The Time of the Tomb

188:0.1The day and a half that Je­sus’ mor­tal body lay in the tomb of Joseph, the pe­riod be­tween his death on the cross and his res­ur­rec­tion, is a chap­ter in the earth ca­reer of Mi­chael which is lit­tle known to us. We can nar­rate the burial of the Son of Man and put in this rec­ord the events as­so­ci­ated with his res­ur­rec­tion, but we can­not sup­ply much in­for­ma­tion of an au­then­tic na­ture about what re­ally tran­spired dur­ing this epoch of about thirty-six hours, from three o’clock Fri­day af­ter­noon to three o’clock Sun­day morn­ing. This pe­riod in the Mas­ter’s ca­reer be­gan shortly be­fore he was taken down from the cross by the Ro­man sol­diers. He hung upon the cross about one hour af­ter his death. He would have been taken down sooner but for the de­lay in dis­patch­ing the two brig­ands.

188:0.2The rulers of the Jews had planned to have Je­sus’ body thrown in the open burial pits of Gehenna, south of the city; it was the cus­tom thus to dis­pose of the vic­tims of cru­ci­fix­ion. If this plan had been fol­lowed, the body of the Mas­ter would have been ex­posed to the wild beasts.

188:0.3In the mean­time, Joseph of Ari­mathea, ac­com­pa­nied by Nicode­mus, had gone to Pi­late and asked that the body of Je­sus be turned over to them for proper burial. It was not un­com­mon for friends of cru­ci­fied per­sons to of­fer bribes to the Ro­man au­thor­i­ties for the priv­i­lege of gain­ing pos­ses­sion of such bod­ies. Joseph went be­fore Pi­late with a large sum of money, in case it be­came nec­es­sary to pay for per­mis­sion to re­move Je­sus’ body to a pri­vate burial tomb. But Pi­late would not take money for this. When he heard the re­quest, he quickly signed the or­der which au­tho­rized Joseph to pro­ceed to Gol­go­tha and take im­me­di­ate and full pos­ses­sion of the Mas­ter’s body. In the mean­time, the sand­storm hav­ing con­sid­er­ably abated, a group of Jews rep­re­sent­ing the San­hedrin had gone out to Gol­go­tha for the pur­pose of mak­ing sure that Je­sus’ body ac­com­pa­nied those of the brig­ands to the open pub­lic burial pits.