On the day he was raised, unrecognized for who he was, Yeshua joined two disciples walking on the road to Emmaus, who were discouraged and confused about the events that had lately occurred—the one whom they thought was the Messiah had been turned over to the Romans to be executed, he had been crucified, and to top it all off, a group of women from their group had visited his tomb, and, finding it empty, claimed they had seen a vision of angels and that he was alive.

Notice especially their comment in Luke 24:21: “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

Anglican theologian, N. T. Wright, helps put their comment in context:

The worry about the afterlife, and the precise qualifications for it, which have so characterized Western Christianity, especially (it seems) since the Black Death, and which have shaped and formed Western readings of the New Testament, do not loom large in the literature of Paul’s contemporaries [including Jesus and the Apostles].