The better reasons to doubt the Joseph of Arimathea story

The fact that we are atheists can tempt us to try and find more holes in the bible than are really there.

For example, Michael Alter wrote a lengthy work against the resurrection of Jesus, and therein tried to justify skepticism against the historicity of the gospel assertion that Jesus was buried in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb.

V. J. Torley summarized that case in an online article.

Christian apologist Dr. Timothy McGrew criticized said skepticism, concluding it was illusory. See here.

I would encourage my fellow skeptics to put less effort into proving each and every statement in the bible to be a lie, and put more effort into strengthening the more weighty skeptical arguments.  Whenever you can argue "Even if the bible were telling the truth about this detail, that doesn't place unbelievers under any intellectual obligation to allow that Jesus rose from the dead", that's probably going to achieve the goals of counter-apologetics more efficiently.

Why is this important?  Because the more you trifle about biblical details being fiction, the more you run the risk that some Christian scholar or apologist will successfully rebut such attacks.  While such responses never actually do anything for the cause of truth, such a successful rebuttal does indeed cause the Christian reader to hastily conclude "the bible has been vindicated, once again".  They lack critical thinking skills.  That's why they think that unless the skeptic can demonstrate that belief in Jesus is equal to belief in the tooth-fairy, they will be forever immune to the efforts of others to steal their joy in the Lord. 

So are the Mormons.

If you don't want to allow Christians any relief from the pressure of good skeptical arguments, then stop giving them weak arguments.  I myself, of course, am guilty of trying to justify skepticism toward many biblical matters, but that doesn't require that I just barge ahead anyway and never consider different ways of doing things that might achieve my goals in a more efficient way.

The matter of Jesus' burial is a good case in point.

Because skepticism of Jesus' resurrection can strongly justified even without doubting the Joseph of Arimathea story (because Jesus' being buried counts as exactly nothing in terms of evidence that he rose from the dead) skeptics have to ask themselves whether the skeptical value of attacking the Arimathea story's historicity outweighs the risk of some apologist making a plausible defense of it.

It might.  If you wish to dissuade Christians from their faith, you need to remember that they will seize upon anything that looks like it might remotely vindicate what they believe.  They love nothing more than to point out how skeptical attacks go wrong.  Every time they are able to plausibly claim such a thing, in their mind they automatically equate the failure of a skeptical argument with a vindication of biblical inerrancy/reliability.  My advice is that pressure on the Christian can be made more relentless and unforgiving if you skip the trifles and stick with the heavy artillery.

In this case, I know of several ways to attack the historicity of the Joseph of Arimathea story that are more convincing than the attempts of Ehrman and other skeptics to charge the story as wholesale fabrication.  Justifying skepticism toward the story does not require positive demonstration of the actual truth.  You can be reasonably skeptical of the testimony of an eyewitness already known for lying, even if you cannot positively disprove her specific testimony.

Dismissing Matthew's version as useless 
The excuse Matthew records the guards as ready to use (i.e., "the disciples stole the body while we were asleep", 28:13) is so unbelievable (they'd be risking death) that we are reasonable to question the entire burial story on that ground alone (not that it is a complete fabrication, but that, consistent with Matthew elsewhere, we cannot reasonably discern where history ends and fiction begins, so that trying to extract historical fact from him in this case is futile).

And don't even get me started on why I think Matthew's frightening angel, so part and parcel of the guard-bribery yarn (28:2), is equally the fictional apocalyptic imagery that Licona says the zombie-resurrection is (27:52). 

Dismissing the lateness of the Jewish 'concern' that the disciples would steal the body
Matthew 27:63, the Sanhedrin are testifying after the trial that "we remember" how Jesus went around saying he'd rise from the dead.  That means the Sanhedrin also knew this Christ-claim before the trial started.  It doesn't make sense to say that the Sanhedrin would delay being being concerned about the disciples stealing the body.  It makes more sense to say they'd be worried about such a deception before or at least during the trial.  Therefore, it does not make sense to say their concerns would be assauged merely by achieving the death of Jesus.  A dead man doesn't solve the potential problem of his disciples stealing the body and later falsely claiming he rose from the dead.  So it was likely at some point before or during trial, that this concern would present itself to the minds of the Sanhedrin. 

Since they'd not be fully satisfied with the death of Jesus, they would be most unlikely to allow the corpse to be removed from official custody.   They'd be worried about the disciple-deception immediately upon Jesus' death, they wouldn't delay worrying about it until after somebody removed the body from official custody.

If we are to take the Sanhedrin's disciple-deception concern to be historically accurate, then their insisting that Jesus either remain on the cross for at least 4 full days, or that his body remain under observation while it was thrown into a common pit as carrion, or that the body otherwise remain under the exclusive custodial watch of the Sanhedrin, represent historical options more consistent with their alleged fear of false resurrection claims, than does the gospel report that they allowed the corpse to go all the way out of their official custody for nearly a full day (27:62) merely to accommodate the wishes of a single Sanhedrin member who was secretly a follow of Jesus.  Another option is that since the OT required not mere removal from the hanging, but "burial" too, that as many members of the Sanhedrin as possible would have participated in any "burial". 

It is also curious that despite the biblical and historical warrant for saying "the Jews" loathed allowing bodies to remain hung after dark, all 4 gospels credit this concern in Jesus' case solely to Joseph of Arimathea.  So I am just a little suspicious that in actual history the only Jew that was intent in removing the body from official custody was a Christian.  The non-Christian Jews are never presented as having the least concern to remove the body from the cross.

