Outside a Chicago hospital on a humid summer night, a gunshot victim was unloaded from an ambulance and wheeled on a gurney into the emergency room.  The teenager gestured toward his abdomen as he was rolled past reporters.  "It doesn't even hurt!" he said with a nervous laugh, as if everyone were old friends.  "It doesn't even hurt!"

A few hours later, he was dead.

A reporter on the streets of Chicago soon develops more than a passing acquaintance with death.  Often the people directly embroiled in an unfolding tragedy - the car accident, the gang fight, the convenience store robbery gone awry - are too bewildered and disoriented to fully comprehend their predicament.  But from the detached perspective of the reporter, the grim outcome is much more foreseeable.  And when death finally does seize its victims, when their eyes stare blankly, then all hope is gone.  They've spoken their last word, they've breathed their last breath, and their time is done - they won't be coming back. That's why all this talk of Jesus' resurrection seemed so strange to me. It's staggering how quickly the body of a deceased person is reduced to a mere shell.  The idea that it could somehow become reanimated, especially after three days, could never quite get past my Journalistic skepticism when I was an atheist.

As I documented in The Case for Christ, it was my investigation of the historical evidence that eventually convinced me that the resurrection of Jesus really happened.  In the succeeding years, however, the resurrection has been subjected to new and more contentious attacks.  Do any of these updated objections, I wondered, manage to crack this central pillar of Christianity?

Religious studies professor Bart D. Ehrman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill certainly thinks so.  "After years of studying," he said, "I finally came to the conclusion that everything I had previously thought about the historical evidence of the resurrection was absolutely wrong."  The graduate of the conservative Moody Bible Institute and the evangelical Wheaton College is now an avowed agnostic.

Skepticism about the resurrection was bolstered by a pre-Easter 2007 television documentary followed by a popular book - which claimed that the burial site of Jesus and his family had been accidentally uncovered by an Israeli construction crew in 1980.  According to the film, the "bone boxes" of "Jesus, son of Joseph," Mary, Joseph, Mary Magdelene, and even "Judah, son of Jesus" were found in the Talpiot Tomb.  The discovery threatened to amplify doubts about whether Jesus really had returned from the dead in bodily form.

At the forefront of the most recent challenges to the resurrection have been Muslims, who clearly understand that discrediting the resurrection means nothing less than disproving the truth of Christianity.  Muslims interpret the Qur'an as saying that Jesus never actually died on the cross, much less returned from the dead.

A leading Muslim apologist, Shabir Ally, has said that the Messiah was expected to be victorious, and therefore "a crucified Messiah is as self-refuting as a square circle, a four-sided triangle, or a married bachelor."  Ayman al-Zawahri, the deputy leader of Al Qaeda, even took time out from excoriating George W. Bush and Pope Benedict XVI in a 2006 videotape to urge all Christians to convert to Islam, which, he said, correctly believes that Jesus was never put to death, never rose from the dead, and was not divine.