(7 of 9)
Close indeed. The Bible's account of the event that rests at the heart of Christian faith, they concluded, is a poetic rendering of a devout wish but certainly not an authentic record. Crossan, who is co-chairman of the seminar with Funk, argues it this way: since the Crucifixion was conducted by Roman soldiers, he reckons, Jesus' body was most likely left on the Cross or tossed into a shallow grave to be eaten by scavenger dogs, crows or other wild beasts. As for Jesus' family and followers, depicted in the Bible as conducting a decent burial of the body according to Jewish law, "as far as I can see, they ran,'' Crossan says. "They lost their nerve, though not their faith."
Such speculations inspire fury and passionate denunciation among scholars and believers from the center and right wings of Christendom. To them, the Resurrection, is not just a story about comfort, or power, or hope. It represents the promise that death can be defeated, that hatred cannot ultimately prevail. "If I were an enemy of Christianity, I'd aim right at the Resurrection, because that's the heart of Christianity," the Rev. Billy Graham told Time last week. Graham rejects the idea that Jesus rose only as a spirit. "I believe he rose bodily. Otherwise you'd have to throw out the Easter story, because he showed the nail prints in his hands. If Christ didn't rise, as Paul said, it all has no meaning."
To the generations of Christians who have tried to invent a demythologized Jesus--the great moral leader and wilderness prophet, inspired but certainly not divine--traditional theologians have always countered with the fact that Jesus himself said he was God's son. C.S. Lewis was blunt in dismissing efforts at compromise. "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher. He'd either be a lunatic . or else he'd be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse."
The night before the scheduled shunt surgery, a doctor arrived in Elizabeth's hospital room and removed so much thick, infected fluid from her brain that he asked to postpone the operation for a few days. But 12 hours later, when he returned to do another tap, he could barely find any fluid, and it was totally clear. The doctor was baffled. Elizabeth was back home two days later. "We now know it was one of those lesser miracles that presage a greater miracle," her grandfather says.
A month after the first operation, the same surgeons made a last-ditch effort to remove the rest of the tumor. But when they went into Elizabeth's brain, they couldn't find the lesion. As planned, they removed a section of the nerve that the cancer had invaded, knowing that it would leave her blind in her right eye but agreeing that it represented her best hope of surviving. When the tissue was examined, the pathologist could not find any cancer. Regular cat scans since then have revealed no evidence of a tumor. The medical community calls what happened "spontaneous resolution." The family call it a miracle. Even a resurrection.