Mystery and memory at Easter

Easter memories are many and varied. St Peter gives a very brief account to the family of the Roman centurion Cornelius: Jesus died and reappeared to his companions.

It's brief, perhaps because it is an early account and maybe also because the audience are new believers, unfamiliar with the lore of Jesus' followers. We all have to start somewhere.

St Paul, in his first letter to Corinth, adds to the list of Jesus' appearances after Easter. Jesus appears to Peter, and the 12 disciples, then to 500 people, then to James, and finally to Paul, who is perhaps the first believer who only knew Jesus in the spirit, rather than in the flesh.

Paul's Easter moment, the famous conversion on the road to Damascus, comes just before the baptism of Cornelius's family, the first Romans to receive the rite. Both are recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, a book which records how the message spreads beyond the close circle of the earliest believers.

As it spreads, it becomes necessary to define the various memories of Easter, even to codify and explain them. And clearly there are some differences in the detail.

Paul refers to Jesus as the Passover lamb, sacrificed for the great Jewish feast of liberation. This resonates with the account in John's Gospel that Jesus was crucified on the day before the Passover, and so was excluded from the feast – a poignant scene of rejection and a powerful image of innocence betrayed. This theme is echoed in the Hymn to the Risen Christ, an early piece of church poetry traditionally recited on Easter Sunday morning.

All three have a different emphasis to our traditional story of Good Friday, which comes from the other Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. They appear to show Jesus eating the Passover meal and then being crucified the following day, Friday; though they may also be read as referring to the day before, depending on whose expert commentary you follow.

By contrast, John's Last Supper scene, on the night before Passover, is not of bread and wine, or of the customary roast lamb, but of washing feet – a tradition we observe on Maundy Thursday.

What all accounts agree on is that Jesus died and reappeared. Gradually the story is developed into the more detailed accounts we have today.

In fact it's a Jewish habit to add to scriptures, then to interpret the story further from those additions. The earliest Christians were Jewish, or at least used Jewish scripture to understand the events of the crucifixion and Easter, and so would have easily fallen into the same habit in writing to explain what they had seen and heard.

John says that Mary – a woman – is the first to see the open tomb on Easter morning, and the unlikely reliance on women's testimony at that time is taken as proof of the Easter story told in all four Gospels. Why would you take the risk of reporting it that way if hadn't actually happened that way?

Some take that further to say only a woman would have gone to the garden without a logical plan to roll away the stone. It's an idea that belittles men and women – suggesting that women are not logical, and that men cannot act in faith.

In fact John says that the beloved disciple – perhaps John himself – is the first to see and believe what he finds in the empty tomb, even if what he understands is not explained.

Mary hangs back and has the more dramatic experience, the first face-to-face encounter with the risen Jesus in the garden around the tomb.

My Easter moment came not in the heart of the Jerusalem, where the major churches mark the Holy Sepulchre in a gaudy, crowded basilica. It came at the garden tomb, an alternative site outside the city walls; a simple hollow in a rock within a carefully maintained garden which overlooks a skull-shaped cliff face.

Curiously the garden is closed on a Sunday morning – the last day of our visit – but being illogically determined to challenge the establishment, I went to take a final photograph. The gate was indeed locked, but around the corner, below the cliff face, is a public bus station.

Crucifixion generally happened on busy roads so all should see and be intimidated by the horrific scene of slow, agonising death and subsequent decay. Some scholars argue that the body would have been left to rot and so there would be no burial, no stone and no miraculously empty tomb.

But in place of the horror was a strange reassurance: buses depart from that place of the skull for Bethlehem and the journey home.

That one detail put the whole story in perspective for me. All was possible in that place; the hopes and fears of many years met in that moment.

In an era of instant karma, when multiple news channels attest the same events in what broadcasters call "reality", it pays to remember that the ancients had only memory, a frail and fragile thing.

Yet at Easter all memory points to the same conclusion: He is risen indeed.