The Episode She Sent Me

The message said this is fascinating!! with two exclamation marks, and it was sent at ten past nine on a Tuesday by somebody who meant nothing by it at all.

Bec is not on a campaign. Bec sends her things constantly. Recipes, a thing about sleep, a video of a dog that can open a fridge. She had listened to this on a walk and thought it was interesting and passed it on the way you pass on anything.

She played it on the school run with the radio off.

And about eleven minutes in, a very calm man with a very pleasant voice explained that the whole of it, the entire faith, was essentially assembled in the fourth century by a group of bishops who sat down and voted on what would be in and what would be out, and that before that it had been a loose collection of competing stories and nobody had thought the central figure was anything more than a teacher.

He was not sneering. That was the worst part. He sounded reasonable and slightly sorry about it.

She got to the roundabout by the leisure center and turned it off and drove the rest of the way with her jaw doing something.

That was Tuesday. It is now Friday.

She has not looked it up. She has an unlocked phone in her hand about ninety times a day and she has not typed one word about it, and she knows exactly why, and she has not said it to anybody including her husband.

She is not afraid it is true.

She is afraid she will look, and find something half true, and not be able to tell which half.

Nobody here is going to tell you the question was silly

Let me start with the three days, because they are not cowardice and I am not going to let anybody call them that.

Not looking is what a person does when the thing at stake is not information. If Bec had sent you a podcast about the moon landing you would have looked it up at the traffic lights. You did not look because you have built a life on this and you know, correctly, that some questions cannot be half opened.

So hear this, and take it as settled rather than as reassurance: you are allowed to ask, and you have been the entire time. That is not my kind framing of a hard week, it is what stands written into the way the accounts present themselves, and the same Holy Spirit who inspired them is the one who has been sitting in the car with you since Tuesday.

Because there is something inside Paul's letters that is worth looking straight at, and it does not require you to trust me about anything.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.1 Corinthians 15:3-5

Read the first six words again. For what I received I passed on.

He is not composing. He says so. He is handing over a set of lines he was given by somebody else, and the phrasing has the shape of something already worn smooth by being said, and it sits inside a letter written roughly twenty-five years after the events it describes.

Now here is the honest part, and I am going to say it plainly because this site does not do the other thing. That is a judgement about wording, not a receipt. A great many people who study this, including people with no stake in whether it is true, read those lines as a formula older than the letter that quotes it. Some read it differently. Nobody has a document with a date on it.

But this is yours right now rather than pending a verdict: the claim was not made for the first time in the fourth century, because the written word contains a man quoting an older wording about a resurrection inside a letter he wrote while eyewitnesses were still alive, and the Holy Spirit is the one who preserved it in the ordinary correspondence of a working apostle rather than in a decree.

And the fourth-century council the calm man mentioned did happen. It was real, and it argued about real things.

What it argued about was not whether the resurrection had been claimed. It was arguing about how to say what the claim meant, between people who all already held it, because it was already written down and already handed on, and the Holy Spirit had been carrying it through ordinary letters for three centuries by then. That is a different meeting from the one described on the podcast, and you are entitled to know the difference without anybody making you feel foolish for not having known it.