Edmund Hatch Bennett (April 6, 1824 – January 2, 1898) was an American lawyer, judge, the first Mayor of Taunton, Massachusetts, and Dean of Boston University School of Law.

[6] He studied at the Litchfield Law School, then lived in Burlington, Vermont, and finally settled in Manchester.

Bennett was educated at the Manchester and Burlington Academies, and then studied at the University of Vermont, where he was a member of the Lambda Iota Society.

The first two children died in infancy, while Samuel Bennett later became the Dean of Boston University Law School.

In 1891 Governor William Russell appointed Bennett as chairman of the Board of Commissioners for the Promotion of Uniformity of Legislation in the USA.

In this text Bennett argued that the New Testament gospels were trustworthy sources for the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

He accepted the traditional authorship of the gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - and applied legal principles of reasoning in examining their accounts about Christ.

Bennett opened his lecture by stating: It is, as you know, a part of the lawyer's profession to examine and cross-examine witnesses, to detect their errors, and expose their falsehoods; or, on the other hand, to reconcile their conflicting statements, and from seeming discord to evolve and make manifest the real truth.

(pp 1-2) [14] Bennett believed that the distinctive content and perspectives about Jesus that appear in the four gospels points to the independence of each writer.

He held to the common literary and juridical principle of harmonization when looking at the differences and apparent discrepancies in details as recounted in parallel accounts.

In the late twentieth century Bennett's book was reprinted in the inaugural edition of The Simon Greenleaf School of Law Review (1981–82).