Could we organise the Second Coming for January 1st 2000? Yes. We have the technology, in the fields of embryology, genetic engineering and the application of DNA to the study of miracles.
It was revealed last month that researchers at the Kyunghee University Hospital in Seoul had
cultivated a human embryo from an egg donated by a 30-year-old woman. The embryo was studied and analysed as it developed for a few days, then disposed of.
The experiment followed last July s announcement that researchers at the University of Hawaii had used the same technique to create 50 living carbon-copies of a dead mouse.
The two experiments marked a significant advance on the technology used by the Roslin Institute in Scotland in 1996 to create Dolly, the sheep.
Meanwhile, devotees of the Turin Shroud are cock-a-hoop and filled with consternation at the results of a study of the organic bio-plastic coating on the swathe of linen preserved in the local cathedral, which some believe was the wrapping-cloth on the body of Christ.
Believers in the Shroud suffered a set-back in 1988 when radiocarbon dating suggested that the cloth was of medieval manufacture and couldn t possibly have been in use two millennia since.
But now Dr. Leoncio Garza-Valdes, a Texas paediatrician and microbiologist with an interest in archeology, has studied fragments of the Shroud and is convinced of its authenticity.
He claims that the image of a man imprinted on the Shroud was not made by direct contact with a body over a discrete period of time but by a build-up over 2,000 years of a coating of microscopic organisms, mainly bacteria . . .
The areas that look darker . . . are the areas that had more contact in the beginning with the dead body of Jesus of Nazareth, so the bacteria there grew faster than in areas which has less contact. If a part of the body was in direct contact with the textile, the concentration of sweat, salt, oil and blood was higher . . .
The 1988 radiocarbon tests, he reckons, measured not the carbon degradation of the cloth alone, but also that of the coating of organisms which had gradually built up. So the date yielded by the tests may have been the average, so to speak, of the elements under scrutiny.
In an effort to authenticate his theory, Dr. Garza-Valdes examined minute traces of blood, possibly originating from a wound at the back of the neck of a body which had been wrapped in the cloth. Using an electron microscope and the most advanced DNA technology, he was able to identify the blood as type AB the most common among Jews.
However, the most relevant aspect of Dr. Garza-Valdes work is expressed in the title of the book which he has just published in the US, to the terror and ecstasy of believers in the Shroud: The DNA of God?
The approved line of Catholic commentators is that Dr. Garza-Valdes has solved the 1988 radiocarbon problem, but has not identified the DNA of God. Jesus-as-Man was merely man, they say. Jesus-as-God had no physicality and, therefore, no DNA.
But this won t wash. The clear teaching of mainstream Christianity has been that Jesus was both God and Man in both his physical and spiritual manifestations. The well-defined doctrine of the Ascension into Heaven leaves little room for argument on this score.
Put the DNA findings of Dr. Garza-Valdes together with the advances in replication and in genetic engineering made in Hawaii and Seoul and cloning God is well possible.
Proper funding could bring the project to fruition on January 1st, 2000.
As for a location, Altnagelvin Hospital, Derry, would be as good as any and more apt than most.
We will deal with the theological and philosophical implications later. In the meantime, send me all your money. n