Drawing on the wonderful scholarship of N. T. Wright, the late Raymond Brown and others, Wills makes a trenchant case for why Jesus' earliest followers believed in their Lord's physical resurrection. If the tomb had not been empty, the authorities could have shut down the early Christians rather easily by dragging out Jesus' bones; they had, after all, gone to all the trouble to execute him, and the only plausible explanation for the disciples' transformation from scattered and scared to fierce preachers and martyrs is that they came to believe Jesus had in fact risen from the dead and began, at last, to understand what he had been saying to them all along.
Nothing against scholarship, but how is this an advance beyond what St. Paul said (1 Corinthians 14)?
P.S. In a not-so-subtle bit of apologetics, the U.S. Catholic Bishops list the Bible in the sidebar under "Church Documents."
Who needs St. Paul when you have Wright and Brown? *grin*
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