The Gospels and the professor
Sir: Mr Kenney charges me with ignoring the evidence of the papy- rus fragments which, he implies, invalidate my statement that `no Gospel text can be traced, directly or indirectly, back beyond the fourth century'.
I am sorry if I expressed myself unclearly. My meaning is this. All our manuscripts of the complete Gospels are copies, many of them copies of each other. Their rela- tion to each other has been estab- lished by scholars, and their pedi- gree can be 'traced back' continu- ously to the fourth century, but no farther. Beyond that we have no complete or substantial texts. '
In saying this I do not, of course, suggest that the Gospels had no earlier existence. As I explicitly said, about the turn of the first century 'something approaching our Gospels was written. The con- crete evidence of this is precisely the papyrus fragments and the literary references of the second century which Mr Kenney men- tions. But textually, such fragments and such references attest only what they contain, which is very little. They cannot show that 'our Gospels' were then in circulation, in the form in which we know them. Whatever Gospels were written between 70 and 120 AD had plenty of time in which to be de- formed, improved, altered, ex- panded, in the.copying, re-copying and perhaps re-writing of the two centuries which separate their ori- ginal form from the officially canonised versions preserved in our earliest coherent manuscripts.
The matter is not very important anyway. Even if our present Gos- pels were extant verbatim in 100 AD the essential fact remains that the biographical details are a late and half-fabulous addition to the story of the Resurrection.
H. R. Trevor-Roper History Faculty Library, Merton Street, Oxford
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