Debate Over Resurrection Surfaces in a New Book : Easter: Biblical scholar’s novel is one of several recent works that attempt to test the faith of Christians. Many clergy welcome the controversy.

Paul L. Maier, author and biblical scholar, recalls that as a boy he always wanted to know more than the Sunday school teacher was able to tell him.

“I remember years ago asking her what Pontius Pilate was doing on the Monday after Easter,” he said. “I recall her throwing up her arms in dismay.”

Judging from a growing number of books like Maier’s new novel, “A Skeleton in God’s Closet,” more and more people are wondering about Jesus following that fateful Good Friday crucifixion.

The questions seem especially urgent as Christians the world over approach the commemoration of the central defining belief of their faith--the Resurrection of Jesus Christ three days after he was crucified on orders from the Roman governor Pilate.

In Maier’s fictional account, a team of archeologists working in the Holy Land uncover what seems to be the bones of Jesus. The discovery not only shakes the Christian world to its foundation but has far-reaching political repercussions.

“Take away Easter and the bodily Resurrection, and Christianity’s doomed,” a brilliant but devious archeologist, Shannon Jennings, declares in Maier’s novel, which has become a bestseller in religious bookstores.

Maier’s work, of course, is not the first book--fiction or otherwise--to test the faith of believers. In 1966, the “Passover Plot” by Hugh Schonfield argued that Jesus’ death and Resurrection were a fraud and clever conspiracy by zealous followers.

Indeed, the Resurrection has been hotly disputed from Day One (or Day Three). Even according to Biblical accounts (John 20:25), one of Jesus’ own disciples, Thomas, doubted the first reports of his master’s Resurrection.

But the debate, with notable exceptions, has more or less been out of earshot of rank-and-file churchgoers.

No longer. The debates are coming out of the closet and off the book presses as never before--and many Christians for the first time are being confronted with potentially disturbing, perhaps even faith-shattering, scholarship and conjecture.

Maier’s novel fictionalized a crisis of faith when the world was told that Jesus’ bones had been found.

“It is a theological thriller to re-examine what you believe about the Easter event and re-evaluate the foundations of your faith,” said Maier, a professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and a member of the conservative Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod.

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The book’s plot, he said, was intended to be constructive--to point out that despite many new archeological findings Christianity’s basic foundation remains sound.

Increasingly, however, Christian doctrines have been called into question by scholarship that has drawn on cultural anthropology, non-canonical sources and an understanding of how early Christianity was torn from its Jewish roots and reinterpreted--some say incorrectly--by Greco-Roman culture.

Much of this misunderstanding, it is argued by some, inevitably led to Christian dogmas that would have shocked Jesus--the literal physical Resurrection of Jesus, the Holy Trinity and the incarnation--the idea that Jesus as God incarnate was both fully God and fully human.

As these and other challenges become more widely known, will the Christian faith be hobbled as Maier’s novel portends?

Thoughtful Christians on each end of the spectrum, from a biblical literalist to another who thinks the Christian Scriptures are best viewed metaphorically, don’t think so.

The Rev. Jack Hayford, pastor of the Church on the Way in Van Nuys and a nationally recognized Pentecostal leader, dismisses non-orthodox findings as the work of a “revisionistic mind-set.”

But suppose, Hayford said, that the long-lost “Q” document--which New Testament scholars believe was a common source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke--was found. Suppose it reported that Jesus really didn’t rise from the dead and the story of his miraculous Resurrection was fabricated by his followers.

“I think it probably wouldn’t change anything even if they found that,” Hayford said. “But they’re not going to find that.”

Hayford said he doesn’t bother himself, or his congregation, with such speculation. “It’s really not worth the time to deal with so transient an effort at undermining people’s faith,” he said. “It’s just not going to succeed. All those battles have been fought already and won by Christian apologetics. . . .”

On the other end of the spectrum is John Hick, a professor of the philosophy of religion at the University of Birmingham in England whose latest book argues for interpreting the Christian Scriptures metaphorically instead of literally.

In a telephone interview, Hick said many believers have already reached an accommodation.

“I really think there’s a lot of people in the pews that are much more intelligent and much more thoughtful than a lot of pastors give them credit for,” Hick said. “And although they will sing all the traditional hymns and say all the traditional things in the liturgy, a great many of them are conscious that this is not to be taken literally.”

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Still, he said, a fundamentalist reaction to non-traditional views may be expected. “There will always be that. It’s a question of how large a proportion of the Christian movement it is. It’s always a minority, but in the (U.S.) in particular, it’s a very powerful minority.”

When faith confronts speculation there can be convulsive reactions, as was the case in 1988 when many Christians, not all of them fundamentalists, were offended by Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” an apocryphal motion picture about Jesus, complete with children, two successive wives, adultery and old age.

In the end, some pastors believe the controversy can strengthen rather than weaken one’s faith, among them the Rev. Canon Lewis P. Bohler Jr., for 32 years rector of Advent Episcopal Parish in Los Angeles.

“I myself would ask my people to go through these things very well, and then I would give them an expansion. I would say, ‘That’s a point of view’ and say, ‘Here is mine.’ I feel that ultimately this (process) will make a better something--a better non-Christian or a better Christian, a better non-Jew or a better Jew,” he said.

The worst thing would be to dismiss the claims of scholarship as irrelevant or lacking credibility, as he suggested some fundamentalists might try to do.

“For the fundamentalists this denial will be just what they need for their members. . . . But I’m sure late at night their members must ponder, ‘Is it as cut and dry as my leaders said?’ ”

Since his novel was published, Maier said he has fielded a number of calls asking whether he had become an apostate or lost his faith. He hasn’t.

But he added, “I cannot praise the sheltered or untried virtue. I think it’s important that people see the counter-arguments to Christianity.”