All Christian apologists try to make a rational case for resurrection of Jesus, but irrationality and bait and switch is the name of their game. I have covered this extensively in a Google knol titled, ‘William Lane Craig makes false claims about swoon hypothesis.’ I have argued for the swoon hypothesis in this paper. This means that Jesus did not die on the cross; he only went into a coma or a swoon!

To make a case for resurrection and ascension as the Pope will do, in scientific terms, is to propose a nuclear explosion of unprecedented proportions with no eye witnesses surviving to give us an account, on whose supposed testimony, the dogma of Christianity are constructed. For further details go to:

Huffington Post states:
The scientific case against resurrection is pretty straightforward: once dead you stay dead — that’s just the way it works. Coming back to life after having been dead (I mean really dead) would constitute a violation of natural law — a miracle — and miracles just don’t happen. Fair enough. But in his recent book on the last days of Jesus (Jesus of Nazareth Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem to the Resurrection), Joseph Ratzinger (aka Pope Benedict XVI) argues that reckoning Resurrection as resuscitation of a corpse is to misunderstand its true significance. Jesus’ Resurrection, he contends, was an utterly singular event, straining the very limits of human understanding:

“Anyone approaching the Resurrection accounts in the belief that he knows what rising from the dead means will inevitably misunderstand those accounts and will then dismiss them as meaningless” (p. 243).

In fact, if Jesus’ Resurrection were “merely” coming back to life in any way that we might comprehend, then it would be of little significance.

“Now it must be acknowledged that if in Jesus’ Resurrection we were dealing simply with the miracle of a resuscitated corpse, it would ultimately be of no concern to us” (p. 243).

To read Huffington Post review of the Pope’s book:

The good news is that the Pope at least is trying to explain the swoon hypothesis, as in the past they would just adamantly deny it and just insist on their paradigm, however irrational!