Matthew: Joseph “laid it in his own new tomb which he had hewn out in the rock” ([xxvii, 60]).
John: “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulcher, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus therefore because of the Jew’s preparation day; for the sepulcher was nigh at hand” ([xix, 41, 42]).
It is evident from John that the sepulcher did not belong to Joseph, but that it was one which happened to be convenient to the place of crucifixion; for, as Strauss justly argues: “The vicinity of the grave, when alleged as a motive, excludes the fact of possession.”
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Was his body embalmed when it was laid in the sepulcher?
John: It was. “He [Joseph] came therefore, and took the body of Jesus. And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight. Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury” ([xix, 38–40]).
Mark and Luke: It was not embalmed. “The women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulcher, and how his body was laid. And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments” ([Luke xxiii, 55, 56]); intending to embalm it “when the Sabbath was past” ([Mark xvi, 1]).