The Resurrection

[The Grand Nudger]

To hear them tale the tale they wouldn't even -be- christian unless resurrection is on the table. No deliverable, no play.

[Sheldon]

Hypothetically, if science were to find a way to resurrect someone, who'd been dead long after rigour mortis set in, then this wouldn't lend gravitas to the Jesus myth in the bible, it would make it all seem rather banal, surely?

[The Grand Nudger]

Only if christians insist. If it really is just a ghost story about punch and pie in the sky, then yeah.

[Belacqua]

couldn't find the word miracle in the Bible. You'll find terms such as wonders and signs, but the idea of a miracle appears to be external the Bible itself.

That's the way I learned it. People in those days used different categories than we do, so they didn't think in terms of natural/supernatural the way we do now. 

The Greek word translated as "miracle" is usually either dunamis (δύναμις), which is a mighty or powerful deed. From the same root as "dynamite." Or sēmeion (σημεῖον), "sign" or "token." Same root as "semiotics." Or teras (τέρας), "wonder" or "marvel." 

So powerful, amazing, significant things, but not necessarily supernatural. 

There are several words which have come to indicate supernatural things which didn't originally have that sense. So "occult" just meant "hidden," either because people hadn't figured out the cause yet or because practitioners kept their knowledge hidden from lay people. 

Also "monster" comes from the word for "portent" or "warning." Same root as "demonstration." So for example if a cow was born with a deformity this was taken as a sign of things to come, or a warning that bad things were happening. 

So in biblical times miracles were rare or powerful signs or warnings. Separating the natural -- as things we expect or can explain -- from the supernatural -- as things we can't -- has distorted the meaning.

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't think it matters whether we string up the palestinian naturally or supernaturally.

[Paleophyte]

My point was about the plausibility of technological advances, not about proving a specific religious claim.

Then it was probably inadvisable to frame it in a religious context at the outset.

The "virgin birth" is actually trivially easy to explain. All you need is a man who drops off after a handjob and leaves his frustrated wife to tend to her needs by herself. Depressingly common and, while it's unlikely to result in pregnancy, there can be sperm transfer via her hands, so there is a very small risk. Probably not the origin story that the church is looking for though.

As for resurrection, you can pretty much forget it. A few people have been brought back from nearly dead due to extreme cold after several hours by careful warming, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and some serious voltage. The technique relies on the body shutting down at extreme low temperatures and being preserved by the cold, but odds are very poor even then. It's led to the phrase "They aren't dead until they're warm and dead."

Taking it back to the resurrection myth, well, best you stick with Divine Intervention. As Zebo has already pointed out, your real problem is going to be brain death, although serious damage to all the major organs will also occur pretty quickly. Without those deep cold temperatures that Jerusalem is famous for not having you're pretty much buggered. Brain damage becomes a worry at 2 minutes without oxygen being circulated and is all but guaranteed by 5 minutes. Those tiny neural connections that make you who you are start dying off and you pretty rapidly lose memory/function/the ability to keep your autonomous nervous system running. That stuff is simply irreparable, even by conceivable near-future technologies. There are a few drugs that might improve your window by a few minutes, but not many, and certainly nowhere near enough to fit the story. I have no idea when the major organs start packing it in from oxygen loss, most people are well and truly dead before then, but I wouldn't give it more than an hour before major damage sets in. After days in the tomb, you're looking at rigor mortis starting and ending and you should be well into putrefaction. What's left of the brain at that point would be a nasty-smelling slurry inside the skull.

Honestly, if you got the poor bugger straight off the cross the instant that he died and right into a modern ER I wouldn't give you good odds. This isn't simply a case of needing to apply some voltage across his nipples to get the old heart pumping again. You're looking at six hours in an extreme stress position leading to death by exhaustion, dehydration, and heat stroke, and all of that is before you take into account the abdominal/thoracic wound and resulting blood loss. This isn't the patient that you're going to give good odds to during triage.

Long story short, everything that science knows about dying says that this one is staying dead.

[Angrboda]

couldn't find the word miracle in the Bible. You'll find terms such as wonders and signs, but the idea of a miracle appears to be external the Bible itself.

That's the way I learned it. People in those days used different categories than we do, so they didn't think in terms of natural/supernatural the way we do now. 

The Greek word translated as "miracle" is usually either dunamis (δύναμις), which is a mighty or powerful deed. From the same root as "dynamite." Or sēmeion (σημεῖον), "sign" or "token." Same root as "semiotics." Or teras (τέρας), "wonder" or "marvel." 

