A Family Circus comic strip shows the children of the family on Easter morning. One asks, "Who laid all these eggs?" The reply of another child is, "The Easter Bunny." "Who colored them?" Again the reply, "The Easter Bunny." The first child asks again, "Who gave us the jelly beans?" The reply, "The Easter Bunny." The family is then shown going to church. In church, the minister is preaching, and asks, "They came to the tomb and saw the stone rolled back, 'Who could have done this?' " And the child in the congregation yells out, "The Easter Bunny!"

But that is fiction. History was not split in half by a rabbit! I remember, as many of you do, as a small child, running around the house on Easter morning, searching for the eggs my parents had hidden. I had been told that the Easter Bunny had …