well if you're skeptic i want you to because of the evidence i want you to rethink your position on the empty tomb if you have taken a position that it didn't happen all right verse 42 when evening had already come because it was the preparation day that is the day before the sabbath joseph of arimathea came a prominent member of the council who was himself waiting for the kingdom of god and he gathered up courage and went in before pilate and asked for the body of jesus so jesus has already died and joseph asks he's on the cross though you know can i take him down can i put him in a tomb verse 44 pilate wondered if he was dead by this time and summoning the centurion he was already dead and ascertaining this from the centurion he granted the body to joseph remember the process here okay forgive me for interrupting the passages i usually read straight through but remember the process he wants he you know to bury jesus he goes to pilate and he asks pilate confirms with the centurion to make sure that jesus is dead and then ascertaining this from the centurion he granted the body to joseph remember the process that will be important later joseph bought a linen cloth took him down wrapped him in a linen cloth and laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out in the rock and he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb mary magdalene okay well then we get to the witnesses the women witnesses actually dealt with that last time two weeks ago from today i dealt with that so let's talk now about this story um why would say scholars like dr bart airman be against this happening and here's the case basically they say romans as a rule in the roman empire and the romans were the ones who were controlling the jews at the time the jews were like were subjected their government was subjected to roman rule so they had a government but it had limits and the um the romans did not allow for crucified people to be buried at all like there was no burial for crucified people they they didn't get buried they were left on the cross and there they stood while birds and dogs came and pecked away at their flesh and and disfigured them or you know then probably days later not the night of the crucifixion but days later when they finally took them down off the cross they weren't put into like proper burial like a tomb they were just tossed into like a dirt pit and just just like a mass grave and just covered with with dirt um making it hard to identify the location where jesus had been raised so therefore they say the empty tomb is only evidence of a legend right because it goes it goes contrary to what would have happened historically and therefore it's a legend so this is actually talked about in bart airman's book and you could you could get this although i don't recommend it i think it's very misleading but you could get by aaron's book which is how jesus became god and he has a chapter in this book which he talks about bart ehrman and i don't mean any disrespect to him personally okay i'm just trying to speak factual i'm trying to talk about motives and all that but he um he's changed he thought jesus had he rejected the resurrection but he thought the burial was real and then he changed his opinion on this and this book he writes why he changed his opinion and he deals with claims he deals with the evidence that would you know say otherwise so in his book dr bart airman he says and i quote this is on page 151 and i have links below to tons of resources articles and stuff like that down below i should say tons there's tons of content in the few links that are there and uh bart ehrman says no one could have discovered that jesus was no longer in his tomb if he'd never been buried in a tomb in the first place and so you realize this is he's going to argue that the the tomb itself is not historical therefore the stories about discovering jesus's tomb empty are not historical therefore it takes away a piece of evidence supporting the resurrection at least that's how most of us are going to understand the implications of that again in his same book on page 160 airman says the following listen carefully i want to hear his arguments and then we're going to work through them because they're demonstrably problematic and i want you to know because listen how many times have you heard confident statements about historical facts and how they just they they refute christianity okay this couldn't be the case because blah blah blah um but how often are do you actually spend you know 40 50 hours researching the topic to go deep and find out and confirm if those things are true well probably not very often that's my job so so here we go uh airman says and i quote from page 160 on his book in his book in some the common roman practice was to allow the bodies of crucified people to decompose on the cross and be attacked by scavengers as part of the disincentive for crime i have listened to this i have not run across any contrary indications in any ancient source so end quote or pause quote i'll read more in a sec airmen saying like not only is that the common practice i've i've never seen any indication in any source of any kind that would imply anything different than that okay well this is going to be a really problematic quote as we show you a bunch of sources that imply problems with that so um continuing his quote he says it is always possible that an exception was made of course but it must be remembered that the christian storytellers who indicated that jesus was an exception to the rule had an extremely compelling reason to do so if jesus had not been buried his tomb could not be declared empty so they invented the story he's he's now kind of going into sort of mind reading about why it fictitious people we don't know of who these christian storytellers are actually like real people with names but these these storytellers who he sees as happening in the first century they invented the story and then they kind of about discovering jesus's tomb empty then they had to make up a story about a burial to back it up um okay so he's basically saying it's more likely that the empty tomb story led to a burial story or that the burial and empty tomb are just part of then that the burial and empty tumors is part of what actually happened that's that's his claim another quote from his book page 16161 he says and i quote and we are told by the roman historian tacitus of a man who committed suicide to avoid being executed by the state now he's going to talk about a historical source since anyone who was legally condemned and executed forfeited his estate and was debarred from burial and that's in annals 6 29. so basically what airman does then at this point in his argument in his book is he's going to offer a number of sources and they are they're real sources okay i'm not i'm not disputing any of these sources where they say things like this where a person who dies of execution is not allowed to be uh buried properly given a proper burial now that's interesting so that would seem to be the whole story then you'd say lots of sources confirm it we have roman sources from around the empire that suggest that crucifixion equals you don't get buried but what what barton airman has done is he's left out a bunch of other sources that fill in a larger picture so we're going to talk about this see a majority of scholars let me and let me mention this too because i know i know look some of you are coming to this video as the skeptics who have very little trust for mike winger right you're like he's just an apologist and you think things like oh he just he's just doing this to make money like it's all just a money-making scheme and that sort of thing and you you have a very low opinion of me perhaps but what i'm going to suggest is that um consider the fact that what i'm sharing here is representing the majority of scholars and bart airman represents the minority in this case and i'm not going to lean on my own stuff here i have lots of research to present to you from qualified scholars in their fields and i'd like for you to consider it even if you don't trust me i'm not offended by that i really don't care but i'd love for you to consider the ideas that i think are true and should impact your life and maybe maybe save you yeah yeah i want you to be saved all right so um here's my response so far the majority of scholars do accept this is true just saying that so that people don't think i'm trying to present some fringe view if i present a minority opinion i always tell you guys this is not the majority opinion um barnard never tells his readers here that he's in the minority in this area at least not that i'm aware of i've never seen him mention that in his writings but the first thing you need to know is that though there are plenty of roman sources that say that crucifixion no burial at least in individual cases or at least in certain locations you need to know that rome was very big rome was a very big place and what's true in one time and one place in rome may not be true in all times in all places in rome an example could be the us we're not even two nations right we're one nation but across the nation we have different laws that play out in different ways like say take take uh walking around with a um with an open or concealed carry weapon on your person okay in california especially like where i live like la county that is not going to be very easy to get a permit to do that other people you don't other states you don't even need a permit to do it because it's just state at least that's how i understand it but that's state by state my example is it's the laws change so i could distort your understanding of america by quoting the laws from only one region or from certain regions and ignoring the laws from other regions