Hundreds of millions of Christians will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday. And after a century and a half of liberal Protestant attempts to redefine the resurrection into merely a metaphor, the vast majority of Christians still believe that Christ’s body physically arose.

Revisionist theologians still find airtime on the History Channel or PBS, but their project never gained a mass following. Even most secular media coverage about religion today focuses largely on orthodox expressions of Roman Catholicism or evangelical Protestantism. Whatever their own beliefs, most reporters and pundits intuit that rationalist liberal theology does not command a lot of adherents.

The Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 to adjudicate over which Scriptures were historically accurate, and which always excluded any talk about miracles, once gained widespread attention for its routine objections to traditional Christian belief. “Christ’s Body Actually Eaten by Wild Dogs!” was a typical headline from a Jesus Seminar gathering, where liberal scholars would vote with color marbles over which biblical verses were valid. Eventually these self-selected academics ran out of incendiary claims, and the media mostly stopped heeding their pronouncements after founder Robert Funk died in 2005, if not well before.

Co-founder and former Roman Catholic priest John Dominic Crosson, now about 76 years old, still soldiers on. He and other kindred academics routinely speak around the nation, gathering usually small audiences of gray-headed, mostly retired clergy.

Of course, the Jesus Seminar skeptics insist notions about a divine Jesus being born of a virgin or rising from the dead were self-servingly and dogmatically imposed by the later church. They themselves typically and dogmatically assert Christianity’s unqualified support for a redistributive welfare state, sexual liberation, and opposition to the American “empire.”

Another aging survivor of the Jesus Seminar is nearly 80 year old retired Episcopal Church Bishop John Shelby Spong, though his fame preceded his induction. In the 1980s and 1990s, while Bishop of Newark, Spong penned books speculating that the Virgin Mary was a prostitute impregnated by a Roman soldier, and that St. Paul was a self-hating homosexual, among other saucy assertions that once gained headlines but now excite yawns.

He earned audiences with Phil Donahue and other breathless talk show hosts, most of whom are now themselves faded from view. Spong always claimed that “fundamentalist,” i.e. orthodox Christianity, was dying, and he was its savior. That his New Jersey diocese lost 40 percent of its members while he was providing enlightened leadership as bishop never seemed to provoke self-reflection. One bemused observer who recently went to hear him speak at a New Jersey college campus remarked he was able to locate the event by following the trail of “old people.”

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