"But in place of the horror was a strange reassurance: buses depart from that place of the skull for Bethlehem and the journey home.

That one detail put the whole story in perspective for me. All was possible in that place; the hopes and fears of many years met in that moment."

The mind boggles. Perhaps if there had been an airport nearby you could have founded a whole new religion.

Hardly that easy, John J. An airport could only foster a cargo cult. Death and resurrection are a far different proposition. So different that people still struggle to come to terms with the mystery, yet a moment of insight can unlock the puzzle in a way thousands of words of discussion and explanation cannot. Thanks for reading, nonetheless.

Cuz, YOUR moment of insight may unlock YOUR puzzle, agreed: but it's not an appropriate foundation on which to create or endorse a system that intimately affects the lives of millions of other people. All that you can deduce from a particular experience is that you have had that experience; it's wildly irrational to go on from there to draw any conclusions about the real world. Or a supernatural one, for that matter.

John J, I'd agree if it were a matter of personal experience alone. But the Easter story is related by multiple sources from different points of view; it also had an impact on many people over the years; and it has the power to reach individual lives now. Subjective insight on its own requires support from other sources to be convincing, agreed; but everyone ultimately decides about belief from a subjective standpoint. Otherwise it wouldn't be belief.

As if these archaic fabricated fairy tale stories provide any kind of basis to live with Real Intelligence.

Apart from the words about Jesus that appear in the New Testament, there is virually no evidence for Jesus' existence. References to Jesus, to a movement in response to him, and to people who were his followers only began to appear decades after the time when he supposedly lived.Apart from fabricated hearsay "evidence" there is no historical evidence for Jesus' existence that is contemporary with the time in which Jesus purportedly lived.

The books of the New Testament were all written decades after Jesus' life time. Paul of cause never met Jesus. The writings of Paul refer to an already institutionalized tradition about Jesus, a tradition that is the basis for all of Pauls preaching. The work of Paul was based on his own teachings about how to interpret the presumed tradition boind of Jesus, rather than on the teachins and activities of Jesus himself.

Insofar as the report of the Gospels is in any sense biographical they describe an institutionalized biography about Jesus. They describe a Jesus who was interpreted by people after his death, often through stories contrived about him to coincide with suggestive prophecies within the Old Testament re the appearance of a Messiah.

In any case none of the lokenesses reported in the Gospels can be taken seriously as eyewitness observations of a presumably historical Jesus. They could only have been spoken about through a process of fabrication or imaginative religious inventiveness.

All of the stories in the Gospels about Jesus' early life before he began to preach are myths. They were a kind of literary creation for the purpose of establishing an institution, for the purpose of engendering public belief.

The writers of the Gospels could not have been making use of information of a factual nature in order to "record" historical fact. Where, how, and from whom would they have acquired such information? And, indeed if there were any fact based source for these stories, why to the Gospels contradict one another relative to the details?

The presence of remarkable contradictions between the separate accounts in the Gospels is one of the outstanding indicators that make it obvious that the Gospels are a form of literature, rather than of historical reporting.

While the Gospels are full of mostly fabricated details about Jesus' lifetime, there is, also, no evidence that the writers have actually quoted, rather than invented, what Jesus said when he was alive. Why is it, then, that after his death, suddenly everybody knew and remembered al these things about him - out of the blue as it were.

Jesus was thus a mythologized and interpreted figure, and on the basis of that myth alone people have presumed that Jesus was an actual concrete historical figure.

The Gospel stories are not about an historical, factual, and actual Jesus, the person as he would have acted and spoken while he was alive. Everything that people have speculated about, thought about, felt about, and "reported" and asserted about "Jesus" has occurred only after, and mostly long after, Jesus was no longer alive. Therefore all of it arose entirely within the writers own sphere of thinking desiring and intending. This is also the case with every one presumes to speak about Jesus in 2012, with no exceptions.

There is nothing that could be said after the lifetime of Jesus that would be as relevant to his own teaching as all that he, himself, said when he was alive. Whatever Jesus cared to say that was of the nature of a teaching, or, otherwise, of a revelation about himself, he would have said during his lifetime. Everything that others have said afterwards is really their own creation, for their own reasons.

This obviously is the case with everything written and said about the crucifixion (if it occurred), and of course the presumed resurrection, which obviously did not happen.