Coincidence II.6: The Courage of Joseph of Arimathea
The Alleged Coincidence
For this coincidence, McGrew wants John to explain something Mark says about Joseph of Arimathea. In Mark, after Jesus’s crucifixion, we read:
And when evening had come, since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God, took courage and went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. (Mark 15:42–43) 1
McGrew wants to know why Mark makes a “rather emphatic” reference to Joseph’s taking courage. 2 The answer, she thinks, can be found in John’s account. In John we read:
After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission, so he came and removed his body. (John 19:38) 3
According to McGrew, John’s account explains Joseph’s courage. Joseph needed courage to request Jesus’s body from Pilate because it would be “the first time that he [Joseph] had openly shown himself to be sympathetic to Jesus”. Until this point, he had kept his sympathies to Jesus a secret, because he was afraid of the reaction of his fellow Jews.
The passages allegedly coincide, then, because John explains Mark. Joseph, according to John, was scared to reveal to his fellow Jews his allegiance to Jesus, which explains why Joseph needed courage, as Mark says, to ask Pilate for permission to bury Jesus.
First Failure: McGrew’s Argument Is Overstated
The presentation of the coincidence above is a simplification of McGrew’s argument. Instead of simply saying John provides an explanation of Joseph’s courage in Mark, McGrew says this:
What we have in the two accounts is an interesting case of two reporters with the same facts giving those facts a different spin. Mark accentuates the positive. He speaks of Joseph as “looking for the kingdom of God” (always considered a good thing in the New Testament) and calls him courageous for asking for Jesus’ body. Yet this very praise of Joseph raises the question I have already noted—why Mark’s emphasis upon “taking courage”? Does this imply that it was unlikely that Joseph would take courage to ask for the body? John’s report tells of Joseph’s previous lack of boldness (not mentioned in any of the Synoptic Gospels), which the twelve disciples may well have known about and had different opinions about. John respects Joseph and Nicodemus only insofar as they finally step forward and make their discipleship known, which John may consider to be the least they could do. Mark, on the other hand, is more sympathetic and inclined to praise Joseph for “taking courage.” (Original emphasis)
This argument is quite bad.
First, it contains unnecessary speculations: that the disciples had different opinions about Joseph’s character, that Mark focuses on the positive, that John is not impressed with Joseph. We can’t know if any of these speculations are true. But none of these claims needs to be true in order to establish a coincidence. All McGrew needs to argue is that John’s claim that Joseph was afraid of revealing his allegiance to Jesus explains why, in Mark, he needed courage to ask Pilate for Jesus’s body.
Worse, however, is that McGrew’s description is simply false. Mark and John are not giving different spins to the same set of “facts”. They share only one “fact”: that Joseph asked Pilate for Jesus’s body. And although Mark gives it a spin—it required courage—John doesn’t give it any. John says nothing about Joseph’s state of mind when asking Pilate for Jesus’s body. And Mark says nothing about Joseph’s being a disciple of Jesus, let alone give it any spin.
But the biggest problem is that McGrew’s argument is a non sequitur. That John is critical of Joseph for keeping his discipleship a secret (a speculation on McGrew’s part) does not explain why Mark mentions Joseph’s courage. Even if Mark mentions Joseph’s courage because he was impressed by it (another speculation by McGrew), John’s account doesn’t help us infer that. We can infer that Mark was impressed by it simply because he mentions it (although as I said, we can’t know whether this is true).
Second Failure: No Coincidence
However, even the simplified version of McGrew’s argument doesn’t establish a coincidence.
Even if Joseph were a secret disciple of Jesus, and even if he were afraid that his fellow Jews might discover that fact, his asking Pilate for permission to bury Jesus wouldn’t reveal he was a disciple of Jesus’s. His request would reveal him to be a pious Jew. According to Deuteronomy, Jewish law still required the bodies of blasphemers to be buried before nightfall (Deut. 21:22–23). Asking for permission to bury Jesus’s body, then, wouldn’t have made any of his fellow Jews suspect he was a follower of Jesus.
Indeed, McGrew acknowledges there’d be nothing suspicious about Joseph’s request for Jesus’s body. She writes: “Pilate was not likely to balk at a request for the body, since burial was important to Jews” (my emphasis). 4 If burial was important to the Jews, then why would Joseph’s request for Jesus’s body be seen as suspicious by other Jews? The answer is: It wouldn’t be. McGrew here undermines her own argument. Joseph’s fear of being exposed as a disciple of Jesus does not explain why he needed courage to ask for permission to bury Jesus’s body. There’s no coincidence.
