On Easter Sunday, Christians will proclaim the message at the heart of their faith — "He is risen" — and will affirm the hope that God will raise all the dead at the end of time.

But this belief is deeply misunderstood, say scholars from varied faith traditions who have dealt with the matter in several recent books.

"We are troubled by the gap between the views on these things of the general public and the findings of contemporary scholarship," said Kevin Madigan and Jon Levenson, authors of the upcoming book "Resurrection, The Power of God for Christians and Jews."

The book traces the Jewish roots of the Christian belief in resurrection, and builds on that history to challenge the interpretation that resurrection simply means an existence after death. To the authors, being raised up has a physical element, not just a spiritual one.

Levenson last year wrote a related book, "Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life." Meanwhile, N.T. Wright, a prominent New Testament scholar and author of the 2003 book "The Resurrection of the Son of God," has just published "Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church."

Debate about the resurrection has focused on whether Jesus rose bodily from the dead after the Romans crucified him on Good Friday, or whether the resurrection was something abstract.

Wright's 2003 book argued that Jesus was physically resurrected.

The three scholars also have been challenging the idea, part of Greek philosophy and popular now, that resurrection for Jews and the followers of Jesus is simply the survival of an individual's soul in the hereafter. The three say resurrection occurs for the whole person — body and soul. For early Christians and some Jews, resurrection meant being given back one's body or possibly God creating a similar body after death, Wright has said.

Madigan and Levenson, among other scholars, also emphasize that resurrection for humankind is a belief that Christians and Jews share.

Even "as the early church was developing, rabbis were making resurrection an article of normative belief," Madigan and Levenson said in e-mailed answers to questions from The Associated Press. "That is something many Jews do not know. Like many Christians, they are under the misimpression that resurrection is a uniquely Christian hope."

Jews in the time of Jesus believed that resurrection was bodily and communal — in that it brought justice to the oppressed and renewed creation, wrote Madigan, who teaches Christian history at Harvard Divinity School, and Levenson, who teaches Jewish studies there. That Jewish belief was absorbed and reshaped by the earliest Christians to form part of their religion.

Many modern-day Jews aren't aware of this. Except for the Orthodox branch of Judaism, Jewish groups deleted belief in resurrection from the traditional prayer book during revisions that began during the 19th century in response to rationalistic Enlightenment thought.

Public understanding of resurrection has been influenced not only by modern skepticism toward the idea of miracles, but also by popular culture.

Alan F. Segal, a Barnard College professor and author of "Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion," notes that most Americans expect the afterlife will be a continuation of life on earth — "like a really good assisted-living facility."

He also said that belief in an existence beyond death persists among Americans no matter how little they observe their religion. In the 2005 Baylor Religion Survey, 82 percent of respondents said they "absolutely" or "probably" believe in heaven. Nearly 71 percent said they "absolutely" or "probably" believe in hell.

But their ideas have been molded by Western individualism, and scholars say many important teachings from early Christianity have been skewed as a result. Indeed, even debating the specifics of resurrection may seem far removed from 21st-century life.

Wright and others say the church should teach what the first Christians believed. Wright also has argued that a presumed physical reality of a future world after death shows that "the created order matters to God, and Jesus' resurrection is the pilot project for that renewal."

Madigan and Levenson said their motivation in writing the book was to help Jews and Christians understand more about their theological bonds.

Amy-Jill Levine, a New Testament scholar at Vanderbilt University's Divinity School, said interest in resurrection — along with reincarnation, ghosts and contacting the dead — has grown in recent years.

"The more chaotic our world, with war and disease, hurricanes and famine," she said, "the more many seek a divine response to the problem of evil."