and then make you think that it's a you know nationwide law about weapons when it's not the roman government had an even more divided country than america does as far as state by state they were one giant roman government with a bunch of different like sort of vassal countries that were submitted to them like judea right like ancient israel and the laws in one place are not the same as laws in all places so let's talk a little bit more about a fuller picture of what rome would do with people who were crucified and the first quote i'll give you is from flaccus 83 you can look this up on your own if you like fla cc us that's the name of the book flakkis 83. um this is the author's philo ancient first century dude and he says about a similar event happening in egypt this happened um before the time just before the time of christ i believe and here is the quote he wants to he wants to rip on this one guy flaccos philo hates this guy flaccos he wants to build a case for why he was basically a bad ruler in egypt but this was egypt under rome so he says i've known instances before now before now of men who have been crucified when this festival and holiday was at hand being taken down and given up to their relations in order to receive the honors of sepulcher or to be buried properly and to enjoy such observances as our do the dead for it is you for it used to be considered that even the dead ought to derive some enjoyment from the natal festival of a good emperor or the emperor's birthday and also the sacred character of the festival ought to be regarded now this is one quote airman does respond to um i can't remember if it was in his book or on his blog because i did try to look up his responses here um i like you know you ever like doing you want to hear both sides and keep chasing an argument down so dr ehrman says that this was this doesn't count because it was on the emperor's birthday sure they allowed some people to be to be who were say crucified to be taken down and buried right away um not left to hang and then put and then debarred from burial but he says this was the emperor's birthday it was not a jewish festival so it doesn't mean anything but that the standard practice was to refuse burial to crucified victims so he's kind of suggests that this quote actually confirms his opinion that seems strange like that the logic of that seems strange that the exception to a rule because of because of a birthday festival but still a festival that the community cared about that that that proves there were no other exceptions to the rule that seems strange um but the scholar dr craig evans who's done great work on this he points out that philo's building a case against flaccus the governor he hates right he thinks he's lousy and this example only makes sense if philo can appeal to a general roman practice that on special occasions burial was allowed see flakis didn't allow the burial of these people during this festival so it's weird to think that you would rule out that being the kind of courtesy that an emperor or a governor would allow for different festivals that were respected by the people that just seemed strange but it gets a lot better than this the digesta which is a summary of roman law from about 500 a.d this is roman law okay not jewish law we know what the jews would want to do i'll talk more about that later we know what the jews would want to do with a crucified victim they would want to bury them right away i'll talk more about that in a bit but the digesta which is a summary of roman law from about 580 it says the following and its rules we're going to analyze this this quote a little bit we're going to get a little heady today you know a little into the into the into the weeds a bit with some of this stuff but it just has to be that way because that's the kind of content i want to make and so that's what you're here for i hope but here's the details it says the bodies of those who were condemned to death should not be refused their relatives that quote means that you when the relatives come and request to bury the body you give them the body that's interesting isn't it now let's read on there's a lot more we should talk about here and the divine augustus in the tenth book of his life said that this rule had been observed so okay augustus who was a previous roman ruler and we're talking he's like rules until 14 a.d and in the tenth book of his life which was the last book that he had come out so right but i mean during the life of jesus he writes this book and the book has a rule that says don't refuse the condemned don't refuse to give their bodies to their families for burial let me read on at the present the bodies of those who have been punished are only buried when this has been requested and permission granted remember when joseph joseph went to pilate to request and then got permission and sometimes it is not permitted especially where persons have been convicted of high treason even the bodies of those who have been sentenced to be burned can be claimed in order that the bones and ashes after being collected may be buried so um a couple things we we have augustus writing in you know 14 or 1080 like right before he dies he has a general rule about actually allowing the burial of crucified people hmm interesting and 500 years later they appeal back to it as being a standard so you'd expect for hundreds of years that it was allowed um now on occasion they refute it refused it but that was in the cases of like high treason and whatever jesus was written up for we all know that pilate didn't see him as an actual threat to rome that doesn't seem to be the case it would make total sense for pilate to give an exception in this situation he doesn't see jesus as actually guilty of high treason um he's like yeah what does this have to do with me he's goaded into it the quote here from um here's the response book and you've got to know about this book because i'm going to reference this book a couple of times so this was dr bart ehrman's book how jesus became god well this is a response book written by four different scholars called how god became jesus and it's is it five scholars excuse me um bird evans gather cole hill and tilling and so all five of these guys came together and they offered a response a very scholarly response to bart airman's very misleading book and i'm not the only one who thinks is misleading um a lot of other scholars do too so um not that i'm a scholar i'm not i'm just i'm just a weird youtuber right i have no qualifications of any kind um except clickbait thumb thumbnails that's my real qualification all right so um i'm joking that's my sarcasm i know it's dry all right the um the phrase that we get here in how god became jesus page 76 is that quote the bodies of persons who've been punished should um oh and we get this from oh i totally got confused in my own notes there so the digesta is discussed in chapter four of the book how god became jesus that's why i'm referring to it now but the um the second quote from the digesta is the following the bodies of persons who've been punished should be given to whoever requests them for the purpose of burial now that is in the same section about how to handle people who are killed as they're executed by the government and it's clear roman law yes you can hand the bodies over so so it seems to be then that the exception to the rule like the normal rule is you can bury people when they're crucified there's an exception to the rule that in some cases they won't be buried they won't be buried at least that was the general regional thing although in some specific places it may have been different it was also so that's the roman laws let's talk about jewish stuff because that's where you start to understand why this was actually super important that even the enemies of jesus wanted him buried right in a tomb yeah and this is why so deuteronomy 21 verses 22 and 23 this is the law of the old testament and i'm not arguing here that romans would obey all the laws that's not at all what i'm saying but let's think about the mentality of the jews at the time if a man was committed has committed a sin worthy of death and he's put to death and you hang him on a tree his corpse shall not hang on hang all night on the tree but you shall surely bury him on the same day for he who is hanged is accursed of god so you sh so that you do not defile your land which the lord your god gives you as an inheritance the first thing to know this is not about the goodness of the man you're not burying him to honor him you will bury him you will take him down that day before night time and you will bury him right because it will defile the land that means it doesn't matter how wicked it could be barabbas up on that thing we want to get him down the two other guys on the cross they want to get them down they want to bury them that day because it's considered defiling the land which is a big deal right that's actually um this is what uh dr evans talks about in his in in chapter four of this book and some other work he's done as well he talks about how there's actually records from the mishnah from the jewish writings just after the time of christ that talk about how it's the sanhedrin's job right that's the jewish like supreme court the people who condemn jesus it's their job to make sure the land stays clean and so they had a particular job of actually taking people down and burying them when they had been executed so the the sources we have suggest that even though rome would execute somebody the same in jerusalem in particular the sanhedrin would make sure they were buried that night so as to keep the land clean because that was one of their tasks to keep the religious purity of the land this was such a big deal to them that according to