Chapter 18
Why the Encounter at the Moment of Death Is an Encounter with Jesus
Condensed Edition
A woman in her forties dies on an operating table during cardiac surgery. Minutes later her heart restarts. When she wakes, she tells the nurse she met someone: a presence of pure light, overwhelming love, total knowledge. She says he knew everything about her. She says she did not want to come back.
Her surgeon, writing the case report, records that she described “a being of light.” He does not record a name.1
This scene repeats across thousands of near-death accounts. A being of light appears. Love pours from it. The experiencer feels known. Yet many NDErs do not name the being. They say “a presence,” or “the light,” or simply “he.” Some call the being God. Some say Jesus. Some say they have no category for what they met.
So what does this book argue? And why does it matter?
The claim is direct. The being at the threshold is the risen Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the incarnate Son who took on flesh, died, descended to the dead, and rose again. Not a generic divine glow. Not a vague cosmic force. Not “the universe.” Jesus of Nazareth, risen and living, meeting every dying soul face to face.2
I need to be honest about where this claim comes from. It does not rest on NDE testimony alone. Many NDErs do not name Christ. If the argument depended entirely on experiencer identification, it would be weak. The claim rests on theology: on what the Bible teaches about who Christ is and what he does at the boundary of death. The NDE data fit the theology. But the theology drives the claim.3
Five passages together build the case.
First, Hebrews 2:9. Christ “tasted death for everyone.” The Greek verb is geuomai (geuomai, “to taste, to experience”). The scope is hyper pantos (hyper pantos), “for every person,” without restriction. Christ entered death not once for one group but once for all people. He has been where every dying person is going. He knows the territory from the inside.4
Second, 1 Peter 3:18–19. Christ was “put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison.” Whatever the full range of this passage (and the interpretive debate is genuine), it places the risen Christ actively present among the dead, speaking, proclaiming. He did not merely die; he entered death’s domain and spoke there. The full exegesis belongs to Chapter 21. For the present argument, the point is this: the New Testament pictures Christ as someone who goes where the dead are and addresses them.5
Third, Revelation 1:18. The risen Christ declares: “I hold the keys of death and Hades.” Keys mean authority and access. Christ does not stand outside death’s door hoping to be let in. He holds the keys. Death is his domain now, conquered from inside.6
Fourth, John 11:25. “I am the resurrection and the life.” Not “I will send a resurrection.” Not “I know the way to life.” He is the resurrection. Wherever resurrection happens, Christ is personally present. To pass through death toward life is to pass through him.7
Fifth, John 14:6. “No one comes to the Father except through me.” If no one comes to the Father apart from Christ, then any genuine saving encounter with God is an encounter with Christ. The passage is not a locked gate. It is a personal introduction. Christ does not block the way; he is the way.8
Paul writes in 1 Timothy 2:5: “There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” The word mesitēs (mesitēs, “mediator, go-between”) appears only here in Paul. Its force is exclusive. Not one mediator among several. One.9
The verse sits inside Paul’s argument that God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). The universal desire and the exclusive mediator stand side by side in the same breath. God wants everyone saved. The way to be saved runs through Christ. Combine these two truths and the conclusion follows: Christ must be accessible to everyone, including every dying person.10
Ladislaus Boros saw this clearly. In Part III of The Mystery of Death, he entitled one section “The Place of our fully Personal Encounter with Christ.” Boros argued that the self-encounter at death is not a solitary event. It is a meeting, specifically a meeting with the risen Christ, who is the ground, the shape, and the goal of every human life.11 The book’s thesis extends Boros with NDE evidence and evangelical framing (see Chapter 16), but the Christological center was already there in Boros’s original vision.
Not every Christian scholar would go this far. An important alternative position, called inclusivism, argues that non-Christians can be saved through Christ’s work even without an explicit encounter with him. Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, and others have argued that God applies Christ’s saving work to people who respond to whatever light they have received, through creation, conscience, or general revelation, even if they never hear the name of Jesus.12
Inclusivism has real strengths. It takes the universal salvific will seriously. It avoids the harshness of restrictivist positions that consign the unevangelized to hell without recourse. And it correctly insists that all salvation is through Christ, whether or not the saved person knows Christ’s name.
