A Reader's Easter Digest
“Lent must be a great time for writing Behind the Gospels”
– a friend, Lent 2025
In most Churches today, time is split in three: feasts (like Easter), preparatory seasons (like Lent), and what is fondly known as ‘ordinary time’ (like the summer holidays.)
In the lead-up to Easter, I had planned to travel again to that foreign country which is the past and return with regular, seasonal insights. I would wrestle again with that most knotty of questions: what does history have to say about Easter?
Sadly, I got only so far as a Lenten post on Jesus’ wilderness temptations before a bout of man-flu reminded me that Behind the Gospels needn’t follow the Church calendar too exactly.
So, rather than travelling back two thousand years, I decided it would be more convenient to trip to the more recent past – the virtual halls of the Behind the Gospels’ archive – and create a collage of some of my more topical Easter essays.
Several of the pieces below tackle classic debates around Holy Week and Easter: when did Jesus die? What sort of burial did he receive? Others grapple with common apologetic motifs: What about the Turin Shroud? Or martyred disciples?
Whichever ones you peruse, I hope they provide something to chew on this Easter.
1. Women Witnesses – Proof of an Empty Tomb?
It is often claimed that the women would not be invented as the preachers of the empty tomb because their testimony was unacceptable in first-century society. In this post, I take a critical look at this common apologetic motif.
2. Did Jesus Receive a Burial?
In contemporary scholarship, there are three key ideas about Jesus’ burial: he was buried by Joseph, he was not buried at all, or he was buried in a common grave. In this overview, I survey the key arguments for and against these main positions.
3. Is the Turin Shroud Authentic?
My doctoral thesis was on the Gospels’ treatment of Jesus’ physical appearance. When this comes up in conversation, I am often asked about the Turin Shroud. In this post, I ask whether the Shroud gives is a reliable image of Jesus’ appearance.
4. When did Jesus Die?
One of the most glaring contradictions in the Gospels concerns the date of Jesus’ death. In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus dies after eating the Passover meal. In John, he dies on the eve of Passover, before the Passover feast was eaten. In this essay, I look at one of the most common attempts to harmonise the accounts.
5. Vanishing Bodies, Ascending Gods?
In the ancient Roman world, there were many stories of vanishing heroines and heroes. Here I compare the account of the empty tomb in John to a fictional empty tomb narrative in the popular ancient Greek novel, Callirhoe.
6. Ancient Apologetics for the Empty Tomb?
It is well-known that ancient apocryphal Gospels, such as the Gospel of Peter, contain apologetic agendas. What is less often considered is that a primitive form of those same apologetic agendas is found within the canonical Gospels themselves. In this post, I look at a number of apologetic motifs in the canonical Gospels.
7. Seven Evidences for the Resurrection? (Part One & Part Two)
Finally, in this two-parter, I look at seven evidences for the resurrection. Part one addresses the Turin Shroud, the disciples’ martyrdom, and the women at the tomb.
Part two explores something I’ve dubbed the ‘argument from resurrection’; the conversion of Jesus’ brother, James; and the appearance to the five hundred. I conclude with a reflection on the strangeness of the resurrection accounts.