Her good, thoughtful questions and reading assignments led to lively discussions about what Jesus taught, and what each of us understands about those teachings. However, it was only at the last class meeting that we began to touch the reason that these questions matter, the reason the Gospels and the letters of Paul were written at all. These stories would not have been recorded unless something more had happened after Jesus was crucified. These were confessional documents, written much later than the events they record, written in the light of various communities' experience of the living Christ. Without the experience of the Resurrection, it is likely that no one today would care about Jesus of Nazareth, except as yet another of those Jewish false messiahs.
Historical figures continue to live in the long, long memory of the Jewish people.
Without the experience of the Resurrection, the followers of Jesus might have remained a cohesive group, living by his teachings of radical, self-giving love, not unlike those Lubavitchers who today continue to revere their beloved Rebbe, Zalman Schneerson, who died a few years ago. But without the experience of the Resurrection, the followers of Jesus probably would have remained a small sect, like the Essenes or the Therapeutae mentioned by Philo were, and eventually died out or became absorbed into the normative Judaism of the late second century rabbis. The gospel accounts are silent regarding the actual event. We are simply told of an empty tomb, the stone rolled away. We simply do not, and cannot, know what happened between the time that Jesus was laid in the cave late on Friday, and the cave was found empty on Sunday morning.