On the Third Day – The Evidence for the Resurrection That Contemporary Scholarship Ignores
In the Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, where New York begins to thin out into suburb, stands a low stone enclosure with no roof. Inside lie two graves, side by side, and around them, at every hour of the day and night, stand people. They write petitions on slips of paper, read them under their breath, tear them and drop them on the stone, until the slabs disappear under drifts of paper. This is the Ohel, the resting place of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Rebbe of Lubavitch, who died in June 1994, and of his father-in-law, the sixth. Some of his followers still hold that Schneerson is the Messiah and await his return. The movement that was supposed to be orphaned by his death, and to fade, has spread across the world.
One thing about this place is as certain as the stone: everyone knows where the body is. No one in the crowd at the Ohel has announced that the grave is empty. No one claims that the Rebbe was raised on the third day, that he appeared to twelve and then to five hundred, that he ate fish with them in Crown Heights. The faithful wait, argue, and some deny that he died at all; but they drop their petitions on a grave that has him in it. This is worth remembering, because it is to this very grave that a professor emeritus from Princeton recently compared belief in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The comparison is better than she knew.
There are claims that history ought to have swallowed long ago. The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is one of those that refuse to go down.
Two millennia have passed, time enough to wear the names off caesars and bury empires under sand. Yet this one claim, scandalously specific, stubbornly irreducible, returns every year on the same morning, carrying the same non-negotiable content: that the tomb was empty, and that it means something. It is not a claim that submits to metaphor or dissolves into symbol. It demands a yes or a no. And it is precisely this uncompromising concreteness that has given no rest, for twenty centuries, to philosophers, historians, and, most tellingly, to those who would simply prefer to forget the whole thing.
What the argument is actually about
The latest attempt to domesticate this claim comes from Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker. His essay “We’re Still Not Done with Jesus” reviews two recent books and, in the process, sketches a portrait of contemporary Jesus scholarship: a portrait that rewards closer inspection.
The first book is Miracles and Wonder, by Elaine Pagels, the Princeton professor emeritus who has spent decades excavating the buried strata of early Christianity. Pagels treats the Gospels as palimpsests: layers of legend, propaganda, and oral tradition beneath which a core of historical memory can still be detected. The virgin birth? A late addition, designed to quash persistent rumors about Jesus’ paternity, modeled on Hellenistic tales of gods impregnating mortal women. The miracles? Psychosomatic phenomena, common enough in the ancient world. The empty tomb? A narrative solution to the practical problem of what happened to the body of a condemned man. Pagels compares the belief in Jesus’ resurrection to the faith of Lubavitcher Hasidim in the eventual return of their Rebbe, who died in 1994. Gopnik calls the comparison audacious and right. It is both, though not for the reasons he has in mind.
The second book, Catherine Nixey’s Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, pushes the argument further: early Christianity consciously borrowed from pagan myths about sons of god and then, having cornered the market on truth, invented religious intolerance and eliminated the competition.
Behind both books, Gopnik outlines a still more radical thesis that has been gaining traction in the academy: that beneath the Gospels there is no memory to mend, because there is no oral tradition at all; only a lattice of tropes, conventions, and rhetorical devices borrowed from the Hellenistic tradition of writing the lives of wonder-workers. The leading voice of this school is Robyn Faith Walsh, of the University of Miami, whose The Origins of Early Christian Literature (2021) argues that the Gospels are first and foremost Greek literature: written by educated, Greek-speaking men of letters of the imperial age for readers like themselves, and closer kin not to Jewish recollection but to the “subversive biographies” of the period, works like the Life of Aesop, stories of clever men of low station who end badly. This must be stated precisely, because everything here turns on precision: Walsh does not claim that Galilean fishermen had read Plutarch. She claims that there are no fishermen in this story at all.
Gopnik presents these arguments with amused sympathy. The spread of Christianity was, in his telling, “a lucky break”: Roman emperors had the life spans of gnats, and Constantine happened to dodge the knife. The religion’s growth, he adds, should astonish us no more than the growth of Mormonism, a Christian heresy of plainly fabricated origins. As for the resurrection itself: Elvis, too, was seen after his death, and a newspaper report of a sighting in Kalamazoo is, Gopnik suggests, at least as reliable as the spotty accounts of believers two millennia ago.
