In 1st-century Roman Palestine it had been almost two weeks since the tomb of the executed Jesus was found empty. The New Testament narratives and other historical accounts tell us there were reports of some who claimed to have seen him alive and believed he had risen from the dead. True or not, in some sense Jesus was still causing trouble for Pontius Pilate and the Jewish authorities. They unmistakably killed him and needed him to stay dead to squash the uproar he had created. In the 2016 film Risen, a Roman centurion named Clavius was forced to become a detective to find the missing corpse and was reeling from the shock of his discovery that this crucified Jesus of Nazareth may not be actually dead at all. In part 1 of this piece (2 down) I tried to give you a grasp of the plotline of Risen and some broad brushstrokes about its themes. Now I want to go deeper. Recall the last sentence of part 1 in which I said “…what started as his problem became his salvation.” 

This paper explores the problems of human knowledge stemming from the medieval era to the present. In it I will grapple with the elusive question of the justification of knowledge that goes all the way back to Aristotle in the 4th century BC and beyond. Aristotle is a good subject to start with since in a real sense he was a medieval philosopher insofar as he was “reincarnated” into a Latin-speaking Europe that previously knew very little of his ideas until his writings were reintro- duced there. “For Aristotle…epistemology is based on the study of particular phenomena and rises to the knowledge of essences.” He believed that we can know things, and I agree. In this paper I argue that we can know things and know that we know them. Further, epistemology as a branch of philosophy is valid only when it includes the existential domain, i.e. data that is received through the senses. Perception and experience must not be proscribed, for they are God's means by which we know.