Let’s imagine it like this: The man on the cross is not Jesus. The man crucified was a stand-in. A strategic measure. Part of a grand design and plan coordinated by the Twelve Apostles and Jesus. It was an inside job. The crucified man sacrificed himself for the cause. He played the role of Jesus, he endured the agony of crucifixion for the sake of renaissance. It was a look-alike, a double who had taken the fall. Did Mary Magdalene know, was she in on it? What about Mary? Were they kept in the dark? Who exactly was privy to this revolutionary ruse and gambit? The idea was for many to witness the demise of Jesus on the cross, and then, three days later, the real Jesus would emerge, reborn, unkillable, flexing and asserting his immortality and sanctifying his title as the Son of God. There is nothing more epic than life-after-death stories, nothing that captures the imagination with such zest and intrigue. This strategy would stack the odds in favor of a mass following, or cult-like influential sway. Conscious and enlightened zombies make for the greatest showmen. Jesus’s ultimate message was true and sincere, he really did want to spread the illuminated gospel of kindness and charity, yet how to get more followers? It was, then as it is now, a promotional issue and marketing challenge. The Apostles became a secret P.R. team. Jesus had to bring death back from beyond the grave, death had to publicly reintegrate with life. You could say the man in Golgotha was the fool on the hill. He was The Fool willing to take the plunge into a tomorrowless void for the sake of a cause he believed in. Faith became him in an anonymous whisper. The Apostles were well-versed in resurrection myths. They had guidelines to follow. Osiris would be a model of inspiration. Comebacks are the backbone of mythology. Myths don’t die, they are recycled. Repurposed. The illusion of witnessing Jesus’s death would start a revolution. They knew it was the tinder they needed to start the right kind of fire. The holy fire. They felt justified and supremely righteous in their aims and intent. The staging of a death was just as powerful, if not more powerful, than an actual death. Jesus didn’t die for your sins or mine. He died, theatrically, in order to return and claim a seat of power, become an ambassador with generational sway. Groucho Marx once said, Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? That line of logic could be reinterpreted and applied to that crisis in Golgotha. The man you saw on the cross was not the man you saw on the cross. I say saw, because you were there, weren’t you? A swirling patter of nameless ions, migrant specks of dust, the anti-matter of an endless dream. You saw what I saw, what so many saw, or believed they saw. It’s been said that the greatest trick the devil ever played was getting the world to believe he didn’t exist. Even greater was Jesus’s trick of getting the world to believe he stopped existing, only to return three days later, clean and well-lighted.