Why We Can't Clone Jesus

This article originally appeared on Beliefnet in October 2000.

UFOs might really be out there, so we can't entirely debunk the claim they exist. International bankers might be plotting to control the world, too, though why they would conspire to cause regular bouts of global financial problems has never really been clear. You can't dismiss such things as impossible.

But you can dismiss this as impossible: cloning Jesus.

Word has been spreading on the web and elsewhere that a California organization has the technology and intent to clone the Redeemer from Galilee. By all appearances, the group's project is a fundraising hoax, yet its claims are being taken seriously by a few hopeful Christians and have received at least bemused coverage in some regular media. Sci-fi novels such as "The Genesis Code" have also tried to create plausible savior-cloning scenarios. But any science-literate or even theology-literate person will pretty quickly conclude that Jesus-cloning experiments simply won't work. Let's take the California group's ludicrous "Second Coming Project" as a model.

Here's what the project claims: It will recover a bit of DNA from a relic, such as the Shroud of Turin, that may have touched Jesus; then, "utilizing techniques pioneered at the Roslin Institute in Scotland," the laboratory that produced Dolly the cloned sheep, it will implant Jesus' genome into an unfertilized human egg cell; the result will be implanted into the womb of a young virgin volunteer, who would then bear a child while she is still a virgin; her child would be Jesus, arriving for the Second Coming; and, to top it all off, this can be timed so that the birth occurs on December 25, 2001, ushering in a new millennium.

As a Christian, I'd love to see Jesus return to right the wrongs of the world. I'd give pretty much anything to touch his robe. But genetic engineering is not going to accomplish the happy event. Whoever produced the "Second Coming Project" materials has copied down some fancy techno-terms like "oocyte," but clearly has no idea what he or she is talking about.

Here are just a few reasons why this Jesus-cloning project won't work:

Even assuming a DNA sample from Jesus could be found on the Shroud or some other relic, it would almost certainly be worthless for genetic engineering. Jesus died 2,000 years ago; his DNA, in the unlikely event any still exists in the world, would now be degraded. Genes slowly break down if a living body does not preserve them. The "genetic fingerprint" tests that courts are beginning to use to assess guilt or innocence--tests that look only for a short "genetic marker," a much less daunting task than recovery of the genome itself--generally don't work on DNA more than 10 years old. Degraded DNA can be scanned for some kinds of molecular information, but no technology present or anticipated can make it usable again.

Suppose, through some fluke or miracle, you did find a well-preserved DNA sample on the Shroud or other relic. How would you know it came from Jesus? Most likely, hundreds of people have handled the Shroud. Unless Jesus' chromosomes glow or sparkle or are in some other way structurally distinctive--we won't rule that out since we don't know what a supernatural genome might be like, but then again we also don't know anything about what the science of a supernatural genome might be like--finding DNA on a holy relic would be meaningless.

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