And although Christians’ interpretations of resurrection have fluctuated throughout two millennia in far more ways than we could mention here, as Adolf von Harnack writes: This could not affect the certainty of the conviction that the Lord would raise his people from death. This conviction, whose reverse is the fear of that God who casts [people] into hell, has become the mightiest power through which the Gospel has won [its reception throughout the world]. In other words, the Christian movement became powerful because Christians could claim to offer “eternal life”—not only to an emperor like
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