So much for Gopnik. The question is whether this account, of Jesus dissolved into literature, of the resurrection as a trope, of Christianity as history’s luckiest accident, survives contact with the evidence. To answer honestly, one must first do what apologists usually avoid: state the opposing case in its strongest form rather than its most convenient one.
The strongest version of the opponent
The strongest sceptic does not claim that anyone invented anything. That is the beginner’s version. The serious version, present in Pagels and in Bart Ehrman, and in its most honest form in Dale Allison’s The Resurrection of Jesus (2021), runs like this. Jesus was crucified, and his disciples scattered in despair. In the days and weeks that followed, some of them experienced what a large share of human beings experience after losing someone they love: they saw him, heard him, felt his presence. Medicine has known the phenomenon for a long time; in the classic study by the Welsh physician Dewi Rees, published in 1971, nearly half of the widows and widowers interviewed reported encounters with their dead spouse, and most found them comforting. The disciples interpreted their experiences in the only categories they had to hand, and as devout Jews of an apocalyptic age, the category they had to hand was resurrection. The story of the empty tomb was added later, when the movement needed a story; the grave of an executed man was unknown or communal, so no one could check.
This explanation accounts for a great deal, and it should be given its due. It accounts for the Gospels’ disagreements about the details of the appearances, for Paul’s speaking of Jesus having “appeared” rather than having been touched, for the earliest creed listing witnesses to appearances rather than witnesses to an empty tomb. It even accounts for the Ohel: the Rebbe’s followers see him in dreams too, and they too open volumes of his letters at random and read the pages as answers. Anyone who wishes to argue with this version cannot answer it with Osiris. He must ask what it does not account for.
The direction of the polish: what the Aramaic substrate actually shows
Begin with what is tangible in the Gospel texts themselves. Walsh is right about one thing: the Gospels were written in Greek, by people who knew how to write, and not in the Galilee of the thirties but somewhere in the Empire several decades later. Whoever argues against this by proving that fishermen had not read Plutarch proves something no one denies, and loses to an opponent no one has fielded. The question is a different one: whether beneath the Greek text one can see something a Greek man of letters would have had no way of acquiring.
One can. Joseph Fitzmyer’s foundational work on the Aramaic substrate of the Gospels, collected in his classic A Wandering Aramean, makes the point with philological precision. Scattered through the Gospel texts are Aramaic expressions preserved intact: Talitha koum, Ephphatha, Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani, each glossed with a translation for the Greek-speaking audience. These are not exotic ornaments. They are the fossils of an Aramaic-speaking community’s memory, preserved in linguistic amber. Matthew Black’s analysis in An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts confirms the picture: Semitic parataxis, the passivum divinum, Semitic mnemonic patterns, none of them borrowings from Hellenistic convention, all of them the structures of Semitic thought showing through Greek syntax.
The sceptic will reply that an educated author could have dropped in a few Aramaic words for color, the way a novelist today drops in an Italian oath. He could have. But color is chosen to adorn, and these words do not adorn: the longest of them is the cry of abandonment from the cross, a sentence awkward for Mark himself, who is, after all, composing a portrait of the Son of God. More important is the direction of the changes. Matthew and Luke, writing later, improve Mark’s Greek and drop the Aramaic words from the healing stories, and Luke replaces the cry of abandonment with a serene “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” If the Gospels had been literature from the start, one would expect the earliest to be the most literary. The opposite is the case: the polish runs from raw memory toward literature, never back. Walsh’s arrow points the wrong way.
(A caveat in both directions. Scholars such as Stanley Porter have rightly challenged the extreme “Aramaic originals” hypothesis: the Gospels were composed in Greek and are not translations. And Walsh will answer with the Life of Aesop, a biography written in deliberately plain Greek about a plain man; a low style can be a choice. So the Semitic substrate proves only what it proves: that the tradition has a Palestinian, Jewish origin, and therefore that beneath the text there is a memory that needed mending. About the genre of the text it says nothing. That is less than apologists would like, and exactly enough to sink the claim that there was no memory at all.)
