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Round and round we modern readers go, disputing the range of possible facts which could have given rise to the New Testament’s testimony to Easter and to the early churches. But perhaps we are not yet listening to the New Testament itself. Its authors were making claims which, they believed, would confound their readers’ understanding; and they set out to equip those readers while they were reading to understand what they were reading. We distrust Origen’s claims for the spiritual aristocracy of which he himself was so conspicuous a member. But he read the New Testament well; and may have seen, in its authors’ techniques and the aims they revealed, what we have preferred not to see After the Resurrection: The Empty Tomb