Helen Bond

And last of all, he says to me, so this must be Paul's sort of experience of Jesus on the Damascus road where he gets some kind of visionary thing.

So when Paul is talking about it, he sounds as though they have some kind of appearances and these appearances convince them that Jesus is

alive again.

The first reference we get to the empty tomb is in the Gospel of Mark, written probably in the 70s.

So this is 40 years later.

That doesn't, of course, stop it being a much earlier tradition, but it is a fact that we don't have it any earlier.

And Paul doesn't mention an empty tomb, but it seems likely to me that there may have been something

to do with the tomb.

Maybe the women found it disturbed in some way, or maybe they couldn't find it, or there was something odd about the tomb.

And then you start to get these reports of visions.

And I mean, again, this is something that historians can't really...

answer because it's outside the normal rules of the universe.

You've got to either believe it if you're a follower or not.

But certainly, I think we're on good historical ground when we say that the early Christians thought that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

They thought that something had happened.

And so strong was that conviction that it does seem to have turned them into frightened people waiting, running off and not knowing what to do next.

to being bold missionaries who took this message around the empire.

Yeah.

I mean, not at first.

I think it took a little while before they were big enough, really, before anybody sort of... And whilst they're seen as Jews as well, I mean, Jews are a sort of protected ethnic group, largely because they were very helpful to Julius Caesar back in the