Library of the Resurrection

I walked into the living room and told my wife I thought Jesus rose from the dead.

Joana laughed. “Of course you believe it, Fellipe. We grew up Christian.”

No — I said. Not that I believe it. I think it actually happened.

She looked at me different after that.

Here’s the deal. Give me 30 minutes.

Not faith. Not church. Not a tract. I’m not asking you to believe anything. I’m asking you to weigh something with me. The way two friends weigh a thing at a bar. You can even go grab a coffee, a beer, something stronger. I’ll wait.

I’ll start where I think most honest people start. The scale runs from 100% impossible to 0% true. Dead people don’t come back. Jesus’s story never happened. That’s the educated default. That’s where I started too.

I want to be honest with you about something before we go further — I wanted it to be true. It’s too good not to want. Nature, healed. Running again with Lucky, my sweet dog that died years ago. My dad getting to hang out with his own dad — the one who died in his early twenties, who he barely got to know. Actual justice. For everybody. Come on.

I grew up with this story. So I knew I had to be extra careful when I was checking. The last thing I needed was to find what I was hoping to find.

Here’s what I found anyway.

Three things are historically locked. Not “Christians say.” Locked. Even atheist historians like Bart Ehrman won’t touch them. Crucifixion happened. Body went missing — both Roman and Jewish authorities had every reason to produce it, and never did. People started saying they’d seen him alive in the same city where it happened. Hundreds of them. Many of them died for the saying.

That’s the floor. Everything else is what you do with it.

Now look at the witnesses. The first people to find the empty tomb were women. In first-century Jerusalem. Where, per Josephus quoting his own people’s law, from women, no evidence shall be accepted. If you were inventing a religion — if you were sitting around a table making this up — you wouldn’t pick witnesses no court would believe. You just wouldn’t. Unless that’s actually who was there.

I imagine the four gospel writers in a room plotting this thing and the joke writes itself. “Okay so we’ll have to convince his mom and his fishermen friends to spend the next 30 years saying he came back from the dead, and we’ll need them to keep saying it through beatings and prison and execution…” Great liars don’t make great martyrs. That’s not a clever line, that’s just true.

And — look — the disciples weren’t pre-sold on this either. Peter runs to the tomb and walks back puzzled, shaking his head. Thomas says he won’t believe it without putting his hand in the wounds. Mary Magdalene assumes someone stole the body and asks the gardener — who turns out to be Jesus — where they put him. These are the foundational witnesses. Skeptics, every one of them. Jesus doesn’t punish the doubt. He invites them to put a hand in the wounds.

That’s not the rhetoric of a religion built to win you over.

So what are the alternatives?

He wasn’t really dead. Disciples stole the body. Mass hallucination. People have proposed each one for two thousand years. I find each of them harder to believe than the resurrection itself. Which is a weird sentence to type. But it’s where I landed.

The Japanese novelist Shūsaku Endō put it best — if we don’t believe in the resurrection, we run the risk of inventing alternatives that are even more unbelievable.

Or — if you want the sarcastic version — here are three pretty solid reasons. They’re super solid. (Read the whole thing. The whole piece is sarcasm. That’s the point.)

So this is where I got stuck. Sitting with it.

The crucifixion happened. The body was gone. People who had every reason to lie low instead got loud and got killed for it. The first witnesses were the wrong people to invent. The alternatives all required more belief, not less.

And then one day — I don’t even remember exactly when — it just landed. Shit. This actually happened.

That’s when I walked into the living room and told Joana.

Not that I believed it. I think people get hung up on that word. Belief sounds like a posture. Like a side you pick. This was different. This was the same thing I do at work when I look at a system and figure out what’s most likely true. I truly think it happened. That’s the sentence. That’s what I told her.

Here’s what I had to sit with next.

If it actually happened — even just allow the possibility — something broke. Or maybe started. The arrow we’d assumed everything ran along, the one that goes from order to decay, from life to death, from full to empty — that arrow has a crack in it.

Something entered the system from outside.

NT Wright writes about this. Tim Mackie at the Bible Project too. Paul calls Jesus the first fruits — meaning what happened to that body in that garden is what’s eventually happening to all of it. Not just souls. The whole material world. Romans 8 says creation itself is in bondage to decay and is being set free.

Whatever you call that — new creation, hope, a thaw, the second law starting to run backwards in one specific corner of one specific garden — it’s worth more than 30 minutes.

And maybe that’s why I keep writing about it.

John’s Gospel doesn’t end with a conclusion. It ends with a conversation. A question Jesus keeps asking — what are you looking for? Do you want to get well? Do you also want to leave? Do you believe this? Whom are you seeking? Do you love me? The risen Jesus doesn’t lecture. He asks.

It’s not a test. It’s not a trap. It’s an invitation.

To seek. To change. To stay. To doubt. To believe.

Come and see.

You gave me 30 minutes. That’s why I’ve put a lifetime on it.

If you want to keep going

These are ten essays I’ve written over the years, circling the same room. Read in order, you’ll watch the voice change as much as the argument does. The earliest are defensive. The newest are quieter. I’m leaving them all in.

Start here — how to even read these texts

1. Reading the Bible Right — it’s a story, not a rulebook.
2. I think, therefore I believe — faith as a reasoned choice, not a leap.

The case itself

3. Easter on April 1st — the long one. If you only read one, read this.
4. The Tomb Is Empty — the weekend, hour by hour.
5. The First Witnesses — why no inventor would have picked the women.
6. (Un)Believable — the burden of proof flips.
7. The Case for Christian Skepticism — Thomas, Peter, Mary. All doubted first.

Stress-testing it (these two are sarcastic — that’s intentional)

8. The Farce of the Gospels — what it would take for the gospels to be a hoax.
9. 3 Solid Reasons Why Believing Jesus Came Back From the Dead Is the Result of Brainwashing — the case, told as if it were nonsense.

What it opens up

10. A Journey Through the Gospel of John — seven questions. What the risen Jesus actually does is ask things.