But inclusivism settles for less than the Bible seems to promise. If Christ holds the keys of death, why would he leave them in his pocket? If he tasted death for everyone, why would he be absent at the moment of dying? If he is the resurrection and the life, why would the dying person encounter life without encountering him?13
The book’s claim is more specific than inclusivism. It does not say non-Christians are saved “through Christ” in some invisible, anonymous way. It says every dying person, whether Christian, Hindu, atheist, infant, the severely cognitively disabled, meets Christ personally, face to face, at the threshold. The encounter is explicit. The offer is direct. The response is free. No one is saved by accident or by a grace they never noticed.14
Here the honest reader raises a hand. If the being at the threshold is Christ, why do so many NDErs fail to identify him? The question is fair. Four considerations answer it.
The first is the simplest. The encounter is mediated through the experiencer’s existing categories. A lifelong Christian in Nashville recognizes Jesus and names him. A Hindu woman in Chennai may perceive the same loving presence but interpret it through the imagery she knows, perhaps as a divine figure from her own tradition. A secular New Yorker may say only “a being of light.” The being is the same. The categories through which the experiencer interprets the being differ.15
The second reply: some NDErs without any prior Christian commitment do identify the being as Christ. Howard Storm is the most striking case. Storm was a self-described atheist, a university art professor with open contempt for religion. During his 1985 NDE, he experienced torment, cried out to Jesus from the darkness, and was rescued. He later described an extended conversation with Christ: personal, detailed, unmistakably Jesus. Storm became a pastor. His identification was not primed by expectation; it cut against every expectation he had.16
Storm is not an outlier. J. Steve Miller, studying one hundred consecutive near-death accounts from the NDERF database, found that eighteen percent explicitly reported seeing Jesus. That figure puts Jesus-encounters on par with core NDE elements like the life review, which appears in seventeen to twenty-two percent of studies. Seeing deceased relatives appears in about thirteen percent. Miller was not looking for Jesus; he was cataloguing non-Christian doctrinal content and was surprised by the frequency. Notably, the experiencers did not describe a generic being of light and then guess it might be Jesus. They claimed to see a distinct person whom they recognized with strong assurance.16b
The disparity across religions sharpens the point. In the same NDERF database of more than five thousand accounts, Miller found only three reports of Krishna. He found no clear report of a living Buddha in an otherwise typical NDE. Among eighty self-identified Muslims, zero confirmed reports of Muhammad appeared. If cultural expectation alone explained Christ-identification, we would expect comparable identification rates for the central figures of other major religions. The data do not show this. Whatever one makes of the finding, the pattern is asymmetric, and the asymmetry favors the Christological reading.16c Michael Sabom’s Atlanta Study confirms the trend in a clinical setting. Among forty-seven NDErs interviewed by a physician, thirty-six percent of conservative Christians and thirty-one percent of liberal Christians reported encountering “Jesus” or “Lord.” The identification was intuitive. George Ritchie described “stupendous certainty” that he was in the presence of the Son of God. Bobby Jean in the same study “immediately knew it was Jesus. There was never any doubt.”16d
The third reply is a distinction about the nature of the NDE itself. NDErs returned. They had a preview, not the completed encounter. The full moment-of-death encounter, the one the book describes in Chapter 19, unfolds entirely at the threshold for those who actually die. NDErs were pulled back before the process concluded. It is entirely possible that fuller identification would have come later in the encounter, had they stayed.17
The fourth reply is subtle but important. Some NDErs initially report meeting “a being of light” and only later, after reflection and sometimes after years, come to identify the being more specifically. The initial report may lack a name not because the being lacked identity but because the experiencer lacked the categories to process what they met. Recognition can take time.18
One further beat belongs here. God’s knowledge shapes the form of the encounter. The book argues in Chapter 28 that if God possesses middle knowledge (knowledge of what every person would freely do in any possible circumstance), then he knows exactly which face, which voice, which form of approach each soul would receive. Christ comes to the Hindu through imagery the Hindu can hear, not as accommodation after the fact but as the approach God knew would open that heart. The mediation through categories is not improvisation. It is optimal grace.19
The Eastern Orthodox tradition offers a striking complement to this discussion. Orthodox theology has long taught that the saints, in mystical experience and especially at death, encounter the uncreated light of the Trinity, the same light that shone on Mount Tabor when Christ was transfigured. Gregory Palamas distinguished between God’s essence (unknowable) and God’s energies (the uncreated light by which God makes himself known). The light the saints see is not a created symbol. It is God’s own presence, radiating through Christ’s glorified humanity.20
This Orthodox insight helps explain something NDErs find hard to put into words. They say the light was not like a person; the light was a person. It had intelligence, warmth, personality, knowledge of them. Orthodox theology provides the framework: the light is Christ’s transfigured presence, the uncreated energy of the living God shining through the risen humanity of Jesus. What NDErs struggle to describe, Palamas had already named.21
A Christological encounter does not guarantee universal acceptance. This distinction is essential. The book argues in Chapter 25 that Thomas Talbott’s case for the impossibility of final rejection, while deeply attractive, does not finally succeed. Some souls may encounter Christ and say no. The Christological nature of the encounter guarantees that the offer is real, that the mediator is present, that the love is genuine. It does not guarantee the response.22
What it does guarantee is that no one misses the offer for lack of a meeting. The Hindu villager who never heard the name of Jesus meets Jesus at the threshold. The infant who died at six months meets the one who said, “Let the children come to me” (Matt 19:14; see Chapter 30). The profoundly cognitively disabled adult meets a Christ whose communication is not limited to human language (see Chapter 31). Every soul. Every death. The same Christ.23
One more thing needs saying, and it is perhaps the most important thing in this chapter. The Christ who meets the dying person is not a theological concept. He is not an idea. He is not an argument. He is a person who once had calluses on his hands from working wood, who wept at a friend’s grave, who ate fish on a beach after rising from the dead.
