There’s no real doubt that Jesus lived 2.000 years ago – even celebrated atheist Richard Dawkins is happy to concede as much. So, the question is not so much ‘Did Jesus live?’ but rather, ‘Is He alive?’, and there Dawkins and many others answer with an emphatic ‘No’. Whatever else Jesus may have been he wasn’t divine, and he didn’t survive his death.
Such was the premise on which Frank Morison set out to write a book about the last week of Jesus’ life. With the working title ‘Jesus, the Last Phase’ Morison set out to prove that the resurrection could not possibly have happened, and that the Gospels contained no evidence to that effect.
But like so many before and since, Morison found that the journey he embarked on led him to an unexpected destination. Far from disproving the resurrection the more he examined the evidence, the more convinced he became that the resurrection was the only way to make sense of what happened after Jesus was taken down from the cross.
In the preface to his book he writes, ‘it is essentially a confession, the inner story of a man who originally set out to write one kind of book and found himself compelled by sheer force of circumstances to write quite another.’
