By suffering the punishment for sin in our place, the crucified Christ made a way for you and me to have fellowship with him through faith. Through his resurrection, the same Christ opened the door for us to share in his eternal life. Will you at least consider the possibility that all this might be true?

A few blocks from the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, a piece of plaster is mounted on a wall in the Palatine Museum. The plaster appears blank at first glance, and you might wonder why the fragment has been so carefully affixed to the wall. But then you look closer, and you notice a bit of crude graffiti gouged into the surface.

This obscene etching from the late second or early third century AD depicts a man with the head of a donkey hanging from a cross with his posterior exposed. At the foot of the cross, a man wearing the sleeveless tunic of a slave prays with an outstretched hand. Three words have been scratched around the praying figure; the misspelled Greek clause can be translated into English as “Alexamenos worships God.”

The aim of the unknown graffiti artist seems to have been to mock an enslaved person named Alexamenos, who had devoted himself to Jesus. This artifact stands as a silent reminder of how shocking the reports about Jesus seemed to ancient Romans. Followers of this new way had devoted their lives to a deity who endured a death reserved for traitors and slaves. The word “crucify” was a vulgarity in ancient Rome, spoken sparingly in polite company. The Jewish historian Josephus referred to crucifixion as “that most wretched of deaths.”

Nevertheless, Christians persisted in praising a crucified God. Even more embarrassing from their neighbors’ perspective, the Christian deity apparently didn’t leave his body behind and ascend to the realm of the gods after he died, which is what any self-respecting deity would surely do. Instead, according to the Christians, the same scarred body that died was raised to life and transformed into the first sign of God’s new creation.

Message That Conquered an Empire

Despite making such distasteful claims, the movement multiplied. By the end of the first century, the news that a crucified Jew had returned to life had spread across the Roman Empire from Syria to Spain, and four written retellings of his life were circulating in the empire’s largest cities. Despite sporadic local persecutions, the communities that devoted themselves to Jesus kept gaining adherents.

After failing in their attempts to crush Christian communities through a series of empire-wide persecutions in the late third and early fourth centuries, the emperors finally gave up their efforts to force Christians to sacrifice to the venerable gods of Rome.

Looking back on this remarkable sequence of events, Augustine of Hippo saw evidence that the resurrection had really happened. He wrote,

Now, we have three incredible things, and yet all three have come to pass: First, it is incredible that Christ rose in the flesh and ascended with his flesh into heaven. Second, it is incredible that the world has come to believe something so incredible. Third, it is incredible that a few unknown men, with no standing and no education, were able to persuade the world . . . of something so incredible. Of these three incredible things, the people we are debating refuse to believe the first, they are compelled to grant the second, but they cannot explain how the second happened unless they believe the third. (author’s translation)

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