So powerful, amazing, significant things, but not necessarily supernatural. 

[John 6IX Breezy]

My point was about the plausibility of technological advances, not about proving a specific religious claim.

As for resurrection, you can pretty much forget it. A few people have been brought back from nearly dead due to extreme cold after several hours by careful warming, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and some serious voltage. The technique relies on the body shutting down at extreme low temperatures and being preserved by the cold, but odds are very poor even then. It's led to the phrase "They aren't dead until they're warm and dead."

Taking it back to the resurrection myth, well, best you stick with Divine Intervention. As Zebo has already pointed out, your real problem is going to be brain death, although serious damage to all the major organs will also occur pretty quickly. Without those deep cold temperatures that Jerusalem is famous for not having you're pretty much buggered. Brain damage becomes a worry at 2 minutes without oxygen being circulated and is all but guaranteed by 5 minutes. Those tiny neural connections that make you who you are start dying off and you pretty rapidly lose memory/function/the ability to keep your autonomous nervous system running. That stuff is simply irreparable, even by conceivable near-future technologies. There are a few drugs that might improve your window by a few minutes, but not many, and certainly nowhere near enough to fit the story. I have no idea when the major organs start packing it in from oxygen loss, most people are well and truly dead before then, but I wouldn't give it more than an hour before major damage sets in. After days in the tomb, you're looking at rigor mortis starting and ending and you should be well into putrefaction. What's left of the brain at that point would be a nasty-smelling slurry inside the skull.

I appreciate your answer, but I'm not sure focusing on the difficulty of the endeavor addresses the possibility of it. Let me offer one way of simplifying the problem: 

Here's a good definition: Life is disequilibrium. What this means is that life is the act of maintaining differentiation from the environment. You maintain a temperature difference, a pressure difference, a concentration difference, and so on, through homeostatic processes. Conversely, you are dead when you are at equilibrium with the environment. So, life is something like an entropy problem. This means that the problem is in principle solvable regardless of complexity.

ps. Since you mentioned brain damage and neural connections, an interesting fact about the human brain is that our neurons have the ability to regenerate their axons (say if you were to sever your optic nerve) but the ability is inhibited by the brain itself. But it raises the question, is there even a difference between resurrecting an individual and healing them? One is wholistic and the other partial, but both achieve something similar—restoration.

[The Grand Nudger]

...and christians are willing to be dicks to other people on that pretense. I don't think you're filth because of what you want, John, but how you intend to go about getting it. There are real people in the real world offering us real fruit of the poisoned tree. Likelihood and possibility aren't even arguable on those counts. I don't take them up on the offer...you don;t take them up on the offer. Then "god" enters the chat...

[Paleophyte]

Here's a good definition: Life is disequilibrium. What this means is that life is the act of maintaining differentiation from the environment. You maintain a temperature difference, a pressure difference, a concentration difference, and so on, through homeostatic processes. Conversely, you are dead when you are at equilibrium with the environment. So, life is something like an entropy problem. This means that the problem is in principle solvable regardless of complexity.

If you're going with basic time reversibility, then every problem is solvable, in principle. You asked if it was "possible in theory or even probable in practice". I think that we've answered the probability of our current or reasonably foreseeable practice with a resounding no. As for possible in theory, since everything is possible in theory let's have a look at the odds. Honestly, I don't know the odds, but let's look at the ballpark we'd expect to find them in. We aren't looking at the loss of a few axons here, we're looking at wholesale mass cellular death across the entire brain. What you need to do is take that, find a point at which to begin the repairs, good luck with that BTW most of the cells that would aid in repair are also dead and decaying, and somehow work your way back to restoring the very fine-detail of exact synapse width, positioning, firing sensitivity, a host of molecules on and in the nerve cells that change the behavior of the neuron to help produce memory, etc. It's absurdly detailed work. And that's just the brain. Keep in mind that the rest of the body that you need to keep the brain working is similarly dead or dying on a cellular level.

In the realm of improbability, there's the old question of 'what are the odds of all the air molecules around me spontaneously buggering off?' That's possible in principle, but in practice the probability is so vanishingly small that you could watch the entire universe from now until the end of time and never observe it. Taking a skull full of foul-smelling decay and trying to get the original owner* back is so much less likely than having all of your air rush away that it's absurd. You'd have much better luck unscrambling eggs.

So while it's "possible in principle", the odds are so vanishingly small that, for any normal usage of the word, it isn't possible.

*Sidenote: You'd be just as likely to get Elvis Presley or Charles Manson as you would anybody else. Good luck sticking the landing with a specific individual.