Taken from the February 2000 issue of American Funeral Director

Burial of the dead in early Christianity was seen as a corporal act of mercy and praying for the dead was seen as a spiritual act of mercy. Early Christians believed firmly that cremation was not a wise decision. They based this on the following: Pagan cultures used cremation as a method to deny the reality of the resurrection and hence, mock Christianity. The Bible clearly teaches that the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit and cremation was viewed as extremely destructive as compared to earth burial. Cremation caused practical problems even in the early period of Christianity in determining foul play and the mode of death.

Cremation was ultimately prohibited by Constantine the Great, the first world renowned person to embrace Christianity. The phrase ashes to ashes, dust to dust is not found in the Bible, but in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: We therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.

In the Old Testament, only criminals such as Achan (Joshua 7:25) were burned. The heathen burned the bones of the dead and it was a sign of a great spiritual travesty (I Kings 13:2; 2 Kings 23:16-20; Amos 2:1; Amos 6:10). The punishment for sex sins was cremation, according to Leviticus 20:14 and 21:9. Jews then and today consider a lack of proper burial or disturbing the final resting place a tragedy of significant proportions. The Handbook of Life in Bible Times states: Cremation was virtually unknown; burning a body was an outrage inflicted only on evildoers. Manners & Customs in the Bible states: Failure to be buried was the greatest disgrace for the Israelite dead ... cremation was almost unknown. The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible states: "The Jews, as Tacitus (Hist 5:5) indicates, were averse to cremating the corpse.

The New Schaff-Herzog Religious Encyclopedia regarding Hebrew practice states: "Indeed, incineration implied something discreditable to the dead and (cremation) was an intensification of the death penalty. According to the encyclopedia: "The Western Church of the Middle Ages also knew only of burial as a means of disposal of the dead. Charlemagne forbade the conquered Saxons to cremate corpses on pain of death.

In time, the issue of cremation became so frustrating to the Roman Catholic Church in particular that Pope Leo XIII issued Canon Law #1203 which reads: "The bodies of the faithful must be buried, cremation is forbidden." Also in May 1886, a Vatican decree forbade Roman Catholics from joining societies whose purpose it was to spread the practice of cremation because it implied a denial of the resurrection of the body. On May 8, 1963, Pope Paul VI removed Canon Law #1203. Today many denominations have eased the prohibition on cremation.

Primary to the earliest burial practices in the Church of Antiquity is the mourners placing a scroll on the breast of the deceased Christian. The scroll contained the following testaments:

That the deceased had been baptized before death.
That the deceased had been a pious person.
That the deceased had partaken of Holy Communion often.

The early Christian took the reverential care of the dead very seriously. Nowhere was this care better witnessed than in the catacombs and in the work of the Fossores.

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