AS EASTER COMES AND GOES EACH YEAR, thoughts about the resurrection always stay with me. Now, as in at least the first few centuries after Jesus' triumph over death, people hold verying views of it. What does it mean today—for Christians and others? What continues to persuade many that it actually happened?
We know of the resurrection only from the Bible. The earliest writings about Jesus, the authentic letters of Saint Paul, don't give many details about it. But the four Gospels, usually thought to be written a few decades later than Paul's letters, do. Those Gospels all agree: Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Roman army some 70 generations ago in Palestine. To all appearances he died on the cross. But as he had predicted, he resuscitated, left the guarded tomb in which he had been enclosed, and talked to his students in a form no different than the one he bore before the crucifixion.
The Gospels show that the initial reaction of Jesus' disciples varied—from bewilderment to awe to utter, beside-themselves joy. But once they had begun to come to grips with this event, it transformed them. For example, the most prominent disciple, Peter, in a short time went from publicly declaring that he didn't know Jesus to healing a man who had been crippled from birth.
