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The question is do we have any thoughts on why "whom do men say that Jesus is" is such a touchy subject.

Why it's such a touchy question is that someone back in the 1st century decided that Christians knew the truth about God and - more to the point - that nobody else did. Let's call him George. Some people believe they know who George actually was, the guy who had this idea, but all I know is that he existed. Some people think George was God himself, some people think the guy who thought it was Jesus, or maybe he was John the Evangelist, or perhaps he was just the bloke who wrote John's Gospel - the man who wrote "we know that his testimony is true" - who claimed he'd got the story from Saint John himself (from "the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down"). Or perhaps George was Saint Paul. Whichever of them had it, the notion that nobody else but Christians knew the truth about God was extreme.

George's idea ended up in the bible, where the author of John's Gospel says that Saint John informed him that he'd heard Jesus tell Saint Thomas that "No one comes to the Father except through me". It ended up in Saint Luke's account of the questioning of Saints Peter and John before the Sanhedrin where Peter tells them that "It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead ... salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved". George has a lot to answer for, this idea he had has been the cause immeasurable suffering and slaughter since. This is what the Crusades were about. This is why we have evangelists and missionaries, this idea that nothing other than Christian faith - the power of the name of Jesus Christ - can lead a person into the presence of God.

Somehow, this idea of George's has to be shown to be fallible because it's destructive. Either George's opinion can be treated as non-binding or Christianity has to go the way of the Dodo. George's bright idea leads to pogroms, it causes holocausts, it starts wars, it kills people. There are too many people who insist that nobody can be a Christian who denies the truth of George's opinion for it to be set aside as a trivial extreme fringe theory held only by nutters. I think it's more Christian to destroy the entire flawed religion and start again from scratch.