LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
[Correspondents are requested to keep their letters as brief as is reasonably possible. Signed letters are given a preference over those bearing a pseudonym, and the latter must be accompanied by the name and address of the author, which will be treated as confidential.—Ed. THE SPECTATOR] THE GOSPELS RE-READ
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR] Sig,—Two ways of reading the Gospels, the one extremely conunon, the other comparatively rare, have been revealed by the correspondence in your columns. Differences of opinion among your correspondents are largely accounted for by the fact that some have read the Gospels in the one way and some in the other.
The first way is fortuitous, random and piecemeal. There is a vast multitude of readers whose knowledge of the Gospels is limited to morceaux choisis, selected episodes, arresting passages (sometimes expurgated in public reading), according as these are offered in the lessons of the day, or as the reader's attention happens to be directed to them by a book or a sermon, or by the needs of a particular occasion. Within the wider circle of these fortuitous readers (or hearers of reading) there is a narrower circle of those who might be described as browsing upon the Gospels from motives of piety, but with a natural preference for the richer grass, and another circle, perhaps still narrower, of those who search the Gospels for light on some particular controversy, such as eternal punishment or the lawfulness of bearing arms. All these varieties are covered by the words " discontinuous " and "occasional."
This way of reading is not without value and can at least be defended on the ground that it is better than nothing. But, obviously, it may lead to grave misconception of what the Gospels, in their totality, intend to convey. It opens the way to what may be called "selective misrepresentation" on the part of public interpreters, not deliberate, but due to the fact that their knowledge, also, is often somewhat randomly, or perhaps tendentiously, acquired. There is evidence that "selective misrepresentation" is very common. Few preachers today have an audience capable of bringing them to book for it; they have it their own way, without risking a vote of censure from hearers whose reading of the Gospels is more discon- tinuous than their own. This may be seen in the common practice of jumbling together citations from the Fourth Gospel with citations from the other three, as though they were all from the same source, a practice of which the correspondence in your columns, as Professor MacBride points out, has contained some rather unfortunate examples. Worse examples might easily be collected.
In contrast to this, the discontinuous, occasional or selective mode of reading, stands another more rarely prac- tised—the continuous and comprehensive. It may be described as follows. The reader chooses a quiet hour, reads through a whole Gospel at a sitting, and then asks himself, as candidly as he can, "What is it all about?" or, alterna- tively, "Whom is it all about?" This he does without either commentary, clergyman or higher critic at hand to guide him to the answer—giving his private judgement a chance just for once, with commentary, clergyman and higher critic in the background, to be consulted later on, if need be.
I venture to commend this way to your readers, though I cannot promise that it will leave their preconceptions, whether orthodox or heretical, undisturbed. In the case of Dr. Joad, who has apparently tried it, the result was highly interesting. When I tried it myself, as I did aftec a long period of selec- tive and discontinuous reading, I came to conclusions which, though considerably but not entirely different from Dr. Joad's, compelled me to admit that my former way of reading had led me astray, and that I must now unsay many things about the Gospels, and indeed about the whole New Testament, which I had previously said without any suspicion that I had lost the vision of the wood in random attention to the trees.
Awakened from my dogmatic slumbers—I had slumbered in the comfortable arms of a liberal Christianity highly selective in its treatment of the New Testament—awakened by the continuous reading of the first Gospel I had pitched upon, I went on to read the others in the same way ; then to the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, the Book of Revelation, and finally to the New Testament as a whole—this last a consider-
able undertaking which needed many more quiet hours than one. Not to trouble you, Sir, with details, I became con- vinced, in the upshot, that the New Testament is a unitary whole, every part supported by every other part in presenting a single Gospel, or offer of salvation (primarily from death) in different aspects, at different levels of insight, with many changes of emphasis and a rich variety of expressional forms, aids to memory and collateral supports—narrative, parable, prose, poetry, allegory, miracle, drama, prophecy, exegesis (mostly fanciful), catechism, persuasion and (not least) threats —but always essentially the same whether in Gospels or Epistles, whether in this Gospel or that, all coming to a focus in the one Gospel of Jesus the Christ, risen from the dead and victorious over death, the Donor of immortal life to all who are His, but to none else. As a concentration of spiritual artillery on a single objective the New Testament struck me as unique in the history of religion. The canonists, I con- cluded, knew what they were about.
Along with the urgent presentation of this Gospel, I found everywhere an undercurrent of condemnation directed against all who reject it, sometimes breaking out into language of great violence, nowhere more violent than in the Gospels. Some of your correspondents who baulk at this language, or seek to mitigate its severity, have failed to observe that these terrible threats are not levelled at evil-doers in general, but at un- believers in particular, the moral man who rejects the Gospel, whether pagan or Jew, standing exposed to them, while the sinner who accepts the Gospel is saved. I cannot but think that the selective and discontinuous manner of reading is responsible for this oversight andfor others equally regrettable. The best corrective I can suggest is to try an experiment with the second of the two ways of reading described above. It may, of course, bring the reader to a conclusion different from
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