"... if you go back to the first century looking for somebody who taught that we have souls which are, um, in Exile from our true home which is heaven, and that we're looking forward to going back there one day, then there is somebody who says that very clearly.

His name is Plutarch and he's a pagan priest at The Shrine at Deli. He's a philosopher, he's a biographer, he's one of the great intellectuals of the first century, but he's a Platonist.

He is in technical terms what we call middle Platonism between early Platonism and the Neoplatonism that was going on in the fourth and fifth centuries (BCE) and so on and it's quite a straightforward belief.

And it's what many modern Western Christians imagine is the gospel so I'd like to start with the resurrection of Jesus."