Right, right.

Yeah, but I think they share some logics.

And I think, you know, we have it in the Greek magical papyri.

And then, but of course, then we also have tracing, you know, back even before and during the time of Jesus, we have evidence for curse tablets being placed near graves.

And we think that those are operating on similar logics.

And they're oftentimes invoking, you know, ghosts, or, you know, what we would call ghosts, you know, spirits of the recently deceased or whoever's in that grave.

And so it seems to be a similar logic that those who've been killed violently or those who have died before their time, the same logic that informs many ghost stories today, they have unfinished business and therefore they're unlikely to just kind of move on to the afterlife peacefully like we would hope they would.

who had died before

What have you found and what are we even talking about when we talk about an ancient ghost story?

Yeah, that's right.

So we have lots of ancient ghost stories that oftentimes sound a lot like modern ghost stories, although with, I think, an important difference that I think is important for thinking about the Jesus story.

So we have many stories of ghosts in the ancient world, you know, people who, especially who have maybe just deceased or just been killed, appearing to loved ones or family members or friends soon afterwards, or sometimes maybe to people who betrayed them, for example.

And ancient people often thought that, especially if you didn't get proper burial or if you were violently killed or if you were maybe killed before your time or died before your time, maybe due to disease, you were very likely to come back and either haunt people who betrayed you or maybe appear to your family or something like that.

What's interesting is that when those stories are told, many of the elements that show up there also show up in the Jesus story.

And so the ability to appear through locked doors, the ability to suddenly appear and suddenly vanish, for example, show up in these stories.

Um, can you walk us through some of these other apocryphal resurrection narratives and how they differ from the canonical ones?