It is difficult for people in the faith community, 2,000 years after the Christian movement began, to imagine — much less appreciate — what it was like to stand up for Jesus. To put it mildly, it was incredibly difficult.

The first believers knew something extraordinary. Their hero, who had been murdered by a foreign power occupying their country, was somehow alive and back with them, encountering and encouraging them in the midst of their lives. There was no explaining how a dead hero could be alive once again — although lots of early Christians tried their hand at it — but, in their experience, there was also no denying it.

As the story went out that the rabbi from Nazareth was not dead and wasn’t going away, the pushback was predictable. It came from the most logical place — the commu…