We should not forget the meaning of Easter

Telegraph

18-04-2025

Is the Easter story becoming a myth? You might well think so, if we judge by the recent English Heritage booklet for children, which asserts that 'Easter started as a celebration of spring' for 'honouring the goddess Eostre'.
It's not difficult to find similar material. Walking through the Canary Wharf shopping centre last weekend, I found the 'Easter Tree of Life', a 'place for reflection and gratitude' where you can 'add a leaf to the branches sharing your future wishes [or] cherished memories'.
I don't want to be too critical of the Canary Wharf authorities. The signage does at least go on to claim 'trees have a deep symbolic meaning in Christian scripture … associated with the Easter story of Jesus dying on a wooden cross and rising to new life'.
But, even if they are indeed familiar with the Dream of the Rood, the Anglo-Saxon poem in the voice of a tree which would be cut down and used to crucify Jesus, in truth trees on which messages are hung are more commonly associated with folklore or paganism. The 'Tree of Life' comes from Norse mythology. And the fact is that the symbol of Christianity is a cross not a tree.
Yes, these are just anecdotes, but they testify to an underlying reality: a society which is increasingly unfamiliar with Christianity and so doesn't find such curious messaging as jarring as once it might have.
A 2020 YouGov poll shows that only two thirds of the country are confident Jesus was even an actual historical figure. A 2017 poll says that only just over half of Britons associate Jesus with Easter.
In this environment it's easy to see how the account of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection becomes just another 'story', more myth than history, helpful if it helps you, but no better founded than any other belief.
Yet Christianity is above all a religion which is based on a defined historical reality. You don't have to accept Christianity's metaphysical claims, but you do, I think, have to accept that it originates in the execution of a specific person, Jesus, a Jewish teacher, who 'suffered death under Pontius Pilate' in around AD 30.
Indeed it's not generally realised just how good the evidence for Jesus's life is. We have not only the New Testament, but also references in Roman writers: Tacitus, Josephus, Pliny the Younger. As Dr Peter Williams, Principal of Tyndale House in Cambridge, has written: 'Jesus has more extended text about him, in generally closer proximity to his life, than his contemporary [Roman Emperor] Tiberius, the most famous person in the then-known world.'
And it's not just a definite person but a definite place. If you visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem you will perhaps be surprised to find that it is in the middle of a walled city. How, you might ask, is that consistent with the Gospel account of a crucifixion outside the walls and a burial in a stone-cut tomb in a garden – an environment where, we are told, Mary Magdalene can initially mistake the risen Jesus for the gardener?
It seemed so unlikely to some Victorian antiquaries that they identified an alternative site north of Jerusalem, the so-called Garden Tomb, now known to be much older than the time of Jesus.
In fact the evidence now available to us is entirely consistent with the Gospel accounts. We now know that at the time of Pontius Pilate what's now the site of the Holy Sepulchre was a disused quarry area outside the city walls, with tomb caves cut into its bare rocks. The traditional rock of Golgotha within the church is exactly the sort of prominent outcrop, fairly close to the city gates and hence visible to many, where an execution would have been carried out.
But the most exciting evidence is the most recent. Ground-penetrating radar scans by the University of Athens have shown that hidden within the decorated chapel or edicule on the traditional burial site are the remains of a first century rock-cut tomb. And, strikingly, the most recent excavations by La Sapienza University in Rome, still under way, and reported just last month, show the remains of pollen from olive trees and grapevines, just as you would expect in a partly-cultivated area.
In short, the historical and archaeological evidence tends to confirm the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus: not just the core events, but the incidental detail too.
It can't of course confirm the Resurrection – which is what everything hinges upon. Without that, Jesus is just another failed Jewish preacher. For evidence of that we must look elsewhere, to the eyewitness testimony in the Gospels, the disciples' willingness to face persecution and death for their faith (unlikely, perhaps, if they knew that Jesus's body was still lying in the tomb), the explosion of Christianity across the world, and the experience of millions of people up to the present day. Last year, sitting in a Holy Sepulchre emptied of visitors by the Gaza war, I realised I found the evidence convincing.
But all of us must make our own minds up. Take a look at it for yourself. Meanwhile, Happy Easter.