He was buried, and His tomb was empty.
Since the beginning, the Christian faith has hinged on the idea that Christ rose from the dead and rose in the fashion that the Jews believed in, that is an actual physical resurrection. Were the Resurrection a myth, it would have been painfully easy for Roman and Jewish authorities to disprove. All they needed to do was display Christ’s dead body on the fourth day, and the Christian religion would have been killed in the crib.
Christ’s execution was extremely public. People knew He died, and both Christian and Jewish sources show that followers and enemies of Christ alike knew the location of His tomb. Evidence also implies that the tomb was empty. Once again, had Christ’s body been in the tomb, killing the Christian movement would have been easy. The fact that it flourished shows that the tomb was empty. If the women mentioned in the New Testament simply went to the wrong tomb, as some skeptics suggest, it would have been simple for authorities to point believers to the correct tomb. Beyond that, early Jewish polemic against the young Christian religion involves claims that the Apostles stole the body, implying that the tomb was empty.
Some skeptics claim that, as an executed criminal, Christ would never have been given a tomb to begin with. It is true that the bodies of many crucified criminals were left to rot on the crosses as a warning to all who saw them, but this was not always the case. A Jewish ossuary from roughly a century before Christ’s death was found to contain the bones of a crucified man. In fact, one of the crucifixion nails was still embedded in his heel bone, and the nail itself had slivers of olive wood stuck to it. Whoever the man was, he had been crucified but was still given an honorable Jewish burial. There is no reason that Christ would not have been given the same treatment, especially when Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin and a high ranking man of Jerusalem, requested Jesus’ body.