dr evans it would cause riots and uprises in israel if they if they just left bodies up on the crosses on a normal basis this would be a real really big problem now on the other hand dr airman in his book how how jesus became god right back to this book in his book on page 157 he disagrees with this he says it was not the jews who killed jesus and so they had no say about when he would be taken down from the cross moreover the romans who did crucify him had no concern to obey jewish law and virtually no interest in jewish sensitivities and the problem here is that um we don't we should think romans did care about jewish sensitivities because they care about bringing peace into their empire not because they're like so so compassionate and loving towards the jewish people right no they just compare about they care about peace in the empire and the fact that the sanhedrin even exists in the first place that this jewish supreme court exists the fact that there's even herod is a jewish ruler up in galilee the fact that these people even exist at the time is proof that the romans are trying to allow jewish sensitivities and self-government to a degree they don't allow them to execute people but they clearly do allow people to bury those that are executed pilate obviously cared about um jewish sensitivities airman himself uh mentions in his in his work the occasion where pilate put roman standards in jerusalem these are this is an event when pilate first moved in right this is before jesus goes public with his ministry but during his during jesus's life pilate becomes the governor and he does what's kind of normal right he takes roman standards like shields and stuff with with caesar's face on them and he puts them in jerusalem and there they are in the holy city and the jews are flipping out because they're like you know caesar claims this title of deity this divine title and we're monotheists so we reject that and they traveled to caesarea and there they said pilate we would rather you kill us right this group of jews we'd rather you kill us than leave those roman standards there now here pilate has to decide between honoring the the caesar versus pleasing the people to avoid uprising and what does pilot do pilate takes the standards down out of the capital of of of the country of the jewish land and he pleases the people because romans cared about jewish sensitivities they just they clearly did they very much cared about since this is why they would try to offer sacrifices to to any any god that was in the region wherever they showed up because they were trying to create a a unified empire right even if it was a weird kind of unity so pilate cared about jewish sensitivities um the the romans according um to josephus in fact i'm going to read another section here from page 77 of this is okay this is the bad book this is bart aaron's book right this is the good book this is this is the response to barter's book by multiple scholars um but i'm going to read here page 76 and a section of 77 i think from this book here um the romans josephus says josephus is a first century historian do not require their subjects to violate their national laws now this is in josephus's book against appion 273 if you're looking for the reference he they don't generally speaking the general rule for roman governments is that they're not going to require the subjects to violate whatever their national laws are that's the normal rule of government bart acts like but when people are executed we don't care anymore like they have a whole different policy for government at that point and that that seems made up um the jewish historian i read on from page 77 here the jewish historian an apologist adds that the roman procurators who succeeded agrippa the first quote by abstaining from all interference with the customs of the country kept the nation at peace so from josephus book jewish war forgive me i'm just throwing the references out there this is for those who want to look this up 2 220 that's the reference this is um this is their normal thing they abstain from interference of the customs of the country in order to keep the nation at peace and the comment from dr evans is these customs include never leaving a corpse unburied that's one of the customs that includes so this is interesting that if you were to read and think of the impact this has on you okay because i care about this like i'm a pastor i'm not a scholar i'm not trying to pretend i am but but i'm like i'm like looking going that's just horribly misleading like if i read bart ehrman stuff i could be like convinced that i was wrong all along about the resurrection of jesus that evidence is totally against it the empty tomb isn't even just they made it all up like oh my goodness not knowing that i'm just getting bad information and part of the story and not the whole thing and that's really unfortunate um and that's really unfortunate so i'm making a video josephus in one of the stories josephus actually had a story where this first century historian he was traveling and he's a jew right but he's also roman he's both and he's traveling and he sees uh three friends of his that are on crosses being crucified he knows these guys and he requests to have them taken down this is in his life of josephus 420 and 421 he records asking for them to be taken down and they were actually taken off the crosses and i'm telling you the story for a reason they were taken off the crosses given the best medical treatment available because josephus just had favor with whoever was in charge at the moment and two of them died one of them survived right showing you just the danger of even even only partly being but if you were to take barterman's logic you would have to look at josephus i think and say oh he made that up right because romans wouldn't allow people to be taken off the cross the whole point of being put up on the cross is so that you're going to die like this is execution you know romans don't care about your cultural sensitivities josephus or your friends like you would reject here's a danger in history when we say generally this is true therefore exceptions are impossible or so unlikely us to be dismissed and as inventions that's a dangerous perspective to have if you have it in a clumsy fashion as i think dr ehrman does and many atheists and skeptics online i interact with have a very clumsy treatment of first century history and i i admit many christians do too most people have a pretty clumsy treatment of history in general when we're talking about the center of our faith let's not do that right the resurrection of jesus let's not be clumsy like let's let's be careful so um that's pretty interesting now there's one more quote from josephus that i think is the best one and probably the most important one as it relates to jerusalem because i've been talking about rome in general we talked about an exception in egypt but what about jerusalem josephus actually has a quote in his writings and he's not a christian okay just in case anybody wondered that and he has equipped his writings that standard practice in jerusalem in particular was to take people down off crosses before the night falls and to bury them let me read to you the quote i'll share how dr ehrman responds and how i would respond to that in josephus jewish wars book 4 317 he says and i quote nay and he's talking about this group of this this group of guys that were um attacking jerusalem during the rebellion and during the the the war with rome so this is a time of war now this is 70 a.d this is 30 years 40 years after jesus and now they're at war with rome there's no more peace so he says nay they proceeded to that degree of impiety as to cast away their dead bodies without burial okay that's what happened in 70 80. there was there was such war going on in jerusalem they just threw the bodies out these these um these idomians is the group that he talks about here and he says although the jews this is the important part although the jews used to take so much care of the burial of men that they took down those that were condemned and crucified and buried them before the going down of the sun this is hugely important josephus non-christian first century historian who was an eyewitness to many of these things he says that it was standard practice in jerusalem at least if not all of israel that even though the romans would crucify people the jews would come and take their bodies down and bury them because it was their custom to do so because of obviously deuteronomy now bart airman responds to this and he's like no this doesn't count because josephus here this is a very strange response but josephus is talking about the idomians and the idumeans aren't even the romans that i think is a little confusing there can be a debate i guess and i don't know the right answer here there's a debate about who the idomians really were uh were they conscripted roman military or were they some other faction but my my answer to this honestly is who cares like he he could have been talking about like the staff of mcdonald's who were doing this it doesn't matter who he's talking about no offense if you work at mcdonald's but um but here's the thing what the value of josephus's claim is that there's standard practice in israel and that's the thing we care about not what weird things happened during war in 70 a.d during the war but what would normally happen before that when jesus was alive and he says the standard practices the jews even though the romans would kill him the jews would come and take him down before nightfall and bury them this is consistent there's even more evidence um from the earth that's kind of a big deal right like if i have if i would i would never drop a microphone because like i think it's rude and these are