A fresco painting in Istanbul’s medieval Chora Church depicts Christ standing upon the smashed doors of the Underworld, retrieving Adam and Eve from their long bondage there.
(Wikimedia Commons; click to enlarge)
In retrospect, this seems a pretty clear prediction of Christ’s resurrection — which, as much as anything of which I can even conceive — would transform the disciples’ (and any future disciple’s) sorrow into unspeakable joy.
The historically-demonstrable emergence of the unstoppable early apostle-missionaries from what at first seemed clearly just another failed messianic movement ranks among the many persuasive arguments, in my mind, for the plausibility of claims of the triumph of Jesus over the grave.
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