Resurrection of Jesus occupies a contested space between reported history, religious confession, polemic, and Shmuel Ash’s imaginative reconstruction. The novel does not settle whether the event occurred; instead, it follows how different sources describe it, how Jewish writers responded to Christian claims, and how Shmuel reinterprets the story through Judas Iscariot’s faith and expectation.

Ancient Accounts and the Problem of Evidence

In the account Shmuel studies, Josephus—also called Yosef Ben Matitiahu, a Jewish historian born only a few years after Jesus’s crucifixion—appears to have left two markedly different versions of the episode. In the passage preserved in Antiquities, Jesus is called the Messiah and is said to have appeared alive on the third day. The wording is so explicitly Christian that some modern scholars, including Professor Gustav Yom-Tov Eisenschloss, judge it impossible that Josephus wrote it as it stands; they propose that Christian hands rewrote and inserted the passage later.

A different version, transmitted by Agapius, a tenth-century Arab Christian writer, does not have Josephus affirm Jesus as the Messiah or state that the resurrection actually happened. It presents him instead as describing objectively what Jesus’s followers believed. The contrast makes the surviving account itself part of the novel’s subject: the claim of resurrection reaches the reader through divergent textual traditions, and the status of the testimony is uncertain.

In either version, Josephus devotes fewer than twelve lines to Jesus’s life, message, miracles, crucifixion, resurrection, and the new religion of his followers. The brevity matters to Shmuel’s inquiry. A historian nearly contemporary with Jesus gives the entire episode little space, while later communities invest it with immense theological consequence. The difference between a brief historical notice and a foundational religious claim becomes one of the tensions the novel leaves open rather than resolving.

Jewish Responses Across the Centuries

The novel places the resurrection claim within a longer history of Jewish engagement with Jesus and Christian belief. Rabbinic references to Jesus are scarce and sometimes ambiguous: some may allude to him, while others may concern different people altogether. In later periods, potentially defamatory passages in the Babylonian Talmud were removed from almost all printed versions because Jews feared what Christian neighbors might do if they read them. The record is therefore shaped not only by argument but also by the danger surrounding its preservation.

Medieval polemical writing could reject the resurrection directly. The Book of Nestor the Priest, first composed in Arabic by an anonymous Jewish author around the mid-ninth century or somewhat earlier, challenged Gospel contradictions, denied Jesus’s divinity, and mocked aspects of the Passion and death. Its account could also portray Jesus as a devout Jew who never intended to establish a new religion and whose followers later altered his image. These competing approaches show that Jewish criticism did not produce a single interpretation: an argument against Christian doctrine could also insist on Jesus’s Jewish identity.

Other medieval Jewish thinkers adopted distinct positions. Rabbi Gershom ha-Cohen objected to degrading stories about Jesus as foolish and shameful, even while questioning the New Testament. In The Kuzari, Yehuda ha-Levi gives a Christian sage a substantially undistorted account of Jesus and the Trinity, while the Khazar king remains unconvinced. Maimonides calls Jesus a false prophet but regards Christianity as a step in humanity’s movement away from paganism toward belief in the God of Israel; he also maintains that Jesus was not responsible for everything his disciples later said and did. These accounts place the resurrection within a history of selective acceptance, rejection, and reinterpretation rather than a simple divide between belief and silence.

Atalia Abravanel finds the arguments of Ramban—Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman, known to Christians as Nahmanides—persuasive. In the Disputation of Barcelona, Ramban argued that the Messiah’s coming should end bloodshed and establish dominion, conditions he said had not followed Jesus’s life and death. Shmuel answers that such reasoning does not confront Jesus’s message of universal love, forgiveness, charity, and compassion. His response separates the question of resurrection from the moral force he finds in Jesus: he says he is an atheist and does not believe Jesus was God or God’s Son, yet loves Jesus and his words.

Shmuel’s Reinterpretation Through Judas

Shmuel’s own account reverses the customary role assigned to Judas Iscariot. In his reconstruction, Judas begins as a man sent to expose Jesus, but becomes his most devoted disciple, captivated by Jesus’s humility, intimacy with others, moral stature, humor, and teaching. Shmuel writes that Judas becomes the first person to believe with absolute certainty in Jesus’s divinity. His faith is not merely assent to resurrection as a past event; it is expectation that a decisive public miracle is still to come.

Judas concludes that Jesus must go from Galilee to Jerusalem, where his divine power can be demonstrated before a large audience. He imagines Jesus being crucified publicly and then descending alive from the cross, with the assembled people recognizing him and the kingdom of heaven beginning there. The resurrection is thus transformed from a reported appearance after death into the anticipated culmination of a public ordeal. Jerusalem and the approaching Passover provide the setting for Judas’s expectation of a universal revelation.

In Shmuel’s version, Judas helps arrange the crucifixion because he believes it will make that revelation possible. He moves among priestly and Pharisaic circles, uses his influence, and may even pay bribes; the familiar story of payment for betrayal is recast as a possible invention by Jesus’s enemies or by Judas himself. The decisive point is not a sale of Jesus but Judas’s conviction that the crucifixion will lead to his return. At the cross, even as Jesus suffers and dies, Judas continues to expect him to rise, leave the cross, and announce love to the world.

Expectation, Death, and the Meaning of the Event

The novel gives no confirmation that Judas’s expected miracle occurs. In Shmuel’s narrative, Jesus dies, and his final words express abandonment rather than triumph. That ending breaks the connection Judas had imagined between public execution and immediate revelation. The resurrection remains the object of a disciple’s absolute faith, while the account of Jesus’s death exposes the gulf between that expectation and what happens in Shmuel’s telling.

This reinterpretation also changes the meaning of betrayal. Shmuel does not portray Judas as the man who sells out a teacher he has ceased to follow. He casts him as the devoted disciple who initiates the crucifixion because he believes Jesus can survive it and reveal his divinity. The act traditionally associated with treachery becomes, in this account, an extreme and disastrous expression of loyalty. The novel therefore makes the resurrection inseparable from the question of how a story’s familiar roles are produced—and from the cost of trusting a promised miracle.

The episode remains contested in the novel’s present as well as in its ancient and medieval sources. Jewish texts variously omit, dispute, reinterpret, or criticize Christian claims; Shmuel’s work gives Judas a central place in a tradition that, he observes, has largely avoided discussing him. Resurrection is consequently not treated as a self-evident fact but as a claim mediated by texts and communities, and as the hinge of Shmuel’s revision: Judas’s faith makes the crucifixion an attempted path to revelation, even though Jesus’s death leaves that hoped-for outcome unfulfilled in the narrative.