In the first gospel (xxvii, 57 sq.) we have a comparatively simple version of the story of Joseph of Arimathea, a rich disciple of Jesus, who gets the dead body of the crucified, wraps it in clean linen, and lays it “in his own new tomb, which he had hewed out in the rock.” In Mark and Luke we have visibly elaborated accounts, in which, however, while the rock tomb is specified, it is not described as Joseph’s “own,” though it is represented as hitherto unused. Such a narrative points very directly to the Mithraic rite in which the stone image of the dead God, after being ritually mourned over, is laid in a tomb, which, Mithra being “the God out of the rock,” would naturally be of stone—a simple matter in a cult whose chief rites were always enacted in a cave.121 Details thus thrown into special prominence, while in themselves historically insignificant, can be understood only as mythically motived. So noticeable is the Mithraic parallel that the Christian Father who angrily records it exclaims, Habet ergo diabolus Christos suos—“the devil thus has his Christs.” In Mithraism the rock tomb, which is an item in a ritual of death and resurrection, is mythically motived throughout: in the gospel story, historically considered, the item is meaningless.

Obvious as is the mythological inference, it is met by the assertion that round Jerusalem “soil was so scarce that every one was buried in a rock tomb.”122 Such a criticism at once defeats itself. If every one was buried in a rock tomb, what was the point of the emphasised detail in the gospels, which are so devoid of details of a really biographical character? Obviously, rock tombs were the specialty of the rich; and Joseph of Arimathea is described in all the synoptics as a man of social standing. Is the motive of the story nothing better than the desire to record that Jesus was richly buried?

“Scores of such tombs remain,” cries the critic: “were they all Mithraic?” The argument thus evaded is that there was no real tomb. If there was one thing which the early Jesuists, on the biographical theory, might be supposed to keep hold of, it was the place of their Lord’s sepulchre; yet nothing subsists but an admittedly false tradition. At Jerusalem, as one has put it, there are shown “two Zions, two Temple areas, two Bethanys, two Gethsemanes, two or more Calvarys, three Holy Sepulchres, several Bethesdas.”123 It is all myth. “There is not a single existing site in the Holy City that is mentioned in connection with Christian history before the year 326 A.D., when Constantine’s mother adored the two footprints of Christ on Olivet.”124 She was shown nothing else.125 “The position of the traditional sites of Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre, in the middle of the north quarter of Jerusalem, seems to have given rise to suspicions very early.”126 It well might. I have known a modern traveller who, on seeing the juxtaposed sites, at once realized that he was on the scene, if of anything, of an ancient ritual, not of events such as are narrated in the gospels. The traditional Golgotha is only fifty or sixty yards away from the Sepulchre;127 and near by is “Mount Moriah,” upon which Abraham is recorded to have sought to sacrifice Isaac.

Colonel Conder, who accepts without misgiving all four gospel narratives, and attempts to combine them, avows that the “Garden Tomb” chosen by General Gordon, in the latterly selected Calvary, is impossible, being probably a work of the twelfth century;128 and for his own part, while inclined to stand by the new Golgotha, avows that “we must still say of our Lord as was said of Moses, ‘No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’”129 Placidly he concludes that “it is well that we should not know.”130 But what does the biographical theory make of such a conclusion? Its fundamental assumption is that of Renan, that the personality of Jesus was so commanding as to make his disciples imagine his resurrection. In elaborate and contradictory detail we have the legends of that; and yet we find that all trace of knowledge alike of place of crucifixion and tomb had vanished from the Christian community which is alleged to have arisen immediately after his ascension. The theory collapses at a touch, here as at every other point. There is no more a real Sepulchre of Jesus than there is a real Sepulchre of Mithra; and the bluster which offers the solution that at Jerusalem every one was buried in a rock tomb is a mere closing of the eyes to the monumental fact of the myth.

The critic is all the while himself committed to the denial that there was any tomb. Professing to follow the suggestion131 of M. Loisy that Jesus was thrown into “some common foss,” which in his hands becomes “the common pit reserved for crucified malefactors,” he affirms132 that “the words ascribed in Acts xiii, 29, to Paul certainly favour the Abbé’s view.” They certainly do not. The text in question runs:

The Greek word is μνημεῖον—that used in the gospel story. There is thus no support whatever either for the suggestion of “a common foss” or for the allegation about “the common pit reserved for crucified malefactors”—a wholly unwarranted figment. The second “they” of the sentence is indefinite: it may mean either the Jews of the previous sentence or another “they”: but either way it expressly posits a tomb. Yet after this deliberate perversion of the document, which of course he does not quote, the critic proceeds (p. 302) to aver that “the genuine tradition of Jesus having been cast by his enemies into the common pit reserved for malefactors ... survived among the Jews”; and that the tomb story was invented as “the most effective way of meeting” the imagined statement. Such an amateur inventor of myth is naturally resentful of mythological tests!