expensive pieces of equipment and i used to be a sound guy so i would never drop a mic but if i i would drop it for josephus on his behalf if i could all right let me read forward here um more evidence that this is the case historically is in the earliest rabbinic writings which say that a person who this is really again this is where it gets a little confusing i i i'm sorry if i don't explain it well but i'm going to try that um early rabbinic writings say that a from just after this time right not during the time but after the time of jesus they say that a person who's executed could be buried in a tomb a tomb but just not an honorable tomb so you could have a two different kinds of tombs that they would keep on hand that the sanhedrin in particular would keep on hand they had tombs for like you know normal good honorable burial and they had tombs a location for dishonorable burial it was still a tomb it was still a tomb and that executed people had to be put in those tombs they could not be put in their family tomb right away they could not be put you know with they couldn't you couldn't put a dishonored body with an honored body that was the rule this is interesting this is in this is in the like the talmud stuff so there's more though and this is where it gets a little complex complex they had burial procedures that are really weird to us nowadays but this is what they would do they would take your body they would put it inside of a tomb limestone generally speaking around jerusalem and in that tomb laying on like a bench of some kind your body would decay over time about one year later they generally would wait 12 months they'd come back they'd you know move the stone out of the way they'd go into the tomb and they would collect your bones they would put your bones in something called an ossuary which is like a bone box it's about the size of a femur because that's the longest bone in the body and it was made of usually stone or maybe sometimes wood and these ossuaries would be would be storage places for your bones and what they would do then is they would they would just have your bones in an ossuary like in a slot in the wall or set somewhere in the tomb and that table where you had decayed before that was then used for the next family member who died so you get the idea that you're you're you have like two burials they have the first burial the second burial so according to the to the ancient rabbinic writings here's the info we've got for the first burial if you're crucified you can't be put in that family tomb on that slab where all your other bodies were because it's dishon bringing dishonor to that you need to be put in a different tomb now a year later they have specific teaching on this a year later the family can come back and they can gather your bones and they can move it from a place of dishonor to a place of honor it's as though the dishonor has faded after a year so there were there were people who were crucified who were buried in known tombs the sanhedrin the jews were the ones to do it even though the romans killed them and they would put them in a place of dishonor but it was still a buried known tomb we even have charcoal markings we found on tomb walls where they would write down like you know here lies so and so so that later when it's just bones you know yeah that's where we put relative so and so then they could transfer them over to the correct family tomb these are historical things that most people are not aware of even sometimes scholars that write in the field at least according to dr evans he complains that sometimes scholars writing on this don't seem to be aware of these issues i would say barnum is an example of that or whether he's aware or not he's not i don't know what he knows but he isn't necessarily addressing all of these issues um certainly not in his book how god how jesus became god which seems to paint a very false picture of things so joseph's tomb let's talk real quick about joseph of arimathea his tomb where jesus was buried um this uh this tomb was never used by anyone else that's what scripture says about it and it seems like a really random claim and you might be thinking like okay pastorally i'm like i'm going through the word i'm like jesus was buried in a tomb where no one else had laid what's what's the message there what's the meaning there and there maybe there's a theological point we can pull from that but actually historically the meaning there would be very different than that the meaning would simply be joseph a member of the sanhedrin the kind guy who would who would go to pilate ask for the body of jesus he goes he gets the body he puts it in a tomb that has been freshly dug right cut into the cave and carved out with tables and things like that and nobody's buried there this means like according to some like uh rachel huckaly i think her name is actually i can't do it anyway according to one scholar who does has really focused on burial and traditions and tombs and stuff like that in israel and i have one of her articles i think linked below i think at any rate according to her what this means is that when jesus body was placed in the tomb there was no violation of the sanhedrin's rules you see it wasn't an honorable tomb yet because no body was in it yet when jesus body was placed in it it became a place of dishonor still a proper tomb and no no you know so joseph may have had to give up having anybody from his family buried in that tomb when he put jesus in there that was a big sacrifice but then he may have changed his mind after jesus raised from the dead and god bestowed such honor upon him so in other words it's historical guys it all fits it's like it's like here's the historical facts extra biblically here's the biblical account and they go like this the empty tomb should be consensus like everybody should hold to it i think um let's see i'm getting i'm getting excited about this so i'm losing my place in my notes um now oh one more thing i'll add the fact that jesus could be relocated to a family tomb a year later right that that joseph the sanhedrin the guys who were in charge of this sort of thing takes him and buries him in his own tomb the fact that it's not considered an honorable location yet so then that would actually be in accordance with the rules although it would probably get him heat from this from the sanhedrin when they found out where he buried them but it also means it would be important to note where jesus was buried and so we have women who follow and track where jesus is buried who want to come back later and grieve privately we'll talk more about that in a bit today's study might be kind of long but it's all going to be good what i'm saying is a mass grave doesn't fit leaving jesus on the cross for for we a week for many days to slowly die to be eaten by scavengers then be unrecognizable thrown into a mass grave where nobody would know it was even him this does not fit saying that crucified victims just simply wouldn't ever get buried or put in tombs doesn't fit in fact we have proof absolute proof that that's not the case case in point this these couple pictures here which are of the same thing one's a recreation one's the original this is the the heel bone of a guy named johannen or john we would say in modern uh english this is a man whose bones found in an ossuary meaning he had proper burial second burial so he must have been buried first and then second proper burial and he had a spike still in his heel his legs may have been broken there's more than one set of bones in in the spot where they found him there were three bodies of bones so there are broken shins they could be from him from the breaking of the legs to speed up the death because of regular practice of wanting to bury people before sundown in jerusalem just like josephus says this guy was crucified here's what's interesting he's in jerusalem and it was only a few years before jesus very likely in the beginning of pontius pilate's governorship or just before it which means we have the bones of a man properly buried in jerusalem around the time of jesus proving that this argument is weird jesus wasn't buried because it just never happened it's happened right there that's that's happening right there so the nail bent it seems and got stuck in the wood so they had to hack the the wood of the cross apart and to to get him down off of it that's why the nail stays in his in his heel um what um dr evans points out in his work on this is that heel bones and wrist bones and things like this are the are very often from 2000 years ago just fragments in pieces now the nail stuck there and never never was removed couldn't be removed and was just attached to the foot so that's why we found it but the truth is he says there may be many more crucified people whose bones we have found and we just don't know because they didn't have this weird situation where the nail got stuck in the wood and so foot wood nail all stuck together permanently that's pretty interesting so he's suggesting that saying we've only found the bones of one crucified person is actually a little misleading we know we've found the bones of this crucified person we may have found the bones of many others and just don't know it another interesting find now this is in an article um by uh rachel hickley uh who i'm sure i'm mispronouncing her name and i apologize um she talks about how we found over 100 nails from crucified victims over 100 nails some of which are at least some significant portion are from crucified victims and we found them in tombs now this is where it gets again complicated okay it's not super simplistic the the nails they're found in tombs but they're not necessarily the tombs of the people they were crucified who received the crucifixion what we're