Is Jesus the man who lives on in the tomb (Mark 5, 39), who cannot be bound by the chains of death? The rumour soon went the rounds that Jesus had kept his power even when dead, and it found a superstitious crowd ready to listen to it.

In 1923 the tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamen was found in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and opened. When later men died who had participated in finding and searching the tomb, even in the enlightened 20th century there was soon talk of the curse of the mummy.

The immediately reactions of contemporaries are part of the history, the biography of a man, regardless how later generations receive that history.