lpetrich

His "Reader Feedback #21" is now up at his <a href="http://www.jesuspuzzle.com" target="_blank">Jesus Puzzle</a> site, and some of it contains interesting comments by ED himself.

Not surprisingly, some of ED's responders praised ED's rational approach in The Jesus Puzzle and Challenging the Verdict, his response to Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ, and some others fulminated that he will be sent to Hell for what he is doing.

Someone asked why JC's body had been taken down from the cross he had been hung on, when the Romans would likely have left it to rot there for several days. ED notes the excellence of that point.

Likewise, there is the serious question of why nobody ever bothered to record the date of JC's execution, which was obviously an important date to his followers.

Something like "in the eighth year of Pontius Pilate's governorship".

About the story of the woman charged for adultery in the Gospel of John, ED suspects that it was likely an addition to John, since it is absent from some manuscripts of John. He also criticizes C.S. Lewis on whether writing in the dirt is really a meaningless detail.

In response to someone's question of whether "John" was really the author of the Gospel of John, ED has some interesting comments to the effect that John son of Zebedee had likely not been the author of that gospel, on account of the important differences between John and the Synoptics.

One of them is how Jesus Christ's mother, Mary, shows up at his crucifixion, even though she is not mentioned as doing so in the other Gospels. ED also notes that the Synoptics state that the apostles had not been around for JC's crucifixion, suggesting that if any of the Gospels had been written by eyewitnesses, they had not been written by any of the apostles.

And there is also how John omits some of the details of Matthew, such as darkness, an earthquake, and corpses walking out of their tombs.

Parallel to this are the contradictions between the birth stories in Matthew and Luke; the "nativity" story commonly presented is a hybrid of the two. Matthew does not mention Luke's overbooked inn, while Luke does not mention Matthew's wise men or baby killing.

There were some who asked why ED has not been appearing in mainstream media like the Larry King show; it might be nice if he could, and it would be interesting to see wider reactions to the Jesus-myth hypothesis.