Long before Empty Tomb had been conceived or at least largely heard of, the essay that composes Ch. 1 was published in an academic journal titled Faith and Philosophy. For other reasons, I decided to go get it, and you'll see soon why my reaction was:

1. "Who is this guy kidding?"
2. "Who let this past peer review?"

Cavin is otherwise known well for a dissertation in which he proposed an idea (also used in a debate with William Lane Craig) that:

• Jesus had an identical twin who was separated from Jesus at birth, and does not see him again until the time of the crucifixion;
• when this twin realizes who Jesus is (a famous person), he concocts a messianic mission for Jesus, steals his body from the tomb, and
• pretends to be the resurrected Christ afterwards.

I've left that dissertation on the floor where it belongs, because it's frankly such an inane idea that I don't consider it a threat, and I'll have to be in a particularly masochistic mood to want to deal with it, right after Acharya S publishes again. To be fair, though, Cavin is more reasonable -- by a hair -- in this essay. But he's still right on the level of "inane".

Cavin's argument can be summed up with a few points:

1. It is claimed by apologists that Jesus came back to life in a supernatural, immortal body which never aged, could never be hurt, and could do all sorts of neat stuff.
2. But no one was able to try to test this proposition by throwing Jesus off a cliff, or making sure he didn't age after a few years, or setting him on fire, or dropping a nuke on him.
3. To use Cavin's own words: "Thus we have no evidence that Jesus didn't catch a bad cold in 43 C.E. or that he didn't cut himself on a rock one hundred years later. We have no evidence that he didn't succumb to gangrene or a blow to the head in 503 C.E. or that he wasn't shriveled with old age in the year 1200 C.E." Why, we can't even assume, if we grant that he was able to materialize in and out of rooms at will, that this meant he was otherwise resurrected as defined.
4. So, how do we know that Jesus was not raised from the dead by, say, "one of the Watchers of the pseudepigraphic book of Enoch" or a member of a group of "technologically advanced but unscrupulous aliens (e.g., the Talosians of Star Trek)" who then forced him to say or tricked him into thinking he was who he was. This can't be denied because it is "conceptually possible".

All of this one might think deserves an answer. And I have one:

1. "Robert Greg Cavin" is a malicious time travelling atheist from the year 2300 AD, named Gorby Glorp, who saw the final resurrection at hand and used his time machine to come here so he could evade it, and he used genetic technology to change himself into, and replace, the real "Robert Greg Cavin" at age 4, and being such a malicious person decided to compose this ridiculous essay (and the "twin theory") as a way of trying to keep people from becoming Christians, because he decided he doesn't want to go to hell alone but take as many of those "d*** Christians" with him as he can.
2. Also, he's secretly married to, and lives with, Acharya S.

Why do I need to say more? It's "conceptually possible," after all.

Or maybe it's better to say, that someone here has been watching too much "Star Trek".