The resurrection, more than any other of the church’s claims, has had a way of distinguishing Christians from their cultural surroundings. And so it is not surprising that the church has wrestled with the problem and meaning of the resurrection so profoundly in the modern scientific age, when common sense seems to rule out the idea that dead men live. … We are nonetheless invited to join a body of witnesses who declare that a first-century itinerant rabbi, executed in broad daylight, is actually alive and not dead. He was dead, but is no longer, because in fact he is the living God incarnate, and thus not even death can hold him down.

Dead men live.