The awkward elements
If someone were inventing a divine hero, they would not have invented Jesus; but no one accuses the disciples of inventing him. The crucifixion is the most secure fact in the whole story, attested by Tacitus and by Josephus, and no one disputes it. Its significance lies elsewhere. As Martin Hengel demonstrated in Crucifixion, this mode of execution was used above all against slaves and rebels, shameful, obscene, unmentionable in polite company, and for a Jew burdened besides with the words of Deuteronomy about the cursed man who hangs on a tree. A crucified Messiah was not a tragic Messiah. He was a refuted one. A movement whose leader ends this way has the exits known from the history of Jewish messianisms: to disband, to choose a new leader, or, like the followers of Sabbatai Zevi and part of Chabad, to deny the defeat and wait. The followers of Jesus did none of these. They did a fourth thing, without precedent, and it is that fourth thing that has to be explained.
The criterion of embarrassment, a standard tool of mainstream historical-Jesus scholarship, employed by scholars as diverse as John Meier and E. P. Sanders, identifies as probably authentic precisely those details that no propagandist would have added: the disciples’ repeated incomprehension, their flight at the moment of arrest, Peter’s triple denial, Jesus’ cry of abandonment from the cross. It must be said in fairness that a younger generation of scholars, led by Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne, regards the whole apparatus of “criteria of authenticity” as a worn-out tool: what embarrasses us may not have embarrassed the author. A fair warning against the mechanism, not against the reasoning. A writer composing the praise of a hero has choices, and here the choice fell, consistently, on whatever was least flattering to the hero and his friends.
Then there is the matter of the women. Josephus wrote in the Antiquities (4.219) that the testimony of women should not be admitted “on account of the levity and boldness of their sex.” The precise legal status of female testimony remains debated among historians; the cultural prejudice is well documented. The critical reading has its answer here, and it should be named before it is dismissed: in Mark the women “said nothing to anyone,” and that silence, says the sceptic, conveniently explains why no one had heard of the empty tomb before. The answer explains Mark, but it does not explain the rest. The women stand at the tomb in all four Gospels, including the independent Johannine tradition; in Luke the men do not believe them, and the Gospels never smooth away the embarrassment, though they had decades in which to do so. And there is the polemic that Matthew reports as circulating among opponents: that the disciples stole the body. Whoever accuses you of stealing a body is not disputing that the tomb is empty. By the eighties of the first century the argument was already about how the tomb came to be empty, not whether.
The timeline: too early for legend
Here we arrive at what may be the single strongest fact in the entire debate. Paul’s letters, written some twenty years after Jesus’ death, already contain fixed creedal formulations. The pre-Pauline creed in the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians (verses 3 to 7), which Paul explicitly describes as “received” (parelabon), not invented, is dated by scholars as different as Martin Hengel and James Dunn, who speaks of months rather than years, to the first years after the crucifixion. This is not an apologist’s dating. Richard Carrier, the most prominent living mythicist, who denies Jesus any historical existence at all, accepts that the core of the formula (verses 3 to 5) was composed within a few years of the supposed death; he disputes the verses about the five hundred brethren and about James, and of course what the appearances were, but not when the creed arose.
Within a handful of years of the events described, then, a fixed creedal formula was already circulating that identified witnesses by name and by group: Peter, the Twelve, five hundred brethren, James, many of whom, Paul assures his readers, were still alive when he wrote. This is not the murky accretion of legend over centuries. This is testimony crystallized while witnesses could still be questioned, challenged, and contradicted. But the formula must be read to the end, and one must notice what is not in it. It names witnesses to appearances. It names no witnesses to an empty tomb; of the tomb it says only that Jesus “was buried.” The story of the women and the rolled-away stone first appears in writing in Mark, some forty years later. Whoever does not say this himself will hear it from his opponent, and rightly.
A. N. Sherwin-White, the Roman historian, observed in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, testing the tempo of myth-making against Herodotus, that even two generations were too short a span for the legendary tendency to prevail over the hard historical core. Bart Ehrman and the students of collective memory argue that legend can grow faster. Even granting that: a few years, perhaps a few months, is not “faster.” It is immediately.
