Buried by His Enemies? Acts 13:28–31

Fitzmyer, Holladay, and Bock

In Acts 13, as we have just seen, ‘the residents of Jerusalem and their leaders’ not only prevailed on Pilate to crucify Jesus but also were apparently those who took Jesus down from the cross and buried him in a tomb. Joseph Fitzmyer comments briefly that, those in the Gospels ‘to whom the crucifixion [of Jesus] is ascribed are not the same as those who take him down from the cross [Joseph and Nicodemus]’. ¹ Fitzmyer notices, but does not attempt to resolve, the difference between two seemingly incompatible accounts of those who took Jesus down from the cross and buried him.

In a more recent commentary on Acts, Carl Holladay also notes the difference: the Jewish leaders are ‘credited with removing Jesus from the cross and burying him in a tomb’. This is not, however, ‘as likely as the Gospel tradition that Jesus was buried by one of his followers’. ² However, Holladay does not explain why the Gospel tradition is more ‘likely’ nor how the difference might have arisen.

Darrell Bock appeals to something that occurs in New Testament Greek, as it does in modern English and other languages—what he calls ‘generic’ usage. This describes the third person plural implicit in the Greek original but not expressed, as it is by English, in ‘they found’, ‘they asked’, ‘they carried out’, ‘they took down’, and ‘they laid’. Bock writes: ‘the reference to “they” is generic, an allusion to Joseph of Arimathea and probably to Pilate’s permission that allowed Jesus to be buried and the opposition that caused his death. This “they”, then, includes those who rejected Jesus (Jewish leaders and Pilate) and those who respected Jesus (Joseph of Arimathea)’. ³ Bock defuses in this plausible way a seeming contradiction between what Luke wrote in his Gospel and what he wrote in the Acts of the Apostles.

In Acts, Luke’s plural, being a generalizing plural, focuses more on the actions rather than on specifying clearly the agents. As regards the actions, there is no difference between Luke’s Gospel and Acts. In both cases, Jesus was taken down and buried in a tomb. But, besides explaining the ‘they’, we need to attend also to the literary nature of the passage in which such a ‘generic’ or generalizing usage of verbs occurs.

Pervo, Keener, and Bovon

Richard Pervo calls Acts 13:27–31 a summary, which is not only ‘concise’ but also ‘crabbed’. In fact, ‘so short is this summary that a reader might conclude that Jesus was buried by his enemies!’. ⁴ But it is not merely any ‘reader’ but, as Craig Keener remarks, ‘some scholars’ who can draw this wrong conclusion. ⁵

Keener states: ‘some scholars think that the text claims that Jesus’s elite Jerusalemite accusers buried Jesus’. He simply comments: ‘they probably read too much into a concise summary’. ⁶ But he does name any of these scholars nor explain why they could be reading too much into the passage.

One notable scholar, François Bovon, not only reached the conclusion rejected by Keener but also gave it a high degree of historical reliability: ‘Jews hostile to Jesus and not a friendly Joseph of Arimathea buried the crucified one. The tradition must be older and historically more reliable than the data of the Gospels.’ ⁷

Bovon was aware that this firm judgment about ‘the tradition’ in Acts involved holding that, for apologetic purposes, the first Christians had created the story of Joseph of Arimathea burying Jesus: ‘if the first Christians wanted to use the empty tomb as an argument, it obviously had to be able to be identified and located’. ⁸ Presumably, if Jesus had been buried by his enemies and not by Joseph, with some or even many female disciples as witnesses (e.g. Mark 15:47; Luke 23:55–6), it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for the followers of Jesus to identify and locate the tomb which briefly contained the corpse of Jesus. Hence, if they were going to appeal to an open and empty tomb as an argument for Jesus’s resurrection, as, for instance, Matthew (28:1–15) and, seemingly, Luke (Acts 2:24–32) did, ⁹ they would have to create the story of ‘a friendly Joseph of Arimathea’ burying the dead Jesus. Much then is at stake for interpreters of Acts 13:28–31.

Settling the literary nature of this passage in Acts is crucial. We need to decide between a Lukan ‘summary’ (Pervo and Keener) and an inherited ‘tradition’ (Bovon) used by Luke. Hans Conzelmann showed himself firmly on the side of a ‘summary’. Rejecting ‘the assumption of a special tradition, according to which the Jews buried Jesus’, he insisted that ‘the form here is kerygmatic, not narrative. This is simply a concise summary of the events.’ ¹⁰ Before exploring further the nature of such a summary, let us recall two classical solutions to the apparent conflict between what Luke wrote in his Gospel and in Acts.

Two Classical Solutions

The obvious conflict between the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea (Luke’s Gospel) and by enemies (Acts) long ago prompted a response from John Calvin. Combining the burial story with the setting of a guard (found only in Matt. 27:62–6) and obviously accepting the historicity of both, Calvin wrote: ‘he [Jesus] was buried by Pilate’s permission, but, on the other hand, guards were placed at the sepulchre by the decision of the priests. Therefore, even if Joseph and Nicodemus committed Christ to the sepulchre, it is [only] incorrect, but yet not absurd, to attribute that [the burial] to the Jews.’ ¹¹ Calvin understood ‘the residents of Jerusalem and their leaders’—namely, ‘the chief priests’ (to whom Matthew adds ‘the Pharisees’, 27:62)—to be involved in the burial of Jesus inasmuch as they asked Pilate’s permission to post a guard at the tomb.

