Happy Easter to those who celebrate.

Do you know the story of Doubting Thomas? For those less familiar, Thomas was the disciple who, when told that Jesus had risen, refused to believe without evidence. “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, and put my finger where the nails were, I will not believe.”

He wanted proof. He wanted to see it himself. He wanted something verifiable before updating his beliefs.

In most tellings, Thomas is the cautionary figure. The one who lacked faith. The one who needed to be shown, while everyone else simply believed.

Governance on Easter

Most Easter sermons focus on the resurrection. Fewer focus on the governance catastrophe that preceded it.

Pilate authorized the crucifixion under political pressure, then washed his hands of the outcome. Literally. A public, performative act of accountability deflection. “This isn’t my responsibility.” It was the first recorded equivalent of “the AI did it.”

The chief priests and Pharisees, anxious about what might happen, went to Pilate the day after the crucifixion and asked for a guard to be posted at the tomb. They were specific about why. They wanted to prevent the disciples from removing the body and claiming a resurrection had occurred. They understood the evidence problem. They wanted a chain of custody. They wanted witnesses with authority posted at the point of consequence.

Pilate granted it. Guards were stationed. A seal was placed on the stone. The accountability structure was in place.

And then the stone was rolled away, and the guards, according to the account, were so frightened they became like dead men. When they recovered, they went directly to the chief priests, not to file an incident report or document what they observed, but to figure out what story to tell. The chief priests paid them to say the disciples had stolen the body while the guards slept. A governance failure, followed immediately by a cover-up.

The official record was falsified. The audit trail was broken. The people responsible for maintaining the chain of custody at the most consequential moment in the story couldn’t account for what happened on their watch. And the authorities who commissioned the guard chose narrative management over evidence preservation.

This is the central evidence dispute of the entire account.

What the Tomb Actually Left Behind

Here is what the witnesses found upon arrival.

The stone rolled away. The linen burial cloths are lying there. The cloth that had been around Jesus’ head was folded separately from the rest. There was no tamper-evident record of what occurred between the sealing of the tomb and the arrival of the first witnesses.

What remained was physical evidence, witness testimony, and a chain of events that different parties interpreted according to their priors. The women who came to the tomb. Peter and John, who ran to verify. The guards who reported to their employers rather than to the record. Mary Magdalene, who became the first witness to the risen Christ, whose testimony was initially dismissed.

Two thousand years later, the historical and theological debate continues. Not because the events didn’t happen. Because the evidence chain has gaps that were never closed. The people responsible for maintaining the official record made choices that prioritized the preferred narrative over the verifiable account. This is why we have belief.

Modern Organizations and the Guards They Station

Every organization deploying AI agents today stations guards at the tomb.

They put policies in place. They implement access controls. They configure logging. They write governance documents. They assign someone the title of AI Ethics Officer or Responsible AI Lead. The guards are posted. The seal is affixed. The accountability structure looks sound from the outside.

Then something happens. An agent produces an outcome nobody expected. A decision gets made that nobody can trace. A compliance boundary gets crossed, and the investigation team discovers that the logs don’t constitute an audit trail, the governance documents don’t describe what the system actually does, and the person assigned accountability can’t reconstruct what happened on their watch.

And then, too often, the response looks less like rigorous evidence preservation and more like narrative management. The incident is minimized. The documentation is adjusted retroactively. The story gets shaped before the regulator arrives.

This is the operational reality for many organizations deploying AI systems today. This is the same combination of political pressure, incomplete oversight, and preference for comfortable narratives over uncomfortable evidence that has characterized governance failures throughout recorded history.

The Case for Doubting Thomas

Thomas gets rehabilitated in the story. He sees the evidence. He believes. And then, the tradition holds, he carries that belief further than almost any of the other disciples, ultimately to India, driven by a conviction grounded in something he personally verified.

Doubt, in this reading, is not the opposite of commitment. It is the foundation of durable commitment. You build on what you can verify. You govern what you can demonstrate. You extend trust to what has earned it through observable evidence.

That is exactly the right posture for AI governance.

The EU AI Act, arriving with enforcement teeth in 2026, will not accept narrative management. Article 12 requires record-keeping that constitutes verifiable evidence. Article 14 requires genuine operational oversight, not ceremonially posted. The regulator who arrives at your tomb will want to see what was on the stone, who was watching, and what the record shows.

If your guards can’t account for what happened on their watch, a policy document won’t cover it.

The Resurrection of Genuine Accountability

The Easter story ends, for believers, with something undeniable enough to change the course of history. Whatever one’s theological position, the evidence that something significant occurred is substantial enough that two thousand years of serious scholarship haven’t closed the question.

The governance lesson isn’t about what happened inside the tomb. It’s about what the authorities did with the accountability structure they had built, and what happened when they chose narrative over evidence at the critical moment.

Build the audit trail before you need it. Station guards who are accountable to the record, not to the preferred outcome. When something happens on your AI systems’ watch, the evidence should speak for itself.

Thomas asked to see. The tradition eventually showed him. That verification, grounded in reality, became the foundation for everything that followed.

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Chris Hood is an AI strategist and author of the #1 Amazon Best Seller Infailible and Customer Transformation, and has been recognized as one of the Top 30 Global Gurus for Customer Experience. His latest book, Unmapping Customer Journeys, will be published in 2026.