Continuing our summary/review of Tom Wright and Marcus Borg's discussion... For other articles in this series visit http://jmm.aaa.net.au/catalog/section/jc1.htm.

More from Tom Wright:

'Turning to the gospels, we find all the puzzles of which readers have been aware for centuries (not simply with the rise of modern scholarship). The stories of Easter morning in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20 are notoriously difficult to harmonize. We shall never be sure how many women went in what order to the tomb, at what point two or more male disciples went as well, how many angels they all saw, where or in what order the appearances of Jesus took place. But... it is precisely this imprecision, coupled with the breathless quality of the narratives, that gives them not only their unique flavour, but also their particular value. Despite the scorn of some, lawyers and judges have regularly declared that this is precisely the state of the evidence they find in a great many cases: this is what eyewitness testimony looks and sounds like. And in such cases *the surface discrepancies do not mean that nothing happened; rather, they mean that the witnesses have not been in collusion'* (emphasis Wright's) (pp. 121-2).

More tomorrow...

-- Shalom! Rowland Croucher