He raised one of his massive fists and said, “Suddenly I heard loud screaming in the room and felt a body fall across me. I opened my eyes to see Mary Magdalene’s terrified face, close to mine, and she was clawing at my shoulders with her nails, crying, ‘They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb and we know not where they have laid him!’ Again and again she said the words, shaking me all the while, until John lifted her from me and my sister came and took her away. My thoughts were still cloudy from sleep and the fever, but I suspected that the poor woman’s mind must have come loose again. She had once been possessed of seven devils before the Lord had laid hands on her, and I reasoned that the events of the past few days had brought about a relapse of her old condition.”

“What did you do?”

“Somehow I found the strength to crawl from my cot and put on my tunic and sandals. Then I asked John if he knew where Jesus had been buried, and he nodded, and I told him we should go to the grave and see for ourselves if what Mary had said was true. We both ran but John, being younger, arrived at the tomb long before me. When I finally entered the garden, not far from the hill of Golgotha where John had told me that Jesus had been crucified, John was standing beside the opening of the tomb, waiting. Resting against the sepulchre was a huge round stone that had been rolled away from the mouth of the grave. John’s voice sounded like a small child’s. ‘The tomb is empty!’ he said, and immediately I went inside.”

“Had you noticed any soldiers in the vicinity, any guards from the Temple, anyone at all?”

“No one. Once inside the tomb I could almost stand, and there, on a shelf hewn from the rock, I saw the sheet that had covered the body and smelled the heavy fragrance of spices. The sheet was the usual long and narrow piece of linen that is used in burial, wound around the body many times with spices and herbs inserted between the layers to prevent the body’s corruption. This sheet appeared to be still wrapped around something, but when I dared to place my hand on the cloth it collapsed and some of the spices fell from its folds to the floor of the cave. On the same shelf, only an arm’s length away from the sheet, lay the napkin that is always placed on the dead one’s head. When I backed out of the tomb, John went in, and he soon emerged, crying, ‘Now I believe!’ and we both knelt in prayers of gratitude to God for raising our Lord from his grave.”

“You both believed he had been resurrected from the dead?”