Antiquity often resembles a jigsaw puzzle, though one without a pre-established image, and in which each assembler proposes a different final picture. Perhaps it is better understood as a palimpsest, each new interpreter removing layers to reveal and inscribe a different vision.

In The Tomb Guardians, Paul Griffiths enters into dialogue with Bernhard Strigel’s Renaissance paintings of the four Roman soldiers said to have guarded the tomb of Christ. The gospel of Matthew introduces these guards, possibly to counter rumours that the disciples removed the body. Jewish tradition forbade burial within city walls; the apocryphal texts add further embellishment. The event itself, if it occurred, is refracted and reimagined.

Griffiths’s book does not attempt to restore historical clarity. Its power lies in the performance of variation: giving voice to the soldiers, and to an academic preparing a lecture on Strigel’s paintings. What emerges is not simply a retelling of a familiar story but a meditation on human frailty, the contingency of memory, and the instability of visual and textual tradition. It is also a work of subtle, imaginative art criticism—one that transforms the familiar into something stranger, finer, and deeply composed.