In his first epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul made it perfectly clear that a belief in the bodily resurrection of Christ as the sine qua non of Christianity. If Christ was not raised from the dead, that the whole of the Christian faith is an utter sham, the apostolic witness fraudulent, the basis of Christian hope nonexistent, and the poor saps who go on attempting to live a life guided by the teachings of Christ are "of all people most to be pitied."

But the editors of the Washington Post's On Faith section apparently didn't get that memo, choosing to run for their Holy Saturday edition a Religion News Service article which hyped the beliefs of liberal religious scholars like the former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, John Shelby Spong, who not only denies that Jesus was physically raised from the dead but that the Bible really, truly teaches the same if you just interpret it the way he prefers to.