February 24, 2003

Three new books wonder if Jesus could be cloned
___By Bob Smietana
___Religion News Service
___WASHINGTON (RNS)--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.
___When BeauSeigneur 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," recently released in hardcover, begins with the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project.
___"One of the things they did was put these strips of mylar tape on the shroud and then pulled them off and put them on a slide," BeauSeigneur explained. His scientists use the same techniques to remove small dirt particles from the images of feet on the shroud. Harold Goodman, one of the scientist characters in the book, 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 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 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 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 the 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 1996.
___"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," Lankford said.
___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 website.
___The main character of "Cloning Christ," 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, which was not an uncommon experience for people working there."
___That experience made him question his own faith, however. Senese 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."
___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, a number of other "Jurassic Christ" stories already are in print, including "The Genesis Code" by John Case, "The Shroud" by Jaqueline Druga-Marchetti and "The Sacred Helix," by Mark Garon.
___Lankford, who already is 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 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," she said. "We have all kinds of people whose DNA has survived intact."

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