saying is these nails came from a crucified victim and then they ended up being in a tomb for some reason let's talk more about it the um the calcium rings on the nails are part of probably the most interesting part so these nails often little short ones they they have these rings of calcium that go around them now this is where and man i was trying to find more research on this um but dr evans talks about it in chapter four of the book how god became jesus and i know he has more stuff on it in some other sources i just wasn't able to get it all get it all going in time but these calcium rings he says they wouldn't happen if somebody was crucified and then the nail was simply pulled out that day the calcium rings are result of the nail being left on the body after burial and time goes by and rust and the bones kind of intermingle and then the nails removed sometime much later and then the nail is put in somebody else's tomb probably somebody else's tomb possibly the same person's tomb it's hard to tell at this point because the bones are all fragmentary so why would he say that well the thing is there's two burials remember for the jewish burial traditions you've got one burial in a tomb probably in a dishonorable place if you were crucified a year later the family comes they retrieve the body the nail is then removed it seems and it's now used and this is the weird part as like a talisman there's actually writings in the and i think it's in the mishnah that um one of the examples of this is that the jews consider it kind of like think of it like a good luck charm but like having actual powers um they would sometimes for healing they would take a nail from a crucified person and they would place it over the neck of you know on a necklace over the neck of somebody who they were trying to heal now two things that are interesting okay yeah that's weird um one two it gives a motive to mark where people are buried when they're crucified to come back later and get the nails the calcium seems to indicate according to dr evans that these nails stayed with the bodies meaning they had to have had entombment proper burial meaning a lot of people were crucified and have proper burial that's the bottom line but the other thing is this in the first century you would have if you would have seen all kinds of strange religious practices going on weird things happening exorcists doing all kinds of weird things people when they were healing trying to use special talismans and stuff like that and when you read the gospels like mark for instance of how jesus heals people he's not like that at all he violates his culture and he just commands people to get healed generally speaking i think that um for instance when he when he makes mud and all that i have a whole study on that i think he did that for the sake of the guy right so the guy could could hear and experience touch he can't see so he can't um uh he can't see what jesus is doing and all that so i think that anyway i have a whole study on that but jesus doesn't use the magical ritual type stuff we see from the culture and that's kind of because it's not from the culture it's just what god did so um in response to all of these things the the implication the bottom line for these 100 plus nails 114 nails i think rachel huckley talks about the response from dr ehrman is um these nails two in particular they focus on two nails and we'll talk about that as well man i know how complicated it is today i apologize if i'm losing anybody but two of the nails in particular that were found with caiaphas or there they were originally in one in caiaphas's ossuary and the other one another of another ossuary why is this guy important okay caiaphas high priest during the time of jesus he dies he gets buried we find his tomb in the 1970s i think it was and in his ossuary are his bones and found with him found in his tomb were two nails his family tomb and these nails are from crucified victims because they have these calcium rings around them they did petrochemical analysis of them and all this kind of thing so bart airman says hey look you found these nails in caiaphas's tomb caiaphas was not crucified end of story these nails prove according to him they prove nothing about anything about crucifixion the nails and then he has an explanation for a while and why the nails are there the nails are there because they just use nails to write inscriptions on the ossuaries or on the walls to be like this is caiaphas and then they just discarded the nail because it was like considered unclean because it had come in contact with the dead body and he's not the only scholar who says this although it seems to be demonstrably wrong um in the the good book how god became jesus if you like that i'm just called the good book um i just think it's funny all right so um dr evans responds with this claim notice the claim about these nails he says the presence of calcium sometimes encircling the nail indicates its use in crucifixion okay that makes sense you human bones right and suggest that the corpse still pierced by the nails was buried and sometime later when the calcium had adhered to the nail the nails were recovered and put to new use why do i say that even though i've said it before notice this the argument about the nails is not that they're buried with the people who were crucified the argument about the nails is the calcium rings show that the bodies were properly entombed and then later the nails were retrieved therefore these nails come from someone who was buried like in a tomb even though it might have been a dishonorable burial was still in a tomb dr ehrman doesn't respond to this he just says it wasn't caiaphas so that's it again this is just i think it's not logical now there's a paper recently published on this topic and i'm going to go ahead and show it to you here this is the paper yeah i read it and understood some of it petrochemistry of sediment and organic material sampled from ossuaries and two nails from the tomb of the family of the high priest caiaphas jerusalem this paper puts to bed the issue of whether these nails really really came from caiaphas tomb interestingly enough the nails themselves came from inside one of them inside caiaphas's ossuary now that's weird if you use the nail to write inscriptions why was it put inside of caiaphas's ossuary where his bones are it's kind of a sacred place that would seem very strange the paper has a lot of details about these bones pictures serious like high level science petrochemical analysis of the of the nails themselves the tomb the ossuary the walls the dirt the rate of blah blah blah stuff that you probably will have a hard time caring about their conclusion though is all the nails contain some adhered or perforated remains of bone tissue they also found wood on the nails implying humans were nailed to pieces of wood with these with these nails they give a very long and detailed analysis to support that these two nails um are from the tomb of caiaphas one of them in his ossuary airman now let's come back to irma's second claim he claims that the nails were just used for inscriptions and discarded the paper directly addresses this not targeting dr ehrman but this is a claim that's come not just from him but from others as well and they reject that claim as just lacking evidence it's interesting how they deal with the claim they go the claim just lacks evidence there's no evidence of that um let me quote to you now where they think the nails why they think the nails are actually there in caiaphas osteoary do you care about this i hope you care about this i hope this matters more to you than playing that video again all right i'm reading you the quote now from the paper they say it follows that the presence of two nails with slivers of accreted cedar wood contained containing traces of remain trace remains of bone tissue present present in two different ossuaries in the tomb of caiaphas suggests that although neglected these rare artifacts were an important issue in the family of the high priest in other words let me pause the quote they're put there deliberately because caiaphas's family thought these nails were somehow important for the dead maybe it wards off evil spirits i mean these are not biblical views but these are their views of the time maybe it wars off evil spirits uh maybe it it brings some sort of help to them in the afterlife um you know they're trying to they have them there for some reason and it's not for inscribing things i continue the quote now in consequence of the full range of observations above we feel confident in concluding that one the nails that we sampled are the missing nails from the caiaphas family tomb and two the nails were very probably used in a crucifixion now if i haven't lost everybody yet maybe i haven't lost anybody i just i feel sometimes as a teacher i go i feel like i'm gonna lose people right now but i hope not okay so airman's conclusion his response to these to this these nails in the blog post is overstated quite a bit he says quote and i um i will put the link below for this i don't think i did but i will put it down below to his blog post he says quote there is not a shred of evidence then that these nails were buried with crucified victims they therefore do not provide any evidence that crucified victims were given decent burials he never dealt with the calcium issue not really he just said it was it was cut they're very with caiaphas therefore they weren't they weren't you know no evidence about burial of crucifixion victims so it just doesn't deal with the evidence remember dr ehrman's statement i've not quote i've not run across any contrary indications in any ancient source remember that that is the stuff people remember this is i think one of the things that's