Any of these scenarios more plausibly harmonize the known facts better that the gospel statements.

The Arimathea burial story's alleged multiple attestation is strongly suspect
Christians have a nasty habit of hastily concluding "inerrant!" merely upon a finding of "multiple attestation", as if this rule of historiography was to be applied mechanically, and where ancient author B tells roughly the same story as ancient author A, then presto, only mentally ill people would doubt the sources.

That is, the average fundamenalist Christian you get on the internet is perfectly certain that the Battle of Troy was a real event, and their ignorance of historiographical method makes them smarter than the legitimately credentialed historians who admit this multiply attested story's sources often exaggerate what happened.  So it doesn't matter if Joseph of Arimathea is "multiply attested", this does precisely nothing to refute the skeptical arguments that the sources are inventing details.

The 'Synoptic Problem' is another illustration of how multiple attestation is useless for overcoming skeptical charges of embellishment and fiction. Most Christian scholars answer the Synoptic problem by positing some type of literarary interdependence on the Synoptic authors.  The majority consensus is the Matthew and Luke borrowed extensively from Mark, the earliest gospel.  How would the multiple attestation of Joseph of Arimathea be impacted if we found out Matthew's and Luke's versions of it were nothing more than their sprucing up the Markan story with their own fictional modifications?  If we can allow an apostle like Matthew to borrow much text from non-apostle Mark (when in fact we wouldn't normally expect an eyewitness to exhibit such heavy dependency upon a hearsay account), what is the problem in saying Matthew derived Joseph of Arimathea from Mark's traditions?

 Fundies will say the differences between the gospels on Joseph of Arimathea are precisely the reason to view them as independently corroborative. But the devil is in the details.  Differences of emphasis do NOT always require that the differences speak to historically real matters.  It is not difficult to show that those differences are also more likely a case of fictional embellishment, so that the differences can support the skeptical position equally as powerfully as apologists think they support independence.

Fundies will say Matthew's account is longer than Mark's therefore Matthew's is not dependent upon Mark.  But what is the problem in accounting for Matthew describing Joseph slightly differently than Mark, as a case of Matthew borrowing the basic template from Mark, then inventing extra details?  After all, Matthew is the only author to mention the absurdly unlikely "bribed the guards to lie" story (28:13).  And if even conservatives like Licona and Blomberg refuse to insist on the historicity of Matthew's zombie-resurrection story in 27:52, and if we can already know that Matthew doesn't tip off the reader as to where the history ends and fable begins in that part of his gospel, then is the skeptic's crediting Matthew with a tendency to borrow and invent, in the area of Jesus' death and resurrection, seriously "unreasonable"?

So Matthew's unique version of the Joseph of Arimathea story does not count as an independent attestation.  And since Luke admits he was only reporting what other unidentified people told him (Luke 1:2), Luke's report about Joseph of Arimathea, coming as it does from Mark and otherwise unidentifiable sources, does not make skeptics unreasonable to label Luke's version as dependent, so that Matthew's and Luke's "multiple attestation" of the story becomes a hindrance rather than a help toward historicity.

Gee, how hard would it be to reasonably question the historical reliability of John's gospel, you know, that gospel that since ancient times was known to exhibit more concern for theology than history?  John obviously invents Christ-sayings.  It's not likely the Synoptic authors would knowingly exclude "Before Abraham was, I am" type statements from their gospels (John 8:58), since Jesus' deity, being essential doctrine and also the most unbelievable aspect of his teaching, would naturally motivate any cheerleader for Jesus to set forth his deity in clear unmistakable fashion, so it's reasonable to conclude the Synoptic authors don't quote the Christ-sayings now confined to John because Christ didn't really talk like that, most such statements in John are merely invented by him.  This is not too different from Jesus' parables, where on the surface, Jesus was referring to real people, but upon closer study, it becomes clear that he is only couching the story in what sounds like historical truth not because it is historical truth, but because he wants to teach a theological lesson.  Even Licona agrees with Craig Evans that if we could go back in time and follow Jesus around, we wouldn't find him speaking exactly as recorded in John.  There is an intense debate within Christian scholarly circles whether the gospels are giving us straight up verbatim reports of Jesus' actual words (ipsissima verba, what the vast majority of "inerrantist" fundamentalists believe), or whether they are giving us merely the "gist" of what was said (ipsissima vox, what most Christian scholars believe).  See one fundamentalist scholar's complaint here.  See Licona's different opinion here.

John's tendency to favor theology over historical accuracy is clear from what he says immediately prior to his story about Joseph of Arimathea.  He quotes Psalm 34:20 and Zech. 12:10 as predictions in the OT that were fulfilled at Jesus' crucifixion (no bones broken, people looking upon a pierced messiah).  Yet, as I document extensively in my up-coming book, Christian scholars are quite aware that the way the NT uses the OT is no simple matter (and is fertile breeding ground for accusations of error in the NT), and they often feel forced to concede that such passages were not true "predictions", therefore, what John presents as "fulfillment" is more accurately labeled a mere similarity or "typology", see here.

So the Joseph of Arimathea story can be deemed sufficiently problematic and lacking in multiple attestation that skepticism of this obvious apologetic material can be reasonably, even if not infallibly, warranted.

I think this manner of justifying skepticism of the Joseph of Arimathea story, a manner that does not necessarily insist it is a complete fiction, has greater persuasiveness than the manner of Alter and Torely.