This is what separates the book’s claim from every form of anonymous Christianity. Karl Rahner taught that grace works invisibly in the world, and he was right about that. But the moment-of-death encounter is not invisible. It is not anonymous. It is a face, a voice, a pair of hands. The dying person is not saved by a principle they never noticed. They are met by a person they can see and hear and answer.
The risen Christ bears the marks of the nails (John 20:27). He is recognizable. He speaks. He calls people by name. Mary, in the garden (John 20:16). He breaks bread and is known in the breaking (Luke 24:30–31). The resurrection did not erase his humanity; it completed it. He remains the same Jesus, now glorified, now carrying the authority of the one who conquered death, but still bearing the hands that were pierced.24
When the dying person meets Christ at the threshold, they are not meeting a force field or a cosmic principle. They are meeting someone. The encounter is personal because the mediator is a person. The love is real because the lover is real. The wounds are visible because the sacrifice was real. This is what makes the moment-of-death encounter something more than a theory. It is a meeting with a man who died and lives.
An obvious objection waits here, and it deserves a direct answer. If every dying person will meet Christ at the threshold, why bother with evangelism? Why preach? Why send missionaries? Why share the gospel at all?25
Consider the analogy from the other direction. A child raised in a loving home knows her father’s voice. When she hears him call her name in a crowd, she turns without hesitation. A child raised apart from her father may meet him one day and may come to love him deeply, but the first meeting carries uncertainty that the other child never had to face. Both children are loved. Both are offered everything. But the one who grew up hearing the voice has an advantage that nothing can replace.26
The mission of the church is not undermined by this doctrine. It is clarified. We do not preach because God has no other plan. We preach because the Christ we proclaim is the same Christ every soul will meet, and knowing him now transforms the encounter that is coming. Antemortem faith forms the soul in love over a lifetime. It prepares the dying person for the meeting of their life.27
Think of it from the perspective of a missionary in rural India. Her work does not become pointless because every soul will meet Christ at death. Her work becomes more urgent, not less. Every person she reaches now will recognize Christ when they see him. Every village that hears the gospel gains the incalculable advantage of preparation. The encounter still comes for those she never reaches. But those she does reach will meet a friend, not a stranger.
Deathbed-vision research adds one quiet confirmation. Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, in their work with dying patients documented in Final Gifts, report that patients who are actually dying (not resuscitated, never coming back) frequently speak of seeing Christ by name, seeing deceased loved ones, and needing to “get ready to go.” The data on nearing-death awareness, explored more fully in Chapter 5, suggest that the dying themselves already know whom they are meeting.28
The book makes no apology for this commitment. The encounter at the moment of death is not a moment of generic spirituality. It is not meeting “the divine.” It is not a warm feeling of cosmic oneness. It is meeting Jesus, the one mediator between God and humanity (1 Tim 2:5), the one who tasted death for everyone (Heb 2:9), the one who descended to the dead and rose with the keys of death in his hand (Rev 1:18).29
A Christian who reads a loved one’s NDE account and wonders whether “the being of light” was really Jesus can take confidence. The theology is clear. The one who meets every dying soul is the one who died for every dying soul. What NDErs describe (a presence of overwhelming love, total knowledge, absolute acceptance combined with uncompromising truth) is exactly what a meeting with the risen Christ would feel like.30
The question the next chapter takes up is how this encounter works: its phases, its dynamics, the way pursuit and response unfold inside the subjectively extended moment. Chapter 19 develops the encounter’s internal structure. But the foundation is here. The encounter is with Christ. Everything else follows from that.
