From bone box to big screen, Jesus reconsidered

NEARLY 2,000 years after Jesus trod the globe, there is, this Easter season, a fresh focus on the physical details of his life and death - and about what lessons they hold for today's religiously conflicted world.

Some scholarly research and portrayals in popular culture are focusing attention on the contours of Jesus' family tree, the veracity of the resurrection, and on his mission itself: Was he really the Messiah or just a political revolutionary - somewhere between Gandhi and Che Guevara?

While questions about Jesus have swirled for centuries, new details and depictions of the man on the eve of one of Christianity's holiest days are provoking fresh discussion and debate:

• A documentary is set to air this weekend in 70 countries about the ossuary, or "bone box," that was discovered last October and is thought to belong to Jesus' brother James. It is shedding new light on Jesus' family ties.

• A new book by a prominent Anglican scholar makes the most comprehensive case in decades that Jesus' body did actually return to life - an idea scholars have discounted over the years.

• A coming film by Mel Gibson depicts the crucifixion with a new degree of graphic and linguistic realism - and is already sparking curiosity and controversy.

• Another Discovery Channel documentary about Jesus included a computer-generated image of what he might have looked like. It also cited scientific evidence suggesting that the people can actually sweat blood, as the Bible describes Jesus doing in the Garden of Gethsemane.

"We live in a Jesus-haunted culture where everybody knows his name, yet we're also quite biblically illiterate," says Ben Witherington III, coauthor of a new book about the James ossuary. The new focus on Jesus' life emphasizes that Christianity is not just a mild "faith in faith" or belief in the "power of positive thinking," he says. Rather it's "a faith in a particular set of people and what they did." And that has big consequences.

For instance, the ossuary's Aramaic inscription, which reads, "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus," is perhaps the earliest known mention of Jesus outside the Bible. For many it revived the idea that a man so revered actually had family members and trod the dusty hills of modern-day Israel.

Likewise, a new book called "The Resurrection of the Son of God" by British scholar N. T. Wright presents a detailed assertion that Jesus was transformed into "a new sort of embodiment" - one that parallels the "new heaven and new earth" described by the apostle Paul.

And there's some evidence that the Rev. Mr. Wright's book comes amid a shift in British public opinion. A recent poll found that nearly half of Britons believe in the resurrection - compared with one-third in a similar poll in 2001.

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