The Burial of Jesus

Mark gives us the day and Matthew gives the time of day when Jesus was buried. Reconstructing the events, they would have occurred as follows:

• Jesus died about 3:00 p.m. Though they didn’t want the bodies displayed on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders waited until Passover Sabbath ended to approach Pilate. John says they came on “the preparation,” which Mark identifies as the day before the weekly Sabbath. Preparation day (Friday) started Thursday night.

• After sundown, two delegations arrived to see Pilate; the Sanhedrin leaders to request an early death for those on the cross, and Joseph to request Jesus’s body. Joseph must have been at the cross to know he was dead.

• The guards find Jesus dead and report that to Pilate, who releases the body to Joseph.

• Joseph and Nicodemus take down the body and place it in a nearby tomb. By the time all of this transpired, this burial must have been incomplete because they ran out of light.

• The Sanhedrin leaders request guards for the tomb. Most likely, this was Friday morning.

If Jesus died on Thursday and Joseph waited until the end of that special Sabbath to make his request, he would have gone literally, “when (or after) even had come.” In other words, he would have gone Thursday evening—in the beginning hours of Nisan 16—which would have begun the Jewish Friday. Thus, it seems logical that Jesus died on Thursday afternoon and was buried Thursday evening, after the Passover Sabbath ended. Thus, we would have a record of his being buried "three days and three nights" without any magic math to fit in between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning.

If so, Jesus’ body was laid in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea after sundown on Thursday, March 5, 33 A.D. Joseph and Nicodemus had only prepared the body by wrapping it in linen. As for further involvement in the week’s activities, having touched a dead body disqualified them. Thus, they may have worked on into the night, lovingly preparing the body of one they had followed from afar.

Meanwhile, others made their plans for the proper burial of Jesus. Surely, the women who saw Jesus placed in the tomb were unaware of the limited degree of care given Jesus’s body, for they seem to plan to continue those efforts at the earliest opportunity. Most likely not getting close enough to know who these two men were and perhaps not knowing they were followers of Jesus, they left them to their task and went home.