To explain partly the ‘incorrect but not absurd’ conflict between what Luke wrote in his Gospel and what he wrote in Acts, Calvin used a story from Matthew and threw in a detail found only in John (Nicodemus’s role in the burial of Jesus). The precise issue, however, concerns what Luke himself wrote in different sections of his own ‘two-volume’ account of Christian origins. Furthermore, whatever their assessment of the presence of Nicodemus at the burial, many scholars now doubt the historicity of the guard story, a key element in Calvin’s solution. ¹²

Calvin might have argued that Joseph of Arimathea, friendly and all as he was to the cause of Jesus, was a member of the Sanhedrin and attested in all four Gospels as responsible for securing the burial of Jesus. In that sense one could attribute the burial ‘to the Jews’. ¹³

(2) It was in terms of identical authorship that Barrett confronted the difference between Luke 23:50–6 and Acts 13:28–31: ‘Luke himself knew that they were friendly hands that took down the body of Jesus from the cross. It is difficult to believe that the man who wrote this in the gospel seriously wished to attribute to Paul the view that it was Jesus’ Jewish opponents who buried him.’ ¹⁴ As far as I know, Barrett is the only commentator to make this point, which is surely a significant observation about the author of the Third Gospel and Acts. Far from being a careless compiler, Luke showed himself from the outset a careful and self-conscious writer (Luke 1:1–4), not someone likely to contradict himself about an event as significant as the burial of the crucified Jesus.

Barrett himself believed that Ernst Haenchen, when commenting on the passage in Acts, ‘says all that is necessary’. ¹⁵ Haenchen wrote: ‘in reality Luke has only shortened the account as much as possible’. ¹⁶ We saw above how Conzelmann also firmly endorsed the view that Acts 13:28–31 represents a concise summary.

Jacob Jervell

The comments of Jacob Jervell allow us to refine further the interpretation of Acts 13:28–31. Noting how ascribing the deposition from the cross and burial of Jesus to Jewish opponents does not agree with what Luke wrote in his Gospel, Jervell observes: ‘wir haben hier aber eine verkürzte Berichterstattung. Die Beerdigung ist der Hintergrund, das Kontrastschema für die rettende Tat Gottes.’ ¹⁷

This calls for expansion. We find a similar, if less elaborate, ‘Kontrastschema’ in Peter’s address on the day of Pentecost: ‘this man [Jesus of Nazareth], handed over to you, according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death’ (Acts 2:23–4). The scheme is basically bipartite: an evil human action (‘you crucified’ Jesus), contrasted with a life-giving divine action and reversal (‘God raised him up’). Jews (in particular, those ‘who live in Jerusalem’ (Acts 2:14)) and Gentiles (‘those outside the law’) committed the evil deed. Reference to the resurrection is not completed by introducing appearances of the risen Christ. Subsequently Peter speaks implicitly of the empty tomb of Jesus and explicitly of the whole apostolic group as witnesses to the resurrection (Acts 2:25–32).

The same bipartite scheme of God reversing a human sentence is repeated in a second sermon of Peter: ‘you handed over and rejected [Jesus] in the presence of Pilate, although he had decided to release him. But you rejected the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses’ (Acts 3:13–15). Once again the killing of Jesus is followed and set over against God’s raising him from the dead. The identity of ‘those outside the law’ is now specified by mentioning Pilate. Here Peter adds at once: ‘to this we are witnesses’.

In Acts 13, however, Luke offers his fullest version of the Kontrastschema: Jewish and Gentile responsibility for the sentence of death passed on Jesus; his crucifixion; his deposition from the cross and burial; the resurrection; the post-resurrection appearances; the apostolic witness to the resurrection of Jesus. The scheme now essentially includes four parts: (a) the death of Jesus, (b) the reality of which is emphasized through his burial in a tomb, (c) the resurrection, (d) revealed by the appearances (to be followed by the witness of apostolic proclamation). This four-fold scheme corresponds to the four-fold shape of the Pauline testimony in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5: Christ died (a death confirmed by burial) and has been raised from the dead (a resurrection confirmed by the Easter appearances, followed by the witnesses proclaiming all this (1 Cor. 15:11)).

Conclusions

In the interests of fashioning a tight, four-part scheme in Acts 13, Luke has allowed a certain ambiguity to creep in about the identity of ‘they’, the agents responsible for the deposition of Jesus from the cross and his burial. Bock helpfully notes how a generalizing ‘they’ functions. It focusses on the activity, the deposition from the cross and the burial, rather than on the agents. In any case, Calvin was right in remarking that what we read is Acts 13 is not totally false. After all, John’s Gospel recalls that ‘the Jews’ were concerned that the body of Jesus (and those crucified with him) should be taken down before sunset (John 19:31). In any case, it was two members of the Jewish Sanhedrin (Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus) who ensured that the body of Jesus was removed and buried.

When interpreting Acts 13: 27–31, we are better advised to join Conzelmann, Haenchen, Jervell—not to mention Barrett, Keener, and Pervo—in recognizing here a Lukan summary rather than follow Bovon in detecting an old tradition (of Jesus’ burial by enemies), which would tell against the historicity of what Luke’s Gospel attests, a burial by the friendly Joseph Arimathea. In particular, Jervell’s notion of a summary that takes the form of a Kontrastschema can be convincingly filled out by recalling earlier, simpler versions of such a scheme already deployed in the Acts of the Apostles.