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June 16, 2026 |
| Death Rituals | ||
About the picture for this study: My request to the AI for a picture was: "A family at a funeral standing around a casket and crying." The massively excessive tearing was entirely the decision of the AI. It isn't inappropriate for this study though. So I kept it.
Twice in the past week, I've had to explain why I won't be attending a funeral, one for my pastor and one for my father. At my age, this is likely going to become more common, so this study will give me something I can give to people the next time this happens.
The problem is that people who have been raised in the church have been to many funeral services. No one questions whether this is what God wants or how we got here. It's just what everyone does when someone dies.
If a person says they prefer not to be involved, they are looked at like they are the crazy one. It's difficult to fight against ingrained traditions.
I did an AI search to see what it said about burial rituals and the church. Remember that SI doesn't usually make things up. It finds someone to quote or summarizes multiple people and passes the result along.
Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes (approximately 75–100 pounds) and fine linen cloths to anoint Jesus’ body for burial. Their primary purpose was to mask the smell of decomposing flesh and honor Jesus according to Jewish burial customs, as they did not have sufficient time to perform a full, proper anointing before the Sabbath began.
These actions served several specific functions:
Preservation and Hygiene: The spices were intended to temporarily preserve the body and cover the odor of decay until a more complete burial could occur after the Sabbath.
Honor and Devotion: Despite being secret disciples, they used their personal wealth to treat Jesus’ body with tender care, demonstrating their love and acknowledging His innocence and royal status.
Cultural Compliance: They followed the traditional Jewish practice of binding the body in linen strips with spices, ensuring Jesus received a dignified interment in a new, private tomb rather than the common grave reserved for criminals. (Some AI)
Most of this is made up to support what churches currently do. That's the hold that traditions have on people. Traditions preserve themselves.
The AI quote made 3 points that we'll look at next.
The AI quote refers to hygiene. The Jews understood nothing of hygiene. All they had were God's law on uncleaness, which had the secondary effect of hygiene.
The AI quote refers to preservation. Unlike in our time, they could do nothing that would preserve the body from rotting. The AI comment is wrong about that.
The real primary purpose was "to mask the smell of decomposing flesh." Martha knows this.
And Yeshua said, “Take away this stone.” Martha, the sister of [Lazar] who had died, said to him, “My Lord, by now it is putrid, for it has been four days.” (John 11:39)
We are very attuned to recognizing the smell of a rotting body. Police say that once you've smelled it, you never forget it. This may be a protection mechanism to warn us that, where others have died, we could die for the same reason. So it's very natural for us to want to have something to absorb, hide, or compartmentalize the odor.
This part of the AI quote is completely made up.
The dead do not benefit from death rituals. Some people say they are doing it for the person who died, or they are honoring that person, or "paying last respects." These are not Christian ideas. Nothing a person does or says at a funeral does anything to help the person who died, neither the body nor the spirit. The dead receive no honor from anything we do or say. Their honor, if any, comes from God.
It isn't even clear if the person's spirit is aware of what is going on under the sun in the land of the living.
The best that can be said is that you are showing other people how you honor a dead body.
So I asked an AI, "What does the Bible say about honoring the dead," and I got this.
The Bible emphasizes honoring the dead through respectful burial and mourning, viewing it as a reflection of human dignity and the hope of resurrection. Key practices include providing a dignified resting place, as seen when Abraham purchased a burial site for Sarah (Genesis 23:19) and Joseph requested his bones be moved to the Promised Land (Genesis 50:25). (Some AI)
The Bible does no such thing. If those two quotes are the best you've got, you've got nothing. Once again this is a church tradition trying to preserve itself.
When Abraham buys a burial site, it isn't what we would think of as a burial. He is buying a cave in the rocks where he can place Sarah's body. He gives the reasons: "I am a sojourner and a foreign resident among you" and "that I may bury my dead out of my sight." He is a stranger there and doesn't have a place to put the body. He doesn't want the body to lie around his camp until it rots away. He wants it to be "out of sight, out of mind." So he bought some land with a cave on it and put the body there.
There is nothing in that story about "honoring the dead through respectful burial," "human dignity," "resurrection," or "a dignified resting place." That's all fiction. As for mourning, Abraham did that before he had bought the cave.
It needs to be said that burial in a cave was only possible for families that owned land that had a rock cave on it. Most people did not have that. For them, the dead bodies were sometimes left somewhere to rot or they were burned. Burning was normal for the dead after a battle. Were they dishonored by such undignified treatment? No one from that time believed so.
