It would be difficult to name an individual who has had a greater impact on history than Jesus of Nazareth. Regarded as the Son of God by a billion Christians and as a great philosopher by millions of others of all faiths, his remarkable life has also inspired in different ways Jews, Moslems, and even agnostics. Many of those who cannot accept him in a religious sense admire his philosophy of forgiveness of enemies and the Golden Rule. The books written about Jesus over the centuries have been so numerous that we sometimes forget how little is really known about him, and much of that is interspersed with erroneous material. Most of the books are little more than speculation or a tired re-phrasing of earlier books.

It is clear that he was a brilliant, sensitive man who may have believed there could be only one explanation for God's unwillingness to intervene directly to end the savagery and unjustness of the Roman occupation of his Jewish homeland. God must have been testing and trying his people. Convinced that the Passover on or about 33 AD was the time for a dramatic and final confrontation with the Roman conquerors and some of the Jewish High Priests who doubted him, Jesus planned for what was to become possibly the single most exciting and mysterious event in human history. ...his “resurrection” from the dead. He was confident that -- if he died -- the grave could not hold him. Remarkably, his disciples and millions of Romans, Greeks, and Jews ultimately came to believe this as well, and one of the great religions was born.

The purpose of this book is not to add to those hundreds written to describe the life or philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. Where did he grow into an adult? How did he develop his ideas? When was he born? We address such questions here only in a peripheral way, because our focus is almost exclusively on the turbulent events surrounding the mystery of his disappearance from the tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea. After the poignant Gospel cry of Mary of Magdala (also called Mary Magdalene) on that long-ago First Easter that "they have taken my Lord from the tomb and we don't know where they have laid him!," the Apostles became convinced -- for a variety of reasons we shall discuss in detail later -- that Jesus had in fact risen from the dead. Had he not earlier proven his powers by raising several people, including most spectacularly and publicly Lazarus of Bethany, from the dead? Did not the resurrected Jesus appear to them, though often in a disguised form, and speak and eat? The overjoyed Apostles began a march that would eventually carry the words of Jesus across the earth; with a powerful and surprising appeal to Gentiles led by the remarkable Greek Paul (Saul of Taursus) despite the fact of Jesus’ crucifixion by the Gentile Romans, they succeeded beyond the imagination of, perhaps, even Jesus himself.

This book presents a startling discovery from ancient Christian documents that tell us what actually happened in Jerusalem on the First Easter, an understanding that has been lacking for 19 centuries and almost certainly was unknown even to the evangelists who wrote the Gospels. In this book, we shall show that Jesus was removed from his tomb by Two Greeks from the region of Gadarene, near the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee. One of them is named in the gospels.

This discovery surrounding the disappearance of Jesus -- a 2000-year old mystery -- is reinforced by the almost uncanny consistency in what we shall describe using these ancient Christian documents, almost certainly written by honest scribes who themselves did not understand the true nature of his activities they were recording. The decision by Jesus to initiate his startling plan; his secret meetings with the Two Greeks who would remove him from the tomb -- meetings on a hill in Galilee; in Jerusalem; at their secret campsite at Mount Olivet; and in the Garden of Gethsemane, all described in the accepted gospels but “hidden in plain sight” to readers for centuries in the stylized and confusing rhetoric of the New Testament; the apparent eyewitness accounts of his removal from the tomb in the apocryphal Lost Gospel of Peter; the stunning and unexpected confirmation that the robe-clothed “Angel” at Jesus’ tomb who speaks to Mary Magdalene is indeed one of these “Two Greeks”; the final, mysterious mountaintop meeting of these Greeks and the eleven Apostles ... .all these will give the unmistakable sense to the objective reader that at last, after 20 centuries, the oldest missing-person’s case in history has been solved.

Readers may wonder how the passages in the Gospels that we shall put forward as proof that Jesus was removed from the tomb by Two Greeks -- as part of an incredible plan he had set in motion that culminated in the First Easter -- could possibly have escaped detection for 2000 years. How could the most read and scrutinized book in Western history -- the New Testament -- not have revealed the truth to others long ago? The answer revolves around the fact that there are generally two very different categories of readers of the Gospels, with each category having a completely opposite approach to interpreting the biblical writings. On the one hand are the deeply religious, who accept with virtually no hesitation the premise that every word in the New Testament is completely accurate and free of error, exaggeration, or untruths. These individuals do not scrutinize the New Testament in an attempt to determine what really happened; rather, they simply accept without question or skeptical analysis that, for example, Jesus was actually visited by the long-dead Jewish prophets Moses and Elijah in the famous “Transfiguration” episode described in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

