I can hardly believe it’s Easter again. It seems as if we have only just finished celebrating Christmas. But here we are again at the most important moment in the Christian calendar. The time when we focus on the greatest event or the greatest delusion in history: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. For this is the time of year when Christians say Jesus defeated evil by absorbing all it had to offer.

Now I know this is a rather startling claim to make and it does tend to go against our normal experience. For when people are dead they are dead, and we don’t get many opportunities to enjoy a meal with someone we buried a few days earlier.

But that is exactly what the disciples claim they did even though they had their doubts at times. Take Luke’s account. He tells us that sometime on that first Easter Sunday a group of Jesus’ followers were gathered together trying to make sense of the fact that several disciples claimed they had had an encounter with him. And as they did this so something very spooky happened: they thought they saw a ghost.

Now we shouldn’t be surprised at that. I have met people who claim to have seen – and claim to have been scared by – a ghost. In fact I found myself chatting to one of them just the other day, and I can assure you that the experience had completely unnerved him.

It was no different in Jesus day. Everyone in the ancient world took for granted that strange things can happen, and they probably knew as much about ghosts and visions as we do today. And they also knew that things like this tend to happen in the emotional aftermath of a recent bereavement.

But the more you look at the evidence the more ridiculous it seems to say that the disciples suffered from some kind of hallucination or saw a ghost. They claim they ate broiled fish with him – and were willing to die rather than deny it. Only an idiot would do that. And we need to remember that in addition to these strange unexpected encounters there was also an empty tomb to confirm their convictions.

We do well to put these two things together. For if we simply had the disciples’ claims that they had enjoyed some kind of spiritual experience we could easily put it all down to some sort of hallucination. In the same way without the resurrection experiences the empty tomb proves nothing because it could be argued that His body had been stolen.

The distinguished scholar Tom summed it up neatly when he said “In order to explain historically how all the early Christians came to the belief that they held, that Jesus had been raised, we have to say at least this: that the tomb was empty, except for some grave clothes, and that they really did see and talk with someone who gave every appearance of being a solidly physical Jesus”.

In 1930 a sceptic by the name of Frank Morison set out to disprove the resurrection as a silly myth. But as has been the case with so many other sceptics, myself included, the more he studied the evidence the more convinced he became that it really had happened. And as a result he wrote a book he had never intended writing. It was entitled “Who moved the stone?”

Given the fact that death is as certain as taxes I reckon it’s a question we would all do well to ponder.

Rob James is a Baptist Pastor broadcaster and writer who currently operates as a church and media consultant for the Evangelical Alliance Wales. He is available for preaching and teaching throughout Wales and can be contacted at [email protected]