What do you think of Dale Allisons argument that it was possible to identify which remains belonged to criminals buried in the graveyard of the condemned?
This is a great question. For readers not familiar with Allison’s book, which I highly recommend, here is the full argument. On the one hand, if Jesus was, as the Gospels have it, buried alone, then all that would have mattered was the place. One could have checked the cave for its one corpse no matter what the condition of that corpse. On the other hand, if Jesus was buried with others, m. Sanh. 6:5-6 is evidence that his body would still have been identifiable. The rabbinic text presupposes that, even if a criminal had been buried dishonorably, it was yet possible for relatives to claim the skeleton after some time had passed: “When the flesh had wasted away they gathered together the bones and buried them in their own place.” If relatives could collect the bones of an executed criminal after the flesh had fallen off, then those bones were not in a humbled pile of corpses, but must have been deposited in such a way as to allow for later identification… Even if it were sometimes other
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