What, then, does the timeline establish? That belief in the resurrection is early: this is certain. That belief in an empty tomb accompanied it from the beginning: this is probable, though by inference rather than by text. Paul was a Pharisee, and for a Pharisee “buried” and “raised” with a body still lying in the tomb would have been a contradiction in terms, because in his world resurrection meant a body, not a mood. That the tomb was in fact empty: this remains disputed, and no historian will close the dispute.
Here we return to the strongest opponent, because now one can ask what he does not account for. He does not account for Paul, who did not mourn Jesus but hunted his disciples, and who lists the appearance “to me also” in the same formula as the appearances to Peter and James. He does not account for James, the brother who, according to the Gospels, did not believe in Jesus during his lifetime and after his death stood at the head of the Jerusalem community. He accounts poorly for the group appearances: grief is a solitary experience, and the formula speaks of the Twelve and of five hundred. And he does not account for the simplest thing of all, the shape of the creed itself. Bereavement hallucinations produce the sentence “he is still with us.” Elvis sighted in Kalamazoo and the Rebbe awaited in Crown Heights belong to the same family of phenomena: they are forms of denying death. The creed from Corinth does the opposite. It begins with the words “he died” and “he was buried,” and only on those does it build. It does not say “he lives”; it says “he was raised,” and Paul places the event within Jewish eschatology as the “firstfruits” of the general resurrection and supplies a list of people who can be asked. Grief visions produce consolation. This formula produces a claim with a witness list.
The tomb that was not supposed to exist
There remains the tomb. The sharpest form of scepticism, known from the work of John Dominic Crossan and Bart Ehrman, holds that there was no tomb at all: the Romans did not release the bodies of the crucified but left them to the birds or threw them into a common pit, and Joseph of Arimathea is a literary figure. If so, the question of the empty tomb loses its meaning, because there is nothing to check. The argument is serious and deserves a serious answer, not the Pilate inscription from Caesarea, which proves only that Pilate existed, a point no one happens to contest.
The answer has three layers. The first is textual: “he was buried” stands in the same early formula as “he died,” so the burial belongs to the oldest core of the tradition, not to later ornament. The second is documentary: Josephus writes in the Jewish War (4.317) that the Jews were so careful about burial that even those condemned and crucified were taken down and buried before sunset, and Philo of Alexandria mentions the bodies of the crucified being handed to their families on the eve of festivals. Ehrman replies that this is half a sentence about a different era, and he is entitled to reply so. The third layer is material, and it lies in a display case in the Israel Museum. In 1968, at Giv’at ha-Mivtar, north of Jerusalem, a first-century family tomb was uncovered, and in it an ossuary inscribed “Yehohanan son of Hagkol.” Yehohanan’s right heel bone was pierced by an iron nail more than eleven centimeters long, bent against a knot in the olive wood so that it could not be pulled out; his family took the body down with a piece of the cross still attached. A crucified Jew, buried in the Jewish manner, in a rock-cut tomb, among his own. Jodi Magness, an archaeologist at the University of North Carolina, has shown that the Gospel account of Jesus’ burial fits what we know of Jewish tombs and Jewish law in that period. None of these layers proves that the tomb was empty. Together they make it probable that there was one, and that people knew where. That is enough for the question to make sense.
The “dying-and-rising gods”: a myth about myths
What about the alleged parallels? Osiris, Attis, Adonis: isn’t Jesus simply one more “dying-and-rising god”? Jonathan Z. Smith, no Christian apologist but one of the most rigorous historians of religion of the twentieth century, took this thesis apart in Drudgery Divine (1990). Osiris persists in the underworld; he does not return bodily. Attis and Adonis undergo seasonal disappearance and return tied to agricultural cycles, not unique historical events of cosmic significance. Honesty requires adding that Tryggve Mettinger, in The Riddle of Resurrection (2001), partly corrected Smith: dying and returning gods did exist in the ancient Near East, Baal, Dumuzi, and Melqart for certain, Adonis perhaps. And yet Mettinger, a scholar with no apologetic obligations, concluded that nothing suggests the death and resurrection of Jesus to be a construct drawn from their myths. That is stronger testimony than Smith’s, because it comes from someone who found the parallels.
