A mother who loses a beloved child will be able, in less than a year's time, to give birth to an exact duplicate.

Aging megalomaniacs like 'The Simpsons' Monty Burns will be able to breed multiple, young copies of themselves, to carry on their nefarious deeds.

The great men and women of history, the Lincolns, the Einsteins, the Kants, the Napoleons, all will be reproduced. Women unable to conceive normally could, instead of an adoption or an anonymous embryo donation, give birth to Thomas Jefferson, William Shakespeare, Ted Williams, Malcom X, Goethe, Mark Twain.

The Catholic Church has 'primary relics' of hundreds of saints, including some of the most famous, and the great 'doctors of the Church'. These could all be brought back as newborns. (Of course, the Catholic Church is completely opposed to human cloning, but that's beside the point. The DNA is there.)

This is not science fiction, folks! Incredible as it sounds, it's fact, and it WILL happen, within the next few years. You can no more stop it than you can stop the sun from coming up tomorrow morning.

Now, my specific question is this:

What if a sample of Jesus Christ's DNA could be found and cloned?

Would the resultant 'Christ Child' also be the Son of God, the second person of the divine Trinity?

Would Christians accept this person as the 'second coming' of Christ? Condemn him as the Antichrist?

What if two cloned Christs were produced? Ten? A thousand? A million?

About forty years ago, science fiction writer Frederic Brown wrote a short-short story called 'Jaycee'. In the story, which was only a couple of pages long, and set in the 21st century, a friend of a famous geneticist finds the man incoherent, raving madly about 'fifty million Jaycees'. The friend thinks he's referring to members of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. It turns out that, twenty or so years earlier, the geneticist had pioneered human 'parthenogenic births' for sterile couples or single parents. Fifty million children had been so produced. Now all of these 'virgin-born' kids were growing up, and beginnning to perform miracles, walk on water, etc. Fifty million Jaycees!

Brown's story, though lighthearted, was amazingly prophetic. The 21st century is here. The first human clone is, very probably, in a womb somewhere at this moment. If it's not, it will be soon.

Welcome to the future of mankind!