One could try to salvage this coincidence by arguing that Joseph was afraid that his fellow Jews would discover his plan to give Jesus an honorable burial. Such a burial would be against Jewish law, according to Josephus: “He that blasphemeth God, let him be stoned; and let him hang upon a tree all that day, and then let him be buried in an ignominious and obscure manner” (Ant. 4.202). 5 But there are several problems with this appeal.
First, as Jodi Magness explains, Josephus’s comment is irrelevant to Jesus’s case. “Jesus was not condemned by the Sanhedrin for violating Jewish law and was not executed by stoning.” He was, rather, condemned to death and executed by the Romans. “Therefore,” Magness continues, “it is erroneous to apply this passage [from Josephus] to Jesus’ execution and burial.” 6
Second, Mark doesn’t say Joseph needed courage to give Jesus an honorable burial. Instead, Mark says Joseph needed courage to ask Pilate for Jesus’s body for burial, but not necessarily an honorable burial. As already mentioned, this public act would be seen as pious by his fellow Jews.
And third, if one insists that Mark’s meaning is that Joseph needed courage to give Jesus an honorable burial, then John doesn’t explain Mark. Mark explains Mark. There’s no coincidence.
In conclusion, there’s no coincidence here. No matter how you slice it, John simply doesn’t explain Mark.
Third Failure: No Evidence for Reliability
Because John’s account doesn’t explain Mark’s and there’s no coincidence, there’s also no evidence that these details are reliable.
But even if John’s account did explain Mark’s, there’d still be no evidence for reliability. Even if McGrew is right that in the story Joseph needed courage to ask Pilate for Jesus’s body because he was afraid his discipleship of Jesus would be discovered, storytellers could have invented these details. These details about Joseph—his courage, his secret discipleship—could have then circulated in oral and literary traditions about Jesus. Mark and John then each mentions one detail but not the other, whether or not they knew about both. And McGrew cannot object to this explanation, since she has to argue for the same thing: Mark and John each mentions one detail but not the other, whether or not they knew about both.
Fourth Failure: No Evidence for Eyewitness Testimony
Because John’s account doesn’t explain Mark’s and there’s no coincidence, there’s also no evidence that these details come from eyewitness testimony.
But even if there were a coincidence here, there’d still be no evidence for eyewitness testimony. As mentioned above, storytellers could have invented the idea that Joseph needed courage to ask Pilate for Jesus’s body because he was afraid his discipleship of Jesus would be discovered. These details then circulated in oral and literary traditions about Jesus, until Mark and John then each mentions one detail but not the other.
Worse, however, is that there’d be no evidence for eyewitness testimony even if these details are reliable. They could have reached Mark and John via circulating oral and literary traditions about Jesus.
Conclusion: A Failure in Plain View
As evidence for reliable eyewitness testimony, this alleged coincidence is a colossal bust. First, there is no coincidence; John’s detail about Joseph being a secret disciple of Jesus’s does not explain why Joseph would need courage to ask Pilate for Jesus’s body in order to bury him. Jewish law required that Jesus be buried before nightfall, and so Joseph’s request wouldn’t have seemed suspicious by his fellow Jews. And if John doesn’t explain Mark, then their accounts don’t coincide and therefore can’t provide evidence for reliable eyewitness testimony.
Second, even if John’s and Mark’s accounts do coincide, the coincidence can be explained as the product of invented oral and literary traditions. And if the details can coincide even though they come from invented traditions about Jesus, then the coincidence cannot constitute evidence that the Gospels are based on reliable eyewitness testimony.
Postscript: A Terrible Argument about the Gospels and Joseph of Arimathea
At the end of her discussion of this alleged coincidence, McGrew points out that the Gospels describe Joseph of Arimathea differently, sometimes using details that aren’t found in other Gospels. For example, Joseph is said to be rich only in Matthew (27:57), and he is said to disagree with the Sanhedrin’s decision only in Luke (23:50). She then argues that these differing details are evidence that the “relationship among the Gospels is not one of gradual accretion or development. Nor is it easy to find any sort of pattern in the inclusions and omissions, which is very much what one expects from varying testimonies.”
