ABSTRACT
The argument of this article is that Jesus’s burial is portrayed in the Gospel of John as a claim on the promised land. Support for this thesis is given in four arguments. First, the fulfillment of the land promise in the OT moves narratively from a burial site to a temple site. Second, the king and temple emphases in the Gospel of John are tied directly to the land promise in the OT. Third, Jesus’s burial in John 19:38–42 uses OT allusions that serve to describe Jesus’s body using that same nexus of king and temple. Finally, burial is related to land claims not only in the OT but also in a variety of sociocultural contexts. Thus the intertextual and narrative matrix of John 19:38–42—namely that of burial, king, and temple—serves to present Jesus’s burial as a land claim.