helped dr ehrman get his book sales going really big is he sometimes just makes these very strong claims and people won't remember the trail of evidence that led them there but they will remember the the conclusion right there's no evidence there's no evidence there's no and this is the mantra you hear from the internet the internet tells me there's no evidence for christianity there's no evidence for god the internet tells me tells it to me so loud i almost want to believe it but except for all the all the evidence you know so um he says he hasn't run across any contrary indications in any ancient source i don't think his book is is honest i think it's misleading and he in the book in the same book where this where he has this quote he doesn't even mention like literally doesn't even mention the bones of jehohannen who we know was crucified and properly buried like he never mentions them in the book it doesn't even come up he doesn't even deal with it so this is somewhat misleading but there's other examples too so on your screen now if you guys are watching on on on a video somewhere we have multiple places there is the app there is the website and there is youtube so bible thinker all over the place but there's the yohohannon nail we talked about that on the top right there's the two caiaphas nails which are on the bottom the two bottom nails there and then on the top on the left of your screen is the aba nail this is another guy who was crucified and beheaded and he ended up receiving proper burial it gets a little complicated he was brought to jerusalem he wasn't crucified there but he was given a proper burial um yeah can i can i just pause before we move on to the next section of today's study and say this that's a lot of confirming evidence for the biblical account we're going to go through the biblical account now and we're going to read it in light of all that evidence and we're going to see jesus was buried by joseph of arimathea and that this we have no good sufficient reasons to doubt the truthfulness of this account all right here we go mark chapter 15 verse 42. when evening had already come because it was the preparation day that is the day before the sabbath joseph of arimathea came by the way the preparation day evening it's about 3 p.m or just after 3 p.m on friday that joseph shows up this is the last day the shops are open um before the the holy day where they're not going to do any work okay it's the last day the shops are open that's my understanding of the timeline of these events and if you want to debate me on it go ahead in the comments i'll make sure to read and reply to every possible person who thinks i'm wrong all right verse 43 um joseph of arimathea came a prominent member of the council who are the people that do that make sure that the land stays clean who are the people that as far as pilots concerned come and take people down off the cross for burial or at least retrieve the bodies for burial that would be the council the sanhedrin joseph varimathia came prominent member of the council who himself was waiting for the kingdom of god an interesting statement mark is pretty vague about it he may side theory here he might have been protecting joseph of arimathea later on we get more details about these guys like john who writes later um we have more stuff like say nicodemus has discussed mark doesn't mention him i think he might have been protecting their identities to some extent he just says joseph was waiting for the kingdom of god even though luke calls him a disciple luke writes later so at least i think he does and most people think he does if that's the case the vague phrase waiting for the kingdom of god it may imply his his believing in jesus but secret which makes historical sense as well let me drink some water before i die death averted all right he comes he waiting for the kingdom of god and he gathers up courage and he goes in before pilate and asks for the body of jesus why does this take courage um you could say he was afraid of pilate um it could also be that he's afraid of his own sanhedrin guys he's afraid of those guys so he gathers up courage and he goes in verse 44 remember this procedure pilate wondered if he was dead by this time and summoning the centurion he questioned him as to whether he was already dead step one now step two verse 45 ascertaining this from the centurion confirming the death he granted the body to joseph right then verse 46 joseph bought a linen cloth took him down wrapped him in the linen cloth and laid him in a tomb which he which had been hewn out in the rock and he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb that's all we're going to cover but let me cover it now in light of all the evidence and answering a few more objections to joseph varimathia in particular lots of lots of brain work for you guys today so step one joseph asks pilate that's consistent with the historical uh order of events we're going to find out pilot has to confirm that jesus is dead that's consistent he confirms he's eddie grant's the request joseph buries him joseph's uh jesus's body side note in verse 46 is called him but in the other areas in the chapter you know it's called the body of jesus like his body the body but then he calls it him later perhaps this is mark just wanting to remind us in the holy spirit that it's the same body that will rise jesus didn't um ditch his body right it was the same body that resurrected the bodily resurrection of christ central christian doctrine so does historical research support or refute specifically joseph of arimathea here's where dr bart airman is going to argue against it from his book here's a long quote from his book it was a bad one jesus became god i think very misleading and hopefully i'm demonstrating that it's misleading um from pages 152 and 153 i'm going to read from the book he's basically going to say that joseph's story doesn't make sense because mark has all the sanhedrin condemning jesus the morning of his crucifixion and then he has a member of the sanhedrin coming to help jesus and honor him afterwards and that turnaround seems contradictory so bart thinks it was made up let me read you the quote there are numerous reasons this is by the way page 152 and 153 there are numerous reasons for doubting the tradition of jesus's burial by joseph for one thing it's hard to make historical sense of this tradition just within the context of mark's narrative so mark contradicts itself according to him joseph's identification as a respected member of the sanhedrin should immediately raise questions mark himself said that at jesus's trial which took place the previous evening the whole council that's in quotes the whole council of the sanhedrin not just some of them or most of them but all of them tried to find evidence against jesus to put him to death and at the end of this trial because of jesus statement that he was the son of god in verse 62 of mark 14 they all condemned him as deserving of death in other words according to mark this unknown person joseph was one of the people who had called for jesus death just the night before he was crucified why after jesus is dead is he suddenly risking himself as implied by the fact that he had to gather up his courage and seeking to do an act of mercy by arranging for a decent burial for jesus corpse mark gives us no clue my hunch and here's airman's thought is that the trial narrative and the burial narrative come from different sets of traditions inherited by mark or mark simply in uh or or did mark simply invent one of those two traditions himself and overlook the apparent discrepancy there's a fatal contradiction because in mark 1462 i think it was 62 it says this no not 62. 60 let me put on your screen you're 64. you have heard his blasphemy how does it seem to you and they all condemned him to be deserving of death and it hangs on this word all all according to airmen according to his logic it requires that when mark says all condemned to death it means every individual member of the sanhedrin actively condemned jesus to death and anything other than that is a contradiction now do you feel like sometimes those who want to say the bible contradicts are actually just being too wooden in their own understanding of language and i think that is the case a lot of the time let me give an example of where mark uses the same greek word for all and nobody thinks he means all i typed first mark for some reason i don't know what book that is all right mark chapter 1 verse 5 mark says all the country of judea was going out to him to john the baptist and all the people of jerusalem and they were being baptized by him in the jordan river confessing their sins according to mark every single citizen in the entire country of judea and every person in jerusalem went and got baptized by john and if mark has any point later on in his book according to the logic that aaron uses if there's any point in his book that there's people in jerusalem who weren't baptized by john then mark has a fatal contradiction and he must have invented up something or got it from alternate do you see how forced this is here's possible two possible ways of reconciling the supposed contradiction possibility number one joseph may not have been present what if all means every individual person without exception not all like like the way you talk the way you and i talk man all the people were just loving it okay was that one guy like this and then i'm like you lied you said all you're like but nobody thought you meant you couldn't find a single exception to my um so possibly number one joseph may not have been present when the rest of the sanhedrin voted on this stuff remember it was a trial in the night time they had a vote they they did not have a scheduled sanhedrin meeting