The real pagan rival of the empty tomb, in any case, is not Osiris but Romulus. Livy and Plutarch tell how the founder of Rome vanished in a storm during an assembly, how no body was found, and how a certain Proculus Julius testified that Romulus had appeared to him on the road and announced that he had become the god Quirinus. Richard C. Miller called this pattern the “translation fable” and argued that Mark’s empty tomb is a variant of it; Walsh follows the same trail when she treats the missing body as a literary sign of divinity. Here the structural parallel is real, and it is worth accepting in order to see what breaks it apart. Apotheosis bypasses death: Romulus does not die, he is taken up, and his disappearance is proof of promotion. The kerygma stands on death: Jesus died, was buried, and his body did not vanish but was raised, which to a Greek ear sounded not like promotion but like absurdity, as Paul discovered in Athens. The hero of a translation fable returns as a god to proclaim his glory. The risen one of the Gospels returns with the marks of the nails, asks for something to eat and is given a piece of broiled fish, and in a garden is mistaken for the gardener. Similarity of form without common substance is exactly what one would expect from independent traditions confronting the same question of death and hope, not from borrowing.
The concept of bodily resurrection was distinctively Jewish, rooted in apocalyptic traditions that expected God to raise the dead at the end of history. What the earliest Christians proclaimed was not a mythological metaphor but a specific claim: that this end-time expectation had been inaugurated in the case of one individual, ahead of schedule. And the resurrection narratives themselves are, against the background of myth, strikingly spare: no battles with death deities, no weeping goddesses, no fertility symbolism. Matthew, it is true, adds an earthquake, an angel like lightning and guards who fall as if dead, but even he does not describe the rising itself; none of the four Gospels does. That is left to the apocryphal Gospel of Peter in the second century, where figures whose heads reach to heaven walk out of the tomb with a cross walking behind them. That is what legend looks like once it gets going. The canon gives an empty tomb, terrified women, and disciples who do not believe. The very austerity of the accounts argues for reminiscence rather than construction.
Binitarian worship: what syncretism cannot explain
Larry Hurtado’s magisterial Lord Jesus Christ reveals another difficulty for the borrowing hypothesis. The worship of Jesus emerged within a strictly monotheistic Jewish framework. What Hurtado calls the binitarian pattern of devotion (he later preferred “dyadic”): Jesus receiving worship alongside God while Jewish monotheism was maintained. This pattern has no parallel in Greek religious thought and is already visible in Paul’s earliest letters from the early fifties, two decades after the crucifixion. This was not, in Hurtado’s reading, syncretistic absorption from without but a unique mutation within Jewish theological parameters.
Scholarly fashion, or how every generation discovers “its own” Jesus
The arguments above do not arise in a vacuum. They belong to a long tradition of research into the so-called “historical Jesus,” a tradition with its own fascinating history of projection and self-deception.
Albert Schweitzer famously diagnosed this syndrome in The Quest of the Historical Jesus: each age finds its own thoughts in Jesus. George Tyrrell, writing at the same moment, put it in an image that has outlived them both: the Christ that Harnack saw, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, was only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face at the bottom of a deep well. It was a devastating critique, and Schweitzer, as has often been observed, promptly confirmed it by succumbing to the very disease he had identified. Having demolished the romanticized Liberal Jesus of the nineteenth century, he replaced it with his own construction: Jesus as apocalyptic prophet, consumed by eschatological urgency, a Jesus who embodied precisely the existential seriousness that Schweitzer himself prized above all. As John Dominic Crossan later observed, Jesus scholars tend to “do autobiography and call it biography.” That even the diagnostician could not escape the condition is perhaps the strongest evidence of its virulence.
The infamous Jesus Seminar (founded in 1985 by Robert Funk and Crossan) took this logic to its extreme: colored beads, theatrical balloting, truth determined by majority vote. Methodological naturalism, ruling out the miraculous in advance, was presented as scholarly rigor when it was, in fact, a philosophical presupposition wearing a lab coat. As N. T. Wright argued, the resulting “Cynic sage” was an anachronistic projection of the late-twentieth-century academy.
