Did Jesus literally rise from the dead? Twenty-five years after the event St. Paul gave this unambiguous answer: "If Christ has not risen, our preaching is in vain and so too is your faith" (I Cor.15,14).

The message of the first believers was not the Sermon on the Mount; it was Resurrection. "I recall to your minds the gospel I preached...what I also received...that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day." (I Cor.15,1-5). The risen Christ is not a reanimated corpse; "what is sown perishable, is raised imperishable" (I Cor.15,42); but raised he was. An un-risen Jesus is an un-divine Jesus, and instead of Christianity what we have is an ethical teaching shorn of the supernatural, a pallid deism, or what Flannery O'Connor famously called "the Church of Christ without Christ," "where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.