When speaking at an Easter service in her Church, Mary Baker Eddy said that the service spoke to her not of death but of Life (see Miscellaneous Writings, p. 180). In the resurrection, Jesus was demonstrating his deathless being.
Basing its conclusions on the testimony of the Bible and of Jesus himself, Christian Science teaches that the crucifixion was only one of the final steps in the Way-shower's great activity of proving man's eternal and indestructible unity with God. Jesus' career would have lost its great significance had it ended with his burial in a tomb. He had overcome for others sickness, lack, and other discords and had raised some from death. But he still had to raise his own body from the tomb and thus show that physical death, so called, is not a factor in man's real existence. He himself had to overcome the challenge of the carnal mind's pronouncement, "You are dead."
All material evidence pointed to the fact that Jesus' body was dead. He had stopped breathing on the cross, his body had been pierced with the spear and bound about completely with the winding sheet. Furthermore, three days had elapsed between the crucifixion and the resurrection—the time accepted by his contemporaries as indisputable evidence of the certainty of death. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul states plainly regarding the resurrection of Jesus' body (1 Cor. 15:12, 14): "If Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? . . . And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain."
