It’s been a few weeks since Easter and I’ve been thinking. Each year at Easter, it has become common for television shows and newsmagazines to produce reports about the founder of the Christian religion. One of the latest in this tradition was a program on the Discovery Channel a few years back, produced by the director who brought us the movies Titanic and Avatar. In James Cameron’s view at the time, the tomb of Jesus and his family had been discovered. And so he brought out for our viewing pleasure the bone boxes of Jesus, his father and his mother—not to mention those of his wife and son.

For those of us who are Christians, we think his effort was akin to the con artist trying to convince the rube visiting New York for the first time that not only is he talking to the owner of the Brooklyn Bridge, but said owner is in desperate straights and wants to unload the property forthwith for only the current contents of his wallet. Or perhaps what we saw from Cameron that year was more like the carnival barker who is trying to convince us to peer behind the curtain—for a minimal charge—to see the bearded lady.

After two thousand years, Christians do not believe it is likely that the dead body of Jesus is going to be produced. After all, if that were going to happen, it would have been done a long time ago by people far more motivated than a Hollywood director looking to make some pocket change.

For the Roman government in Palestine during the first century AD–and for the leaders of the religious establishment in ancient Israel–the fact that a dangerous lunatic was not still dead—or that at least his followers were pretending that he wasn’t—was a monumental disaster. If the rebel leader had managed to escape his death sentence—or if his most ardent compatriots were able to convince the rabble that it was so—then the government’s goal of quashing a rebellion had failed miserably. Jesus’ rotting carcass was worth a fortune to the ancient tyranny. Unfortunately, they could not produce it and had to instead pay off some soldiers to claim that his body had been stolen, reducing the controversy to a “he said”, “she said” argument. Certainly far less than ideal for the Romans trying to crush a rebellion.

For Hollywood producers two thousand years after the event, it is easy to speculate that the whole Easter shenanigan was a hoax. After all, fooling people is most of what Hollywood is all about. Unfortunately, such Hollywood presentations fail to understand the political setting or the popular expectations of first century Palestine.

In the time of Jesus, the Jewish people believed themselves oppressed by a wicked foreign tyranny: the Roman Empire. Their greatest desire, the focus of all their hopes, was that God would intervene and rescue them again, just as he had, in times past, rescued them from Egyptian bondage. Many Jews had joined the ranks of the Zealots: ancient terrorists who took every opportunity to kill Romans and those Jews they had decided were collaborators. Meanwhile, around the countryside, pretenders arose claiming to be the chosen ones of God, who would lead an armed rebellion to throw off the shackles of the Romans. Called “messiahs” they took on the mantle of ancient Judges like Gideon or Samson, whom God had raised up in antiquity to rescue his people from their enemies. Time and again, the Romans had been forced to send soldiers against such “messiahs” slaughtering their followers and then arresting and executing their leaders. Jesus and his disciples were simply this sort of problem as far as the Romans were concerned. And by executing Jesus, they had solved the problem the same way they had solved all the others before him.

Christians therefore believe an improbable thing: that Jesus actually was God’s Christ (the Greek form of the Hebrew word Messiah) and that his purpose was not to free his people from political bondage, but rather to free them spiritually: to save them from their iniquity. But that is not the most improbable thing that Christians believe. They further believe that Jesus did not stay dead, but that God raised him back to life only three days after his execution.

And Christians have always been well aware of just how unlikely that is. Paul himself, the great apostle, reminded a church in the Greek city of Corinth that Christianity is built on this singular improbability. He wrote, “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” (1 Corinthians 15:14-19)

So, each year at Easter, Christians remember that Jesus did not stay dead. And somehow, for nearly two thousand years, Christianity has managed to endure, despite how improbable its foundation. On that first Easter, and on subsequent ones, the highly motivated Roman government and religious establishment could not overcome the inconvenient reality that the tomb of Jesus was, in fact, empty.

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