At the threshold of every death, the same person waits. He is the one who said, “I am the resurrection and the life.” He is the one who told the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). He is the one who walked out of his own grave and showed Thomas his wounds.
He is there for every soul. He has always been there. The love that meets the dying is not an idea. It is a man with scars on his hands, and he knows your name.
↑ 1. Composite case drawn from the patterns documented across thousands of NDE accounts. See Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010), chs. 1–3; Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010), chs. 1–2; and Michael Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor’s Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), chs. 1–5, which presents the Atlanta Study cases with detailed clinical documentation of the encounter phenomenology.
↑ 2. The claim that the moment-of-death encounter is specifically Christological is the distinctive contribution of this chapter within the book’s larger argument. Boros had already argued for a Christ-encounter at death in The Mystery of Death, III.2 and III.6. This chapter integrates that claim with the NDE evidence and the biblical data developed in preceding chapters.
↑ 3. J. Steve Miller makes a similar methodological point: NDE data are significant but should not be treated as theological revelation. See Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2012), ch. 10. The theological argument is primary; the NDE data are confirmatory.
↑ 4. The Greek γευσηται θανατου (geusētai thanatou, “he might taste death”) carries the sense of real, personal experience. The preposition υπερ (hyper) plus the genitive παντος (pantos) marks the scope as universal: every person. See F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 73–75.
↑ 5. The interpretive debate on 1 Peter 3:18–19 is substantial. For the descent-to-the-dead reading adopted here, see Chapter 21. W. J. Dalton, Christ’s Proclamation to the Spirits (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1965), remains foundational.
↑ 6. κλεις (kleis, “key”) in Revelation 1:18 carries overtones of authority, control, and access. See G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 213–14.
↑ 7. D. A. Carson, The Gospel according to John, PNTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 412: “Jesus is not merely the agent of resurrection and life; he is the resurrection and the life. There is no resurrection and life apart from him.”
↑ 8. On John 14:6 as exclusive in scope but personal in character, see Andreas Köstenberger, John, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 428–30. The exclusivity names a person, not a barrier.
↑ 9. μεσιτης (mesitēs) appears six times in the New Testament: 1 Tim 2:5; Gal 3:19, 20; Heb 8:6; 9:15; 12:24. Only in 1 Tim 2:5 is it used of Christ in relation to all humanity. See I. Howard Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 427–28.
↑ 10. For the book’s fuller treatment of 1 Timothy 2:4 and the universal salvific will, see Chapter 2.
↑ 11. Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death (1965; repr., Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish, 2020), III.2 (“The Place of our fully Personal Encounter with Christ”) and III.6 (“Christological Basis for the Hypothesis of a Final Decision”).
↑ 12. Clark H. Pinnock, A Wideness in God’s Mercy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), chs. 4–5. John Sanders, No Other Name: An Investigation into the Destiny of the Unevangelized (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), chs. 6–7. For a survey of inclusivist positions, see James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation after Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), ch. 1.
↑ 13. This line of argument draws on and extends Beilby’s observation that inclusivism answers the access problem but leaves the mechanism unspecified. See Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 37.
↑ 14. This is the book’s distinctive move beyond inclusivism. For the full treatment of the unevangelized question, see Chapter 32.
↑ 15. On cultural mediation of NDE content, see Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s, 2021), ch. 10. The cross-cultural studies show consistent core structure with variable surface-level imagery. Miller’s NDERF data add an important qualification: the mediation through categories is not symmetrical across religions. NDErs from Hindu and Muslim backgrounds do not typically report seeing their own tradition’s central figures at rates comparable to the Jesus-identification rate among Christians and non-Christians alike. See Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (2023), the chapters on Hindu NDEs and Muhammad.
↑ 16. Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005), chs. 3–5. Storm’s case is widely cited in the NDE literature for the clarity of his Christ-identification despite his prior atheism. See also Appendix B.
↑ 16b. J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023), the chapter on Jesus in NDEs. Miller studied 141 consecutive NDERF cases and, after culling non-NDEs and red-flagged accounts, found that 18 percent of 100 remaining cases reported seeing Jesus. He notes that earlier researchers had buried Jesus-encounters within larger categories such as “Saw Spiritual Beings,” so the incidence had not been tallied. Significantly, the experiencers did not describe a generic being of light and then assume it was Jesus; they reported recognizing a distinct person with strong assurance. Kenneth Ring had noted he could not recall an NDE in which the being of light identified himself as Jesus; Miller responds that formal self-introduction would be redundant when the experiencer already knows who it is, just as deceased relatives are recognized without introduction. For the comparison with core NDE elements (deceased relatives at 13 percent, life review at 17–22 percent), see the same chapter and Miller’s notes 251–253.
