The Easter break brought a welcome breather for most of the country, and for Christians either renewed assurance that the body of the crucified Jesus came back to life, or pangs of doubt that such a miracle really happened.
There is another way of understanding Jesus' resurrection, however, that requires neither a premodern credulity nor suspension of what we know about the processes of death and decay.
For the meaning of the resurrection does not depend on what happened to Jesus' body, nor on reconciling the differing biblical accounts of that first Easter.
It hinges rather on how those who wrote about the events several decades later interpreted them, and especially how they drew on the rich resources of their Hebrew scriptures to make its meaning clear.
Many of those clues for a modern understanding of the resurrection lie in the Old Testament.
Indeed, American scholar and journalist Jack Miles likens the New Testament to ''a skin on every square inch of which the Old Testament is tattooed - the gospel writers cannot move a muscle without bringing some portion of the Hebrew scriptures into view''.
Making sense of the resurrection therefore begins with identifying the tattoos they used to interpret the one bit of historical reality we can be sure of: the first followers of Jesus had some kind of experience that turned the horror of his execution into confidence that the God they knew from their tradition had vindicated him.
That conviction transformed their despair into triumph, and gave birth to the church.
One of those tattoos is woven into the creeds recited through the ages: ''On the third day he rose again.''
By that they understood the Sunday following Jesus' crucifixion and death on the afternoon of Good Friday.
There is a slight problem here. Dawn on Sunday is only about 36 hours after Jesus' death, and that seems a tad short for a third day. Furthermore, the earliest gospel, Mark, has Jesus repeatedly predicting that he would rise ''after three days'', which can only mean Monday.
The later gospels blur the discrepancy by having him rise ''on the third day''. That is, Jesus was crucified on day one (Friday); lay dead in the tomb on day two (Saturday); and rose again on day three (Sunday).
Does the timing matter? Only if you take the stories literally - but that would be to miss their point. For they were not written as history or biography, but to express what the early church had come to believe about Jesus.
Hence the tattoos. The first Jewish Christians did not see themselves as ditching their religious heritage: they saw Jesus as bringing it to fruition.
That is why they quarried deep in their scriptures, drawing on the symbolism within them to meld the old tradition into the new story they were telling, and so add depth and resonance to their narratives.
Take those ''three days''. References to ''three days'' or ''the third day'' crop up again and again in the Jewish scriptures.
They refer especially to turning points in national or religious life, and gradually came to symbolise the day of judgement, when they believed a grand new reality would dawn - Jewish writings reverberate with ideas of the beginning of God's rule.
One commentary speaks of a general resurrection that would come at dawn three days after the end of the world. Mention ''the third day'', and all that is conjured up.
This old mythology would have been present in the minds of early Jewish Christians for its symbolic association with the coming of God's kingdom on Earth. What many Jews believed would happen to everyone at the general resurrection, they said, was actually happening with Jesus.
After the crucifixion, Jesus' followers mulled over everything that had happened, desperate to make some sense of it all. Then he appeared to some of them.
People explain that in different ways, including meeting Jesus restored to life as before. But for me, the key lies in psychologically triggered ''appearances'' or ''presences'', such as still happen for many people in the trauma of bereavement.
Potent ideas from the Jewish scriptures about a suffering servant, a sacrificial lamb, the long-awaited messiah who would restore the nation's glory days, gradually gelled around Jesus. And the gospel writers drew on the imagery of ''the third day'' to mark the inauguration, as they saw it, of God's new age.
These are the tattoos that help interpret Easter. It is not necessary to believe in a bodily resuscitation to feel their mythic power.
Ian Harris is a journalist and commentator.