This argument is terrible. Stories based on oral traditions will also have different details among them, and some will be present in only one account. And while the differing details in oral traditions can show development or fit a pattern, they don’t have to; they can simply be different. The lack of a pattern or development, then, is not evidence that the traditions about Joseph go back to varying eyewitness testimonies.
But it’s debatable whether McGrew is correct that the traditions about Joseph don’t show signs of development. For example, Joseph goes from being someone who was “waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God” in Mark, to a “disciple of Jesus” in Matthew (see Mark 15:43; Matt. 27:57). Seems like a development to me. And then John develops the tradition further, by stating that Joseph was a secret disciple. The reason for this development is clear: John at several points portrays Jews negatively (they’re murderers, liars, and the children of Satan in John 8:44!), and this detail about Joseph is another instance. The reason Joseph had to be a secret disciple was “because of his fear of the Jews” (John 19:38).
But even if the traditions about Joseph don’t show patterns of development, that doesn’t mean such patterns of development can’t be found elsewhere among the Gospels. For example:
- There is the shocked, silent, anguished Jesus going to his death in Mark, and there is the confident, cool, and collected Jesus accepting his death in Luke and John.
- There is the Pilate who is slightly reluctant to execute Jesus in Mark, the Pilate who publicly announces he’s innocent of Jesus’s blood in Matthew, the Pilate who declares Jesus innocent three times and tries to pawn the matter off to Herod in Luke, and the Pilate who declares Jesus innocent three times and twice tries to have the Jews kill Jesus themselves in John.
- There is the human Jesus who is exalted into a divine figure at his baptism in Mark, the Jesus who is born a divine figure in Matthew and Luke, and the Jesus who is a preexisting divine figure in John. 7
- There is the Jesus who doesn’t claim to be divine in the Synoptics, and there is the Jesus who publicly claims to be divine in John.
- There is the Jesus who teaches about the kingdom of God and the need to repent to be saved in Synoptics, and there is the Jesus who teaches about his identity and the need to believe in him to be saved in John.
- There is the Jesus who refuses to do miracles to prove who he is in the Synoptics, and the Jesus who performs miracles, called “signs”, to prove who he is in John.
In other words, the “relationship among the Gospels” can be shown to be one of “gradual accretion or development” regarding several people and themes, even if Joseph of Arimathea is not one of them. And these changing traditions are strong evidence that the Gospels are based, not on reliable eyewitness testimony, but on oral and literary traditions that developed over time.
- I’m using the same translation as McGrew, the English Standard Version (ESV), because this coincidence focuses on the phrase “took courage”. In the NRSVue, the phrase is “went boldly”. Bold doesn’t necessarily mean “courage”, though their meanings can overlap. For the sake of argument, I’ll assume Mark is referring to “courage”. ↩
- I’m using the Kindle version of McGrew’s book, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (DeWard, 2017), making page numbers useless. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from McGrew in this post come from Chapter II, section “6. The courage of Joseph of Arimathea”. McGrew’s claim that Mark makes a “rather emphatic” reference to Joseph’s courage is overstated. Mark mentions it; he doesn’t emphasize it. However, we can recast McGrew’s question and ask why Mark mentions it at all. ↩
- NRSVue. ↩
- McGrew’s claim that Pilate would be concerned about honoring Jewish burial practices is simply wrong. Historical sources show that Pilate repeatedly rode roughshod over Jewish sensibilities. Josephus tells us that when Pilate first became governor of Judea, he offended the Jews by bringing into Jerusalem Roman standards bearing images of the emperor. The Jews protested for six days, and the event nearly ended in violence. Later, he stole money from the Jewish Temple to pay for an aqueduct, and the Jews protested again. This event did lead to violence: Roman soldiers surrounded the protesters and beat them with clubs. Josephus reports that “they were a great number of them slain by this means” (Ant. 18.2.2; translation by William Whiston, from https://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/ant-18.html). ↩
- Translation by William Whiston, from https://lexundria.com/j_aj/4.176-5.0/wst. ↩
- Jodi Magness, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit: Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus (Eerdmans: 2011, Kindle edition), Chapter 11: “Tombs and Burial Customs”, n.173. ↩
- For the full argument for this development, see Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperCollins, 2014), Chapter 6: “The Beginning of Christology: Christ as Exalted to Heaven”, pp. 211–46. I restricted myself to the Gospels but, as Ehrman explains, the development started even earlier: in Acts and Paul’s letters we have evidence that the oldest Christology is that Jesus became thought of as divine at his resurrection. ↩