Before Easter became a holy day, it was the beginning of the Resistance

Belief in the resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of the Christian faith. But the miracle of Easter didn’t end there. What happened afterward was just as improbable – and offers a blueprint for contemporary resistance movements.

In the year 112, a Roman governor in modern-day Turkey had his first encounter with members of a strange religious cult called “Christiani.” The governor had heard reports the cult followed an obscure criminal who had been tortured and executed by the Romans. His followers, though, believed that their leader was still somehow alive. They met in each others’ homes for communal meals where, rumor had it, they practiced cannibalism by drinking the blood of their leader and held orgies. The governor became even more puzzled when he summoned two leaders from the cult for interrogation. He wrote about the encounter. “I believe it all the more necessary to find out the truth from two slave women, whom they call deaconesses, even by torture,” he wrote to the Roman Emperor Trajan.” I found nothing but depraved and immoderate superstition.” He assured Trajan that he had deployed the firm hand of Rome to halt the “contagion.” The governor, Pliny the Younger, would go on to some renown. He would write additional letters that gave historians crucial insight into the Roman Empire. And he would provide a harrowing first-person account of the volcanic eruption that buried the city of Pompeii. But he would miss the seismic religious shift that literally stared him in the face. The obscure cult would become the dominant faith in Rome and the most widely practiced religion in the world. The cross, an instrument of torture used by the Roman government to publicly lynch political revolutionaries, would “come to serve as the most globally recognized symbol of a god that there has ever been,” according to the scholar Tom Holland, in his book, “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution remade the World.”