↑ 16c. Miller, Is Christianity Compatible, the chapters on Krishna, Hindu NDEs, and Muhammad. In the full NDERF database of more than 5,000 accounts: only 3 reports of Krishna (and in each, Jesus was also reported); 0 confirmed Muhammad sightings among 80 self-identified Muslims; and no clear report of a living Buddha in an otherwise typical NDE. Miller also studied 33 self-identified Hindus in the database and found only 4 mentioning Hindu deities, with red flags on two of them. The disparity is stark. If cultural expectation alone drove the identification, one would expect roughly comparable rates for the central figures of other major traditions. The data do not support this expectation.
↑ 16d. Michael Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor’s Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), ch. 11 and the Appendix tables. Sabom’s percentages come from his Atlanta Study of forty-seven NDErs classified by religious orientation. The Ritchie quote (“stupendous certainty”) is from George G. Ritchie Jr., Return from Tomorrow (Fairfax: Chosen Books, 1978), 49, cited by Sabom. Bobby Jean’s identification (“immediately knew it was Jesus”) appears in Sabom’s account of her case (ch. 5). Sabom notes that in all three of his anchor cases (Ritchie, Eadie, Bobby Jean), the intuitive identification, the descriptions of the being, and the powerful feelings of unconditional love in his presence were “virtually identical.” Sabom himself draws a more cautious theological conclusion: he classifies the NDE as “general revelation” and raises the possibility that the “Jesus” encountered could be a counterfeit (citing Matt 24:24 and 1 John 4:1). This book respectfully diverges: the theological argument of this chapter and the cumulative biblical case across the book support the conclusion that the being is indeed the risen Christ, not a counterfeit, and that the encounter exceeds general revelation.
↑ 17. This distinction between a preview and the completed encounter is developed more fully in Chapter 19, which maps the phases of the encounter.
↑ 18. Long documents cases of delayed identification in God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016), ch. 4. Long’s NDERF data show that some experiencers initially describe a “being of light” and only later, sometimes years afterward, come to identify the being more specifically.
↑ 19. The middle-knowledge framework and the concept of optimal grace are developed at full length in Chapter 28. The key claim is that Christ comes to each soul in the form God knew would best reach that particular person.
↑ 20. Gregory Palamas, The Triads, ed. John Meyendorff (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1983), III.1. See also Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), ch. 11 (“The Divine Light”).
↑ 21. Hierotheos Vlachos, Life after Death (Levadia: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1995), chs. 2–3. Vlachos explicitly connects the Palamite theology of uncreated light with the dying person’s encounter with God.
↑ 22. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). The full engagement with Talbott’s argument belongs to Chapter 25.
↑ 23. For the specific cases of infants, the cognitively disabled, and the unevangelized, see Chapters 30, 31, and 32.
↑ 24. On the continuity between the earthly and risen Jesus, see Gary R. Habermas and J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998), chs. 5–6. The resurrection appearances in the Gospels consistently present a recognizable, embodied, personal Christ.
↑ 25. This objection is common enough to warrant the extended treatment it receives in Chapter 34. The present discussion is a compressed anticipation.
↑ 26. The analogy of knowing a voice in advance is adapted from Jerry Walls’s treatment of antemortem preparation in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2015), ch. 3.
↑ 27. Stephen Jonathan makes a similar point in Grace beyond the Grave: the universal salvific will does not diminish evangelism but grounds it more deeply. See Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, [p. 201].
↑ 28. Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying (New York: Poseidon, 1992), chs. 2–5. See also Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At the Hour of Death, rev. ed. (New York: Hastings House, 1977), which confirmed similar patterns cross-culturally.
↑ 29. The eschatological neutrality of the book is affirmed in Chapter 29. The Christ-centered nature of the encounter does not predetermine the downstream eschatology for those who refuse.
↑ 30. Long’s analysis of thousands of NDE reports consistently identifies these five qualities as central features of the encounter with the being of light. See Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010), chs. 4–6; and Long, God and the Afterlife (2016), chs. 3–4, which documents the profound unconditional love experienced in God-encounters and God’s apparent adaptation of appearance to the experiencer’s frame of reference. A systematic analysis of over five thousand NDE cases found that those reporting encounters with Jesus specifically showed the highest rates of biblical compatibility, lending further empirical weight to the Christological reading.