To the editors:
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While Dr. Thomas Sheehan of Loyola University exhibited an extensive knowledge of exegesis in his interview with Mr. Robert McClory [April 21], Dr. Sheehan dismissed the authenticity of the resurrection story too quickly on the basis of known biblical redaction. Although Shakespeare characterized death as the bourne from which no traveller returns, modern medical research has uncovered evidence of the probability of life after death in interviews with individuals resuscitated from clinical death, defined generally as the cessation of bodily functions. These interviews, conducted independently by researchers like Dr. Raymond Moody and Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, provide empirical evidence that the clinically dead experience a body apart from the physical body and that this “new” body can move about. In one instance, Dr. Moody reported on a woman, lying in a hospital bed out of view of an adjacent waiting room, who after resuscitation correctly described the mismatched clothing that her daughter was wearing in the waiting room. The daughter never viewed or otherwise saw her mother on that occasion. The author, however, stated that she left her physical body and that, before returning to her physical body, she walked into the waiting room where she saw her crying daughter with her nanny who had hurriedly dressed her child in the mismatched clothes before coming to the hospital. If archaeologists discovered the physical remains of Rabbi Joshua Ben Nazareth a/k/a Jesus Christ in Judea today, the discovery would not invalidate the resurrection story in light of this recent medical research on near death experiences. Furthermore, Dr. Moody has found evidence of comparable near-death experiences in other cultures and times, e.g. the Tibetan Book of the Dead written in the eighth or ninth century A.D.
Eugene L. Mahoney
