By BOB SMIETANA
c. 2003 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) In theory, all you need to clone a human being is one live
skin cell, a human egg and the right laboratory techniques.
But what if, like the scientists in "Jurassic Park," you could
create a
clone from the DNA of someone or something who was dead,
like Napoleon or
Albert Einstein. And, what if you found skin cells from
Jesus on the Shroud
of Turin or on a shard of the cross.
Could you clone God?
That's the question raised in three new books: "In His Image: Book
One
of the CloneChrist Trilogy" by James BeauSeigneur;
"The Jesus Thief," by
J.R. Lankford, and "Cloning Christ," by Peter
Senese and Robert Geis.
BeauSeigneur says that when he first tried to sell his cloned Christ
stories in 1997, he couldn't find a publisher. So he decided
to self-publish
them, which didn't go well at first.
"Right after I published it, I spent a lot of money on advertising
-- in
the radio, wherever I could think of," he said.
"But it wasn't going
anywhere -- I was spending about $100 a book to sell
it."
But a renewed interest in cloning in recent years helped pushed sales of
the books from 962 in 1997 to 15,000 in 2001, enough to get
the series
picked up by Warner books. "In His Image," due out
in hardcover on Jan. 29,
begins with the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project.
"One of the things that they did was put these strips of mylar tape
on
the shroud and then pulled them off and put them on a
slide," said
BeauSeigneur. His scientists use the same techniques to
remove small dirt
particles from the images of feet on the shroud. Harold
Goodman, one of the
scientists, finds living skin cells in the dirt particles,
which he uses to
clone Jesus.
Much like the leaders of Clonaid, the company run by the Raelian sect
that recently claimed to have created a human clone, Goodman
is fascinated
by extraterrestrials. He believes that Jesus was a member of
an alien race
and clones Jesus to prove his theory. But instead, he may
have created the
Antichrist.
BeauSeigneur, an evangelical Christian (and 1980 Republican opponent to
then-congressman Al Gore) says the inspiration for the
series came from his
lifelong interest in Christian prophecy about the end times.
A former
technical writer who has written about strategic defense and
military
avionics, he says he was trying to work out how those
prophecies could
become reality. "In His Image" has more than 200
footnotes, something
BeauSeigneur said was crucial to establishing his
credibility.
"If I am writing to a skeptical world and I am going to be saying
that
my answers are the right answers," he said, "I
have to be really careful
about how I tell the truth -- not just the truth of the
Gospel but all the
truth."
J.R. Lankford says her biggest challenge in writing about cloning Jesus
was finding a believable main character. "How could you
do this and not be a
mad scientist?" she said.
Her main character, Dr. Felix Rossi, is motivated at first by a deep
Catholic faith. Later, when Rossi discovers that his parents
were really
Jews who fled Italy to escape the Nazis, he tries to somehow
bridge the gap
between the two faiths. If a Jew could bring back Jesus,
then Rossi believes
that no one could ever blame Jews again for Jesus' death.
An
electrical engineer turned novelist, Lankford started writing "The
Jesus Thief" in 1999, after seeing a cable television
special on Shroud of
Turin. The special, which reported about a scientist who
claimed to have
found human blood on the Shroud, aired a few years after the
first
successful cloning of an animal -- Dolly the sheep -- in
1977.
"If there is blood on the Shroud," Lankford thought,
"then they could
clone Jesus." Or as one character in "The Jesus
Thief" sarcastically puts
it, "They've cloned a sheep, let's clone the
Shepherd."
"I'm an engineer so I suppose my mind can't avoid such
thoughts," said
Lankford.
Like BeauSeigneur, Lankford at first had trouble finding a publisher for
her book. So a group of her friends and fans formed Great
Reads Books, a new
publishing company whose first book is "The Jesus
Thief," to be released
March 3. To promote the book, Great Reads is running ads in
Publishers
Weekly and The New York Times Book Review, and has created a
promotional Web
site (www.thejesusthief.com). "This is a group of
absolutely wonderful men,"
she said. "I call them my band of angels."
The main character of "Cloning Christ" (Orion Publishing and
Media),
which was released Jan. 11, is Max Train, a geneticist who
lost his faith
after his wife and daughter were murdered. During a trip to
Israel, he
discovers a fragment of a cross, which may contain hair and
other fragments
of the body of Jesus.
Author Senese got the idea for the book while volunteering at Ground
Zero in New York. "I came across fragments of body
parts," he said, "which
was not an uncommon experience for people working
there." That experience
made him question his own faith. Senese says he walked into
a nearby church
and began shouting at a crucifix there. "I don't know
how long I was
standing there yelling," he said.
Eventually, Senese felt God's presence in that church. "I realized
how
much Christ was at Ground Zero," he said, "and
that the love of God was
strengthening people through those terrible times."
Senese says that his book takes the position that cloning is evil. The
real way to clone Christ, he said, "is to clone his
actions" by loving
others.
Besides the three new books, there are a number of other "Jurassic
Christ" stories in print, including "The Genesis
Code" by John Case, "The
Shroud" by Jaqueline Druga-Marchetti and "The
Sacred Helix," by Mark Garon.
Lankford, who is already at work on a sequel called
"Risen" said there are
two factors that fuel the appeal of these kinds of stories.
"We all want to reverse death -- we are all afraid of death, even
if we
have faith in an afterlife. Who could look at that
crucified, tormented
Jesus, and not want to reverse it somehow," she said.
"And we all want to
meet God. No matter what happens with this book, I will not
regret writing
it, because I got to imagine what it was like to really meet
God."
While she says that any blood on the Shroud of Turin would be "too
degraded to use in cloning," Lankford believes that
society still has to
wrestle with the possibility of cloning other famous people.
"We are going
to have to decide if we are going to clone people like
Einstein -- we have
all kinds of people whose DNA has survived intact."