"Cultural compliance" is a fancy way of saying "following tradition." That had become a very big part of the death rituals of Jesus' time. No one loves traditions more than Jews. What began with the need to mask the smell of a rotting corpse had become a big process. It also included professional mourners who would mourn at the funeral.
In the time of Jesus and his apostles, funerals, like weddings, were family affairs, as they had always been. It was the Roman Church that made them into church affairs.
Despite the teachings of the apostles, the Romans understood temples, and they understood the power and control that came from any religion. They wanted Christianity to work like that.
Christianity had abolished worship centers, but the Roman Church brought back priests, altars, and worship centers. To further insert themselves into the lives of Christians, they pushed for people to get married in a church, hold funerals in a church, be baptised in a church, hold communion in a church, and other activities. They saw the church as the center of Christian life, as it is seen now in all churches. The modern church is far from where it was supposed to be.
The Bible's perspective on a dead body is that it does not matter what happens to a body after death. Its former owner is done with it. There'll be a new, better one in the resurrection. For this reason dead bodies aren't important, and the Bible says very little about dealing with them.
The Old Testament's perspective on a dead body was that it was unclean and, if you touched it, you became unclean and needed to follow God's instructions to become clean again.
The body is nothing. It is only a shell. The person who was there, the person you knew, isn't there anymore. True Christians know that this dead body is done; it won't be coming back.
Christianity has become very focused on death and funerals, but Jesus wasn't much interested in them. because He said:
But Yeshua said to him, “Come after me and let the dead bury their dead.” (Matthew 8:22)
Tradition shouts out its interpretation of Jesus' words, "He means that following Jesus should have a higher priority in your life than worldly things."
If Jesus had meant that, he would have said something more like, "You can mourn with your family some other time." Instead, he criticizes the people involved in funerals and thus shows there is a real problem, not a matter of priority. The primary meaning of "let the dead bury the dead" is that the spiritually dead bury the physically dead. The secondary meaning is that the spiritually dead bury the dead bodies of the spiritually dead. Either way, there is no value in what they are doing. Dispose of the bodies and move on.
Jesus makes no allowance for the spiritually alive in these words on burying the dead. He doesn't say, "Except for the spiritually alive, let the dead bury the dead." Because there were people who were spiritually alive at the time, the implication from Jesus' words must be that the spiritually alive would not be involved in these burials.
Paul says:
I want you to know my brethren, that you should not have sorrow in you about those who are asleep, as do the rest of mankind who have no hope. (1 Thessalonians 4:13)
Again, Tradition shouts out its interpretation of Jesus' words, "He means that Christians shouldn't have as much sorrow as unbelievers."
But watch what happens when I pull one clause out of that verse.
I want you to know my brethren, that you should not have sorrow in you about those who are asleep, [because you have] hope. (1 Thessalonians 4:13)
He means Christians shouldn't have sorrow, period. There is no "as much as" statement in there, and no "you should not have such deep sorrow.
In those days, some people would go on long journeys, where they might be gone for many months, perhaps more than a year. This was normal life for the apostles. When people left like this, the family would have no idea when they would come back or even if they would. There were no communications as we have now. If the person never came back, the family might never know what happened. They didn't have cameras or ways to preserve dead bodies.
So when a person left on a trip like that, it was a sad and concerning separation, sad that you won't see them for a long time, concern about where they are and how they are doing. That's to be expected, and also expected by living Christians at that time, when a brother or sister in the faith has died. But there is no cause for sorrow.
Also note what Paul says a few verses later.
Therefore, comfort one another with these words, [that you will see them again in the resurrection]. (1 Thessalonians 4:18)
Christians should find comfort in those words, but the Christian funerals I've seen have more mourning going on than the non-Christian funerals. The non-Christians usually take a stiff-upper-lip approach and plow through it without saying much. The Christians are blubbering away, barely able to speak.
Christians have different death rituals, but they have one in common. They declare that the dead person is in Heaven. That declaration is certainly false.
That judgment is also not ours to make. We do not know. We think we know the dead person, but maybe we don't. We think we know what happens after death, but maybe we don't. We think we know Jesus is our savior, but maybe the whole thing has been a lie. Instead we are to have faith in all of these things.
I don't see anything sinful about attending a funeral. It's like Catholics crossing themselves. It achieves nothing and only confuses the spiritually young about what the faith is about.
I don't want to involve myself in "Christian" funerals, because it would look like I approve of them. It takes effort, though, to step out of any tradition. I like to think that someone will wonder why I'm not there and consider that there might be a problem. When I'm being honest with myself, though, I know funerals are so normal for them that they will think I'm crazy.
The voice of Tradition whispers the advice, "Go along with it … for the sake of others"