LETTERS Gospel truth
Sir: We can be grateful to Professor Sanders Out did it happen?', 6 April) for turning our thoughts again to the Resurrec- tion. However, he covers the same ground as have scores of commentators who reached conclusions quite opposite to his. One of these was William Paley, Senior Wrangler of Cambridge University, whose Evidences of Christianity has remained in print for 200 years and never been refuted. On 'Discrepancies between the Gospels' he writes: 'A great deal of the discrepancy aris- es from omission; from a fact or a passage from Christ's life being noticed by one writ- er, which is unnoticed by another. Now, omission is at all times a very uncertain ground of objection. We perceive it not only in the comparison of different writers, but even in the same writer, when com- pared with himself. There are a great many particulars, and some of them of impor- tance, mentioned by Josephus in his Antiq- uities, which . . . ought to have been put down by him in their place, in The Jewish Wars. Suetonius, Tacitus, Dio Cassius, have all three written of the reign of Tiberius. Each has mentioned many things omitted by the rest, yet no objection is from thence taken to the respective credit of their histo ries . . . '
The whole question has been minutely examined by Professor Eta Linnemann of Marburg University in her Is there a Synop- tic Problem? (Baker, 1991), which shatters the myth of the priority of Mark, and other Bultmannian hypotheses. The exact sequence of events admittedly remains enigmatic (John Wenham, The Easter Enig- ma), but the physical resurrection of Jesus from the dead is still 'the best-attested fact' of ancient history.
David Watson
31 Harold Heading Close, Chatteris, Cambridgeshire
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