was buried. To be sure, they also confessed that he was risen from the dead, but that further claim, albeit far more contestable as a biographical datum, did not in any sense qualify belief in his humanity. On the contrary, only one who had truly died could rise again, so precisely as the risen One, Jesus was confessed as one who had died—a defining feature of human existence, but emphatically not of divinity (Rom. 1:23; 1 Tim. 6:16; cf. Ps. 68:20).3 And while there were early Christians (usually