Regardless of whether one views Jesus as a good teacher and a historical figure (as I do); whether one considers Jesus simply a myth (as some other atheists do); or whether one considers Jesus the Messiah who died for our sins and rose from the dead, his "remains" do not exist here on earth. The question is based not on a hypothetical but an impossible premise.

Every year at Easter time, superstitious and credulous people (both religious and nonreligious) work themselves into a lather over some phantasmagorical tale or discovery involving the New Testament. Last year it was the release of the movie The Da Vinci Code. This year it is the discovery of the so-called "Lost Tomb of Jesus," allegedly containing the ossuaries of Mary Magdalene and their son, Judah. Never mind that Jesus, Judah, and variations of Mary were among the most common names in first-century Judea.

Only a year ago, the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury were blasting Dan Brown and the Hollywood honchos who made his idiotic novel into a movie. (Yes, I know, millions of amateur cryptologists loved this yarn.) In case you too have been encased in an ossuary for the past few years, you should know that Brown, like the discoverers of Jesus's previously undisturbed "tomb," thinks that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married.

The Pope was offended because the idea of a married Jesus vitiates the Catholic Church's defense of a celibate priesthood. If Jesus was married, it surely follows that it is all right for priests to marry as well. I'm not sure exactly why the Archbishop of Canterbury was offended; perhaps the Code was a welcome distraction from his problems with the growing schism over gay clergy in the Anglican Communion.

As someone who considers the Bible the best supernatural thriller ever written, I can't imagine why devout Christians would pay the slightest attention to Brown's vastly inferior supernatural thriller.

Nor do I understand why an atheist would waste time debunking obvious attempts to cash in on the credulity of of people who actually believe that the final repositories not only of Jesus but of his entire family have conveniently turned up in the same cozy burial area after all of these centuries. The entertainment media move in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform.

You either believe that Jesus rose from the dead or you don't. The proposition is not subject to any kind of natural proof.

And now for something completely different...

As an addendum to this week's essay, I would like to correct a common misapprehension, expressed in many comments over the past few months, about the relationship between American freethought and atheism. Freethought refers to a movement, rooted not in atheism but in resistance to ecclesiastical authority, that extended, roughly from the late 17th century until the early 1920s. The lovely words "freethought" and "freethinker," which first entered the English language in the 1690s, are somewhat archaic--though I believe they are enjoying a modest revival as a result of my book.

American freethought has run the gamut from deism--belief in a God who set the universe in motion but takes no active role in the affairs of men--to outright atheism. Freethinkers are not necessarily atheists (neither Thomas Paine nor Thomas Jefferson were atheists, but both were freethinkers), and atheists are not necessarily freethinkers. The novelist Ayn Rand and the satirist H.L. Mencken, both well-known for their atheism, were devotees not of the democratic freethought tradition but, ultimately, of right-wing social Darwinism.

Describing freethinkers in the revolutionary generation, I write in my book: "What the many types of freethinkers shared, regardless of their views on the existence, or nonexistence, of a divinity, was a rationalist approach to fundamental questions of earthly existence--a conviction that the affairs of human beings should be governed not by faith in the supernatural but by a reliance on reason and evidence adduced from the natural world." Many people of liberal faith, now and in the past, qualify as freethinkers by that definition.

Since my Freethinkers, as well as the freethought movement, have been repeatedly mischaracterized in comments on this thread, I suggest that interested readers consult the book itself. It is available in most public libraries, and no one is making a movie out of it. If only I had managed to unearth the lost remains of Thomas Paine...