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To any traditional Christian, no miracle is more important than the Resurrection, the event that lies at the heart of the faith, containing within it the promise of eternal life. "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain," Paul wrote to the Corinthians. But it was St. Augustine who observed that "on no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the resurrection of the body." And indeed no assertion of modern biblical scholarship can match, in its capacity to horrify and gall, the statement that Christ never actually rose from the dead.
Yet liberals argue that it is not blasphemy to say the Resurrection never happened, because accounts of Christ's rising are meant metaphorically. In this view, one robs the Bible of its richness and poetry by insisting it should be read literally. Jesus was resurrected in the lives and dreams of his followers; the body of Christ is the church, not a reconstituted physical body. The Resurrection represents an explosion of power, a promise of salvation that does not depend on a literal belief in physical resurrection.
New Testament scholars from this school point out that the Gospel writers made a crucial distinction between flesh and spirit. "They were talking not about the resurrection of the flesh but about the resurrection of Christ's selfhood, his essence," says Jackson Carroll, a professor of religion and society at Duke Divinity School. "The authors of the New Testament had experiences with an extraordinary person and extraordinary events, and they were trying to find ways to talk about all that. They weren't writing scientific history; they were writing faith history."
Distressing as it is to a conservative Christian, that kind of reading is mild compared with the pronouncements from the left fringes of contemporary scholarship. The efforts of moderate theologians to find new meanings in Scripture are burdened by the decrees of such groups as the Jesus Seminar, which seem determined to offend at all costs. The seminar is the invention of onetime Protestant clergyman Robert W. Funk, who now runs a Bible think tank, the Westar Institute. Since the mainstream press rarely covers the esoterica of New Testament criticism, he set an irresistible trap: he would gather "eminent" scholars, and they would put the events in the Bible to a vote. He passes around a white plastic container, and each scholar drops in a colored marble: black if he or she is certain the event was fabricated, gray if it probably was, pink if it might actually have occurred, red if it certainly did.
In recent years, the Jesus Seminar weighed Christ's actual words as reported in the Gospels, and agreed that in most cases he never said them. Last fall they considered the Virgin Birth, and 96% agreed it never happened. And last month, just in time for Easter, they took up the subject of the Resurrection. The invitation to reporters promised that the experts "will be drilling close to the nerve of the Christian faith."