My Radical Theory About the Resurrection

Look, I know that, if people believe what I'm about to say, then it would turn our views on Easter - as they say - "upside down". I know this may come as a shock to many. That some will say this is just the sort or dangerous stuff that church leaders should stay well clear of. And I know that if the press got wind of my views I'd be on the front pages of the papers with headlines like "We must change our views of Easter, says Potty Archdruid."

But I've read the differing stories of the Resurrection in the Gospels. You can see the way the details are inconsistent - the number or angels, the people who go to the empty tomb, Jesus's different itinerary after leaving the Garden.

There's the vagueness of some stories about Jesus's appearances after Easter Sunday. The apparent randomness of when he turns up. The way John just goes off on a completely different storyline to the other Gospels. The story that Paul gives in 1 Corinthians, which seems to be a tidying-up.

And then on that - the fact that Paul's list is actually written before the scruffy, inconsistent, random selection of stories in the Gospels.

And I've come to the conclusion that the reason that these stories are so different, with so many loopholes and oddities, is that the story behind them is true. I don't need to tell myself that the Spirit dictated the words directly to the evangelists - not least because, if that were the case, it would suggest that a divinely-inspired, literally-true-in-in-every-word account is unaccountably full of minor discrepancies. No, I'm going to go with this being an divine story, written down several times in human handwriting.

I'm going to believe that the ideas that it was wish-fulfilment, a bizarre, 50-day, mass hallucination, a kind of spiritual consolation that became a story about a bodily resurrection - are all themselves made up - ways for failed modernists to try and persuade themselves that they could hold an unlikely belief and what they thought was a "scientific" framework in tension. I'm going to believe there are only two proper, respectable alternatives - either it's all been made up, or it's fundamentally true. And I'm going with the latter.

I'm going to accept that when Mary Magdalene - maybe a bit of s groupie, probably not a prostitute, definitely a mourning follower - gets down to the garden on that cold morning and finds a large stone in the wrong place, everything changes. For her, for the other women, for Peter, for John, for Cleophas, for James and Joses, for Paul, for you and me, for the whole of creation. Because Death has received a deadly blow, the gates of Hell are broken down, and we are free.

So I'm going to put on the scorched Hi Viz (got a bit too close to the Eternal Flame in that draught yesterday, didn't I), go out into the cold, imperfect, brutal, flawed world, and shout out the news that, against all probability, a group of women took to a bunch of broken, terrified Galileans all those centuries ago.

"He is risen!"