"Judy" Christ? I Think Not...

WorldNet Daily reported on June 3 that a new version of the Gospels has recently been released, in which Jesus is replaced by "Judith" Christ. I found this to be very strange, but it's a strange world, so I just figured it was weirdness as usual. I did want to verify the story for myself, however, so I started to look around a bit...here's some interesting info that inclines me to think this is some kind of an elaborate hoax:

Amazon.com lists this book as being authored by "LBI," the Law & Business Institute...WorldNet confirms this and says they tried to contact Stephen Glazier of LBI without success...now, I don't know everything about LBI, but Mr. Glazier is an intellectual property attorney who has written such thrilling theology books as "e-Patent Strategies for Software, e-Commerce, the Internet, Telecom Services, Financial Services, and Business Methods (with Case Studies and Forecasts)";

LBI's VP is said to be named "Billie Shakespeare"--right, nothing strange there...;

Although the book is said to be "new", the copyright listed by Amazon is 2003, and the book is "out-of-print";

Further, although the book is "out-of-print", it oddly has 67 reviews, 65 of which were posted in the last week...the reviews are uniformly terrible, which means all these people bought a book they knew in advance they would hate, or they never read the book and are just reacting to the news story, or a bit of both.

So...a company that focuses on patents and e-business printed a twisted set of gospels 2 years ago, and is now suddenly promoting them on WND through "Billie Shakespeare", but the books aren't available anyway, yet Amazon is flooded with reviews of the book...I dunno what the agenda is here, but it looks like a hoax. If anybody has more info, I would love to hear it.

Thanks to Dane Bramage for alerting me to this...and the Anchoress has a different take.