A little more than 2,000 years ago, something enormous happened. History changed course the way a mighty river is rerouted by an earthquake. Calendars were recalibrated to Zero. Millions of individual lives were upended because of it. Civilizations crumbled and reformed as a result of it.

John Shelby Spong, Episcopal bishop and noted theologian, compares the Easter moment to the universe’s Big Bang beginning — an explosion of energy and love so bright, so overwhelming and awesome as to leave its witnesses unable to find the words to describe it.

In Resurrection: Myth or Reality (2009), Spong asks one simple question: So what actually happened in that moment? And he has one simple answer: We’ll never know for sure.

“A description of the actual experience (Easter) was written nowhere,” he writes. “We only have stories, symbols, and folklore that interpret the experience and describe the effect of that Easter moment.”

The New Testament was written years after the event. Eyewitnesses were few. The way of thinking in this primitive age was far different from our own. Objective reporting was unheard of. Demons, ghosts and angels walked the flat Earth, and God looked down on His people through peepholes (stars) in the vault of the sky.

Finding truth isn’t easy in our own age, either. Look at the Kennedy assassination. Even with all the records, the freeze frames, hundreds of eyewitnesses and the best in forensic science, we still, 50 years later, continue to debate what actually happened. Objectivity is impossible, because time is always moving.

Christian leaders, mostly, demand that adherents swallow the conventional story of Jesus hook, line and sinker, from the virgin birth to bodily resurrection. Spong says no: “Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power.”

So how in the world is a modern person supposed to find the truth? “Words must be recognized as symbolic pointers to the truth, not objective containers of truth.”

He continues: “Only when literal truth is challenged are we able to float in the profound and limitless sea of ultimate truth.”

The author spends a majority of the book in his role as biblical scholar, trying to dispel our ignorance and suss out what can actually be known about the life of Jesus of Nazareth. He wants us to understand the New Testament the way the Jews at the time did, as stories that illustrated the significance of Jesus’ life, not the literal truth of it. And out of this great tangle of legends and hearsay, Spong’s answer is: not much.

Spong’s ideas reach far, far beyond the Sunday school theology that is most prevalent in Western churches. He’s a radical. He’s pushing hard to bring the modern skeptic back into the Christian fold.

“Religion must be a doorway into the transcendence of an expanded vision,” he says. “It must point us to a truth deeper, far deeper, than even the truths of our religious system.”

We will never know what actually happened on that Easter day. But those who believe that something monumental happened — and Spong counts himself among that group — will have to rely on a leap of faith to span the final distance to belief.

But something did happen. Its effects still quiver through humanity like the waves of gravity in deepest space, a defiance of the laws of physics at the heart of history. The leap of faith is a leap into a bottomless mystery.