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‘Back from the dead’ shouted the front pages as the Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko told the world that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated. Except, of course, that he himself was central to that exaggeration, in a sting staged by Ukrainian security services intent on foiling an alleged Moscow assassination plot. His apparently blood-soaked body which had been seen around the world seemed in rude health as he offered his explanation the next day. ‘There was no other way,’ he said apologetically as he was greeted with gasps, shrieks and even a little dancing. He and his family had fled to Kiev after many threats because of his courageous investigative reporting. He knew that in many countries journalists like himself pay with their lives for exposing facts which powerful people want hidden. Those who take such risks deserve to be honoured, which is why tributes in his memory had poured in. But some of his colleagues are distressed. They believe the hoax undermines the credibility of what they do and plays into the hands of those who live by deception and lies. One friend said: ‘I feel anger and relief in equal measure’. As a Christian, these strange events drive me back to what I believe to be the biggest Back from the Dead story in human history. When Jesus of Nazareth disappeared from his borrowed tomb, no one denied there’d been a plot to kill him. He too was regarded as a threat to powerful people, and political and religious establishments conspired to silence him. His death was very public. But it was the suggestion that he was alive again which provoked a terrified anger, because it subverted so much of what his killers stood for. Not surprisingly, it was swiftly dismissed as fake news, and money changed hands to get a different story into circulation. The resurrection has always been dangerous - because it vindicates his turn-the-world-on-its-head teaching, suggests divine approval for his way of love, threatens those who’d prefer him sealed in a grave, rather than at large to change the world. The immediate effect on his friends was far more than relief: a whole bundle of emotions, joy, bewilderment, confusion, terror. Death not so much cheated, as defeated. Who knows how any of us would have reacted in that situation - or indeed what we’d have done under the pressures that bore down on the truth-seeking Arkady Babchenko? The more useful question is how much what we do reinforces the credibility of what we really believe, and how much it subverts it.