The exact opposite interpretation is placed on gospel stories such as the Transfiguration by many of the modern biblical scholars, who dismiss out of hand any New Testament episode that has even a hint of miraculous or supernatural activity. These scholars, typified by the “Jesus Seminar,” attack the Transfiguration episode as pure invention by the Gospel writers, meant to persuade Bible readers of Jesus’ exalted position by having him meet with Moses and Elijah. The most skeptical New Testament scholar was probably Rudolf Bultmann (1886-1968), who argued that most of the gospel material had originated “in the life of the church, not in the life of Jesus”. Bultmann’s goal was to demythologize the gospels, an activity which remains fashionable among many New Testament scholars. Professor A. H. Sayce wrote “It is difficult to understand why the gospels should have had such a hypnotizing effect, for its fictitious nature is its most obvious characteristic.”

With the Gospel readership divided so rigorously into “believers of everything” and “believers of nothing,” it is not surprising that real, non-miraculous events that may have formed the core of Gospel stories would remain hidden in the stylized vernacular of the original New Testament writers, who almost certainly were composing and interpreting the life of Jesus under the sincere belief that he was indeed the Messiah. But did that mean, as the Jesus Seminar and so many other modern scholars insist, that the Evangelists were simply inventing story after story to persuade us that Jesus was divine?

Rather, we are convinced that the gospel writers in general (there are some exceptions we shall discuss) -- and especially the remarkable and thorough Luke -- were attempting to present a coherent biography of Jesus of Nazareth, while only stressing those incidents that reinforced their own belief in his divinity and interpreted most of the events they wrote about as somehow related to what they believed to be his special relationship with God. They focused on stories that had come down to them from the Apostles themselves in either oral or written reminiscences. There were certainly exaggerations and slanting of the truth (of which the worst was focusing on the Jewish people as somehow responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion rather than the Roman crucifiers, almost certainly because the fledging Christian religion needed to attract Roman adherents in order to survive). There are some episodes and dialogue that appear to be creations by one or more of the Gospel writers, but many of these seem attempts to either supply unrecorded conversations by “imagining” what may have been said (a modern counterpart would be the televised so-called “docudramas”), or to relate an episode that may have been alluded to or predicted elsewhere in other Gospels but had somehow never actually been recorded (as we shall show, Matthew is particularly guilty of creating stories to be consistent with some events implied in Mark that were not actually described by Mark).

A good example of the failure of the deeply religious and the overly agnostic to correctly interpret biblical episodes because of their own biases is the Transfiguration. As related earlier, many Christians accept unquestioningly that Moses and Elijah visited Jesus on a mountaintop. At the other extreme, modern agnostic religious historians such as the Jesus Seminar dismiss the whole Transfiguration episode as invention. Yet, in our view, there is something important and disturbing going on in this story -- and in many others in the Gospels -- that both the rigidly orthodox believers and the overly skeptical agnostics totally miss (see Chapter 5 on “Strategy Meeting on a Hilltop: Jesus and the Two Greeks”).

In this book, for the first time, a former NASA Scientist with a strong engineering and physics background performed a thorough science analysis of the “resurrection” mystery. A distinguished Professor of Biblical Studies from a major university (who declines identification) served as a sounding board for the author, calls him/herself the “Deep Throat” of Theology and has requested that the author not reveal her/his identity to anyone until after his/her death, a request that will be honored.

As you read on, keep an open and objective mind to a new and startling understanding of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ last days. We expect strong reactions to this book from both of the entrenched camps; the religious will condemn this book as outrageous, sacrilegious and full of holes. At the other extreme, we expect the modern agnostic religious historians such as the Jesus Seminar to also attack -- partly because it will become clear that rather than ridiculing all New Testament “miracle” stories, they should have been analyzing them carefully as we did to learn the truth behind the incidents; and we expect them to be very unhappy that they missed what was really going on between Jesus the Two Greeks. This book is not an “easy” read. You may well conclude there are no “smoking guns” to prove our hypothesis (although we believe you will at least find a number of “hot guns”). The evidence is circumstantial by its nature, and because we are forced to use 2000-year old sources; it might not lead to a conviction of the Two Greeks for grave-breaking and entering if it were presented in a court of law. But we ask open-minded readers to review the evidence on their own, and reach their own conclusions about our presentation. If the truth about the resurrection had been easy to discover and interpret and describe, the events of the First Easter would have been revealed many years ago. The reader is invited to embark on a difficult journey that may or may not shake your faith, but at last we believe the World’s Oldest Missing Person’s Case is solved.