Walsh and Gopnik represent the latest iteration of this same pattern, with the difference that they do not reduce Jesus to a sage but dissolve him into text. Neither Walsh nor Gopnik claims that Jesus never lived; they claim that the text gives no access to him, because beneath the literature there is no memory. The assumption that beneath the layer of literature there is no layer of memory, that beneath the veils there are only further veils, is intellectually elegant and suits an age that calls everything a “narrative.” The trouble is that it loses the evidence along the way: the Aramaic substrate, the direction of the editorial polish, the chronology of the pre-Pauline creed. Tyrrell would have put it in a sentence: a generation of literary scholars looked into the well and saw literature.
A lucky break and six million
Gopnik attributes Christianity’s spread to “a lucky break” with Constantine. This would be more persuasive if Christianity hadn’t already permeated the Empire before Constantine’s conversion, surviving three centuries of intermittent persecution. Rodney Stark estimated in The Rise of Christianity, on a model assuming growth of forty per cent a decade, that the Christian population grew from roughly a thousand in 40 C.E. to approximately six million by 300, entirely without imperial patronage. Constantine’s conversion was a consequence of Christianity’s social penetration, not its cause. That much can be said to Gopnik, and there the apologist should stop, because Gopnik has the Mormons in reserve, and he is right. Mormonism too grew without an emperor and under persecution, from six members in 1830 to more than a dozen million today, and its Book too has its witnesses, the Three and the Eight, signed by name; many of them later broke with the Church, and none recanted. Growth proves only growth, and the constancy of witnesses proves constancy. The statistical argument should be surrendered without regret. Christianity does not differ from other movements in having grown. It differs in what it claimed, and that alone is what the argument is about.
As for Nixey’s claim that Christianity invented religious intolerance: Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who desecrated the Temple and outlawed Jewish practice on pain of death two centuries before Christ, might have objections.
What these arguments establish, and what they do not
Let us be precise. The historical arguments assembled here establish something important but limited: that the resurrection tradition is early, rooted in the testimony of people who could still be asked, and not derived from pagan mythology. They establish the historicity of the tradition. They do not, by themselves, establish the truth of the resurrection as a metaphysical event. That final step requires a judgment that transcends historical methodology, just as the a priori exclusion of the miraculous involves a metaphysical judgment that many scholars mistake for neutral method.
The honest position is this. The evidence is compatible with the resurrection and inconvenient for every explanation that goes around it. It does not compel belief, since no historical evidence compels metaphysical conclusions, but it removes the lazy objection that the resurrection narratives are late, legendary, or borrowed. They are none of these things. The levels of certainty must be kept apart: the earliness of the belief is certain, the burial probable, the empty tomb disputed. What one does with early, many-voiced testimony to an extraordinary event remains a question each person must answer alone.
On the third day
As G. K. Chesterton wrote in the last chapter of Orthodoxy (1908), “The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall.”
By trying so desperately to make Jesus more explicable, these scholars only make him more extraordinary. A Galilean peasant who inspired literary creations sophisticated enough to transform Western civilization is, if anything, an even greater miracle than the one described in the Gospels themselves.
Return, at the end, to Queens. At the Ohel stand people who loved their Rebbe more than anything in the world, who see him in their dreams and wait for his return, and who in thirty years have never uttered the sentence that his grave is empty. They behave exactly as Pagels and Gopnik say the disciples of Jesus behaved. The whole difference is that the disciples of Jesus behaved otherwise. Within a few years, among people who did not expect an empty tomb and for whom an empty tomb made nothing easier, a formula arose: he died, he was buried, he was raised, he was seen, and here is the list. One may decline to believe it. It is hard to derive it from grief, because grief, so thoroughly studied by now, produces presence, not burials with a roll of witnesses. Two tombs: one full, venerated, and certain; the other, for two thousand years, empty and troublesome. The faithful of the first say: he will return. The faithful of the second said something harder: he died, and that was not the end.
The most rigorous historical analysis need not exclude the possibility of the transcendent. It need only follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it leads, as it did for the first disciples, to an empty tomb and the unsettling conclusion that death itself has been overruled.
Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.
The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.
Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.
He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.
Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.
He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.
