Revival

The sun was unbearable, just as it had been every day for as long as she could remember. Sweat trickled from beneath the headband of the woman's sunhat, bypassed the bandanna she had tied around her forehead to prevent its further progress, and stung her eyes.

"I don't know how much more of this I can take," she said to the man. "If we don't find something worth looking at soon, I'm going back to Seattle."

"Cheer up," he said. "Anything is better than spending the day in the office. Even this."

"Come quick! Come quick!" One of the lucky graduate students who had been chosen as assistants had much more energy than the heat of the day should have allowed. "I think I have found something!"

"Well, be careful," the woman answered, "and don't disturb it any more than you have to. We'll be there in a second." Moments later, they looked on as the assistant brushed sand away from the lip of an urn buried in the excavation zone. "It looks like it may be unbroken!" the astonished student said.

The urn was fairly large--a foot or so in diameter at the lip--and tightly closed with a fitted disc of similar material sealed with some combination of wax and two thousand years of sediment. It stood upright, allowing the brush to clear sand away from all sides and confirm that everything above the base was intact.

"Look--what's that?" the woman said, pointing at a mark on the side of the urn as more of it came free of the sand. "Could it tell us what was inside?"

The assistant brushed gently at the mark to clear more of the sand away. "It looks like a stick drawing of a fish," she said.

Thus begins this adventure of scriptural confirmation and church-driven dogma in present-day Christian society.  Dr. Elizabeth Rosen's scrolls and artifacts prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Jesus Christ indeed walked the earth two thousand years ago, but this revelation is tempered with somber evidence that Jesus was more human than any of us had ever expected.  

The nation rapidly polarizes on the issue. Fundamentalist Christians abandon Jesus Christ completely, choosing dogma rather than accept Jesus' humanity. Church-led Christians take charge of the federal government, repealing the First Amendment and imposing a Christian republic based on Biblical law in its place. The Homeland Security force vigorously prosecutes Jews, Muslims, and other nonbelievers as heretics.

Seeing the horror brought on by her discovery, Rosen actively spreads Jesus' original message of love and acceptance in direct contradiction of the government's evangelical stance. Homeland Security accuses her of heresy and sends agents to take her into custody. A close friend, unhappy with Rosen's apparent disloyalty to the country, alerts Homeland Security to Rosen's whereabouts. Agents capture her, torture her until she confesses to heresy, and execute her on national television.

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