Quantum scrambling could lead to resurrection of the dead
There have been many cases where people, animals, and certainly microbes have been thought to be dead only to return to life. Microbes and some insects can be frozen and then brought back. Cryogenics aside, human beings can survive for a short time while being effectively “dead”.
All of these are examples of revival. That is, something alive has had its vital functions slowed or stopped to near nothing, and then it is reanimated to life.
Resurrection, however, is very different. A being that is resurrected is not reanimated or revived. It is dead, decomposed or disassembled, and then reassembled and reanimated.
The Greek word for this is anastasis and the authors of the New Testament of the Bible were very careful to use this word when referring to the resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, anastasis has come to mean this specifically and in the Gospel of John (11:25–26), just before raising Lazarus, Jesus says he is the anastasis, the resurrection.
The New Testament authors’ descriptions of the resurrection (and for the raising of Lazarus) are careful to assure the readers that this person was, as Dickens said of Marley in A Christmas Carol, “dead as a doornail”. From talking about Lazarus’s body’s smell to the piercing of Jesus’s side to the way that his wrappings were somehow…