that day they had to call their members together and if they knew that joseph maybe nicodemus maybe some other guys had leanings towards jesus they may not have invited them to this trial we have seen this again in our own government other governments have done this they've held votes without asking some members to be there in order to have an all vote and all yes vote because they knew that that person would cause problems that's possibly number one is it is it true i don't know it's differently possible it's a reasonable explanation another possibility number two joseph may have been just uh present but abstained from voting when the voting occurred and you could still take all to mean all in the very strict sense because it would just mean that every positive vote when they voted to condemn jesus all the hands that went up and said yay all of them said yay and nobody said nay there may have been people abstaining maybe they just didn't say anything for fear for shame for whatever and they said nothing so all the votes would be yes the vote of the sanhedrin was was a unanimous condemnation vote but some members perhaps abstained we have this in government as well this is not far-fetched or strange and it would be consistent with luke 23 because look at the way luke writes about what joseph did it says about joseph that he had not consented to their plan and action when they wanted to kill jesus so he hadn't consented for the plan it doesn't say he voted against it it says he didn't consent to it he didn't give his vote for it that's interesting the way it's the way it's worded there so that's another possibility or simply all just doesn't always mean every single individual without exception um i think that we're just being wooden here so that was considered a reason to reject the story to like say the story's invented because of the word all that seems really i'll move on all right why would i say joseph the jos joseph of arimathea story is not legendary what evidence do i have positively to support that it really happened and you've already heard some of it but i'll share even more does it bear the marks of historicity do the details like i say fit hand in glove that we know from the history of the time and we look at the biblical account does it go like that dr craig evans already mentioned he notes that it was the responsibility of the jewish sanhedrin at a later time wouldn't be hard to imagine it being their responsibility earlier on as well um to bury the executed dead especially in and around jerusalem again see chapter four of the good book how god became jesus that's a good location for you part of their job okay and joseph is one of those members pilate's response is also interesting because he wants to make sure jesus is dead um this is this is what evan says on this topic really good stuff quote i quote him now from page 89 of his book pilate's response to joseph's request in which he inquires into jesus's condition remember i told you to remember that in mark 15 44. he's like hey centurion is he really dead before i can grant the request i need to confirm he's really dead so he says pilates response to joseph's request and which he inquires into jesus's condition reflects the practice of roman officials and he refers to the oxyrinkus papyri which none of you are going to look up 475. go ahead if you want which says take a public physician and view the dead body that has been shown and having delivered it up for burial make a report in writing which in which in which an official orders the inspection of a corpse so this this ancient writing suggests that the official had to double check the death of the corpse before you could hand them over to be buried he had to make an official an official check and he calls a centurion to do this yeah evidence of historicity super consistent with the actual events of the time it's also multiply attested it's not just in mark it's also in other locations and john to get not even more into the weeds john has a uh independent account of the burial of jesus he has information that's coming not from the same sources as mark and so it's multiply attested if you want to argue against that do some research on it first i i beg you yeah arimathea also joseph is from where arimathea there's a good chance that this is a place four to five miles north northwest of jerusalem called ramathion zofia or ramathym zofin he's he's local he's a he's a well-known member of the sanhedrin he lives not far from jerusalem and you might be like well if he lives four or five miles away why is his tomb in jerusalem well the scholar raymond brown yeah we looked into that too the scholar raymond brown he says that many jews who lived outside jerusalem still wanted to be buried in jerusalem because it was seen as the epicenter of god's future work when he when he comes to raise the jews back up so they wanted to be buried in jerusalem now think for a second if this is a legendary account how strange it would be to invent a well-known member of the sanhedrin to bury jesus in jerusalem in a known location why if you're going to make stuff up why make it so easy to prove wrong not only this here's the weirdest part about the whole story of joseph it's very embarrassing to the disciples that they abandoned jesus right and that joseph okay the sanhedrin throughout the book has been the bad guys they killed jesus right they're responsible for so much of the bad stuff that happens to jesus they want him dead why on earth as a christian if you were inventing stories about somebody burying jesus to honor him somebody coming to find him why would you invent joseph of arimathea a member of the of the opposition the sanhedrin why would you invent women as we talked about last time coming to the tomb all of these things are really embarrassing and they made it harder for people to believe the message in the early church especially the women part this is why we think it's more historically accurate now because we say you know what when you invent legend you don't invent it like that we have lots of examples of legend and they don't look like this they don't look like this if you were going to invent someone to bury jesus and you're a christian who would you invent right it's going to be peter it's a great it's a great thing of him to honor christ i wouldn't even invent the whole thing about peter like denying jesus and and fleeing and all that no no no i wouldn't admit that that's one reason why that people think it's historical and i would i'd be like peter okay okay maybe not peter how about john right in john's gospel we have him coming at least staying close to jesus he could easily have just walked and seen where they laid jesus he could have come back on the next you would you invent like a more authoritative source a more respectable source in the community and not joseph of arimathea an opposition member even a neutral person like some random joe schmoe right like this assignment simon of cyrene knew carried jesus christ like even that guy would be better than joseph of arimathea a saying he'd remember yeah this is just it's just cause it's what happened okay it's also testable to the original hearers he's from a nearby town well-known member of the sanhedrin and the tomb is at an own location um in your garden and what motive you might ask to push back what motive why would joseph varimathia do this but i can imagine lots of motives it was an intense night joseph whether he was there and abstained or he wasn't even present and found out later what they had done he feels terrible he feels ashamed that he hasn't done something to stop it he feels embarrassed he and he can he's in a unique position as a sanhedrin member to make it very likely that pilate will grant the body if he asks for it because from pilot's perspective this dude represents the guys that do the burying then he takes and gets in trouble with his own guys when he buries him in his own tomb though technically that's okay because nobody else has laid there it all fits the history the two mitch itself i'm not even done yet right there's more evidence to help support it not even done yet let me talk about this paper this paper right here this is from jody magnus who ironically works right down the hall from dr bart airman um at chapel hill university chapel hill a fellow associate a scholar of his um he never seems to reference her work which seems to be refuting some of his but any at any rate um at least not in in the stuff i've read from him that she talks about the tomb itself and how the tomb and the story of joseph and let me point out she's not a christian catch that okay she's not a christian scholar has dealt with this stuff because some people feel like they only believe christianity if non-christians tell them it's true it's kind of strange standard but hey if that's what you need um jody magnus so she talks about how there's three different types of stone tombs that have been discovered from the time of jesus like 90 of them are not the kind that the bible talks about jesus being buried in the majority of them are other kinds of tombs the one we have that jesus has described being buried in in the gospels is what's called an acrosolia tomb or a bench tomb it's a specific kind of tomb and it has the rolled door the door that's rolled in front of it here's what they look like sort of at least one example so you're seeing two pictures one is of the more typical tombs which have the more square doors these are not as fancy these aren't for his rich folk but on the other side on the right part of your screen there's a tomb and then you see and i drew a little red line around it that's the round stone door for the tomb it'll be rolled and it'll fall into place like there's a good sound effect it's very accurate historically speaking and then it's there it can be removed but it's difficult to remove now only the most expensive tombs had these disc shaped stones that were used as doors put in front of the tombs the stone according to the bible was rolled into the slot it was a rolled stone which would mean it was a particular kind of tomb it's described when they go inside and they see the bench and all this other thing it's an acrosolia tomb which is the tomb of the rich do you catch that jesus wasn't rich but he was buried in a the tomb of someone who was rich according to the record we have in scripture this stone here probably weighed 1500 to 3 000 pounds kind of heavy kind of hard to deal with you can move it but it's just not easy now mark says that the tomb belongs to joseph and many of the we've had this throughout the gospels the tomb belongs to joseph joseph is a rich man okay you're part of the sanhedrin you're wealthy he has just carved out his own tomb and he puts jesus in it everything about it fits the history like that's the tomb of rich man there's there's more there's more john and luke tell us that nobody else had laid in the tomb and that makes it a location where he could technically bury jesus because it's not yet an honorable tomb it's a blank slate the tomb has also said i haven't talked about this yet but it's said to be in a garden in a garden now we have how we've found specific tombs just outside a particular gate in jerusalem the name of the gate the garden gate right we found a number of tombs and in particular they're the rich people's tombs they're the tombs like the jewish high priest john hircanis or alexander gennaeus these these like high priests and leaders these people that were rich and wealthy this is where they were buried in israel by the garden gate and jesus is buried in the rich man's tomb in a garden like this is just going like you either think the bible's presenting to you like the best put together conspiracy ever or it's just true that's kind of what it comes down to i think that we should see it as true now let me quote to you what jody magnus says after her and i did read her paper and i did link it below and you're welcome to read the whole thing it's actually pretty interesting stuff if you like you know that sort of thing then you probably will like it but in her paper ossuaries and the burial of jesus and james she says the following in conclusion she says and she is she is an expert on jewish burial practices not a christian here's the quote the gospel accounts describing jesus's removal from the cross and burial accord well with archaeological evidence and with jewish law now that seems like a subtle thing to say what we're saying is it's historical here's my recap let me break it all down everything i've said so far the skeptics tell me often being you know launched off the trampoline of dr bart airman's content that nice visual for you that's how it feels on the internet there's fly into it like okay they say that's not how things worked mike historically jesus didn't get buried joseph wouldn't have done it the romans didn't care it just wouldn't have been allowed my response is no that's exactly how things worked historically it seems historical and non-legendary and perhaps that's why a majority of scholars do even non-christians think that jesus really was buried in a tomb that was found empty three days later think about that for a second slow down may i encourage you some of you might need this sometimes we have these strange scales we can be gullible in a number of ways right and i'm going to give you an analogy of scales here okay here's my burden of proof scale right my burden of proof goes really high for some claims and really low for other claims and now sometimes religious people like myself can be gullible in this sense i perhaps am very you know gullible when someone's like oh god told me this or you do this or you know and there and we can be not skeptical enough that's absolutely true but what people don't recognize is on the other side sometimes people become skeptical and their burden of proof for religious claims is very high and their burden of proof for skeptical claims is very low somebody tells them well the romans just didn't do didn't allow that jesus would have been buried and they're like oh i guess that's true and all they heard was someone say it out loud there's no evidence or support so please slow down i've even met christians who are like this plenty of times they're very gullible about skeptical claims because there's something inside of us sometimes that thinks if a smart person disagrees with me and they have big words then maybe it means i'm wrong and that's not rational if you study anything in detail like wake up call smart people disagree about everything but things are still true no matter how smart the person saying it's not might be slow down with your own goal ability about skepticism i don't want to be overly gullible religiously or overly gullible about skepticism i want truth look for more info don't think that people who disagree with the bible and who aren't christians are automatically unbiased they have their biases too a non-christian is going to have a bias to not can not be a christian most of the time a christian is going to have a bias to more often than not stay christian some christians want to not be and that's their bias and we all have biases we've all got motives it's just the reality of life jesus though jesus really died historically he was really buried his tomb was really found empty and the disciples really faced death and threat of death and suffering because they were truly believing they had seen him alive from the dead these are things that actually happen in history no matter what you do with it you've got to acknowledge this kind of stuff really happened i think it's great evidence for the central fact of the resurrection of christ in our christian faith our faith is based on historical reality and that historical reality assures us of the future and that's where i hope to bring you application finally um today which is my encouragement to you i'm sure you can find your own application in different ways but one application is this is that as as people we will face we will all face death and we need to look at our future death and we need to learn to do this with the kind of hope that jesus looked at his death with that knowing that he'd be resurrected and then going forward with yes it hurt yes he didn't like it no he didn't enjoy it it wasn't a walk in the park but it was with this confident hope and this strong knowledge of what would happen next and if you have your faith in christ you need to have strong knowledge because the hardest trials you will face in life will probably not be some of the stuff you were thinking about it'll be death it'll be slowly wasting away it'll be the news that the thing you've got is going to take you out and that is so hard you need to see a savior that conquered the grave so you can have hope about your future resurrection in christ you will see us again we will see each other and you will be with him for eternity and that good news is based on good historical facts all right let me pray with you and then uh i'll share with you what i got planned for this week father we thank you for um i mean immeasurably for the death and resurrection of our lord and savior jesus christ but father i also want to thank you especially right now for all the evidence that you've left you left a trail of breadcrumbs to be followed for those who need it and who want it it's there thank you for the access to a scholarship that is able to deal with these things and help us to answer these questions and to help bolster and strengthen our own confidence because of the evidence it's it's a wonderful thing i i don't know of any anything comparable anywhere else in any other belief system that could bring the kind of support that we can for these wild claims we have about the death and resurrection of our savior thank you for helping us week people by giving us evidential support we're grateful we pray lord that you'd also give us wisdom so that when we encounter skeptical claims um we don't knee-jerk react to them lord but we react with thoughtfulness and wisdom and knowledge and we ask lord that more and more people become aware of the truth of christ turn their lives to christ we pray that this ministry bible thinker and the video content that goes out and other apologetics ministries who are doing stuff online that they would reach many people and would stir up true and genuine faith in them in jesus name amen amen all right y'all um this week so it's monday wednesday i'm going to put up a short video for you like a clip friday like every friday at 1 p.m pacific time i do a live stream where i answer your guys questions from the live chat i do 20 questions and i i keep eating longer and longer it used to be an hour it's been like an hour and 40 minutes last friday i might try and shorten it up but i say that but then i don't do it so we'll see i'm not much i'm not very reliable when it comes to that so thank you so much uh for joining me today and being part of this ministry and may i announce something about giving and donating to support this ministry never feel like you ever have to i'm not asking you to please just be blessed all right y'all take care

Channel: Mike Winger

Views: 51,225

Rating: 4.9120493 out of 5

Keywords: women at the empty tomb, women witnesses, the mark series, part 66, episode 66, mark 15, mark 16, mary magdalene, salome, mary the mother of James and Joses, apologetics, the resurrection, empty tomb, was Jesus' tomb found

Id: dK1fU4p43jg

Length: 79min 34sec (4774 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021