[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR] SIR,—I should hire, as
a convinced Christian, to express the hope that Professor C. E. M. Joad's contribution on "Re- reading the Gospels " will be very widely read and digested. I have never seen more cant exploded in any single article of its length—including cant in which Professor Joad confesses he himself once indulged. Not that it is " cant " to accuse the Church, as he used to accuse it, of continually betraying the Gospel which it is its task to proclaim ; for the Gospels them- selves insist, with that " harshness " which Professor Joad has seen in them apparently for the first time, that such betrayals are always to be expected. But it is cant to foist on to " the historical Jesus the general convictions of modem liberal humanitarians.
Again, Professor Joad's picture of the obscurity of the Gospels when read by themselves is a severe blow to the common view that the New Testament Epistles are unnecessary complications of the " simplicity " of the Synoptic writers. He should now be a little more willing to believe that perhaps St. Paul, after all, clarifies rather than obscures what we read in Matthew, Mark and Luke.
He has also struck a blow at the view that there is more unity and coherence in the parts of the Bible—in its individual component books—than in the whole of it. The unity and coherence are in the whole or nowhere. Professor Joad has shown, at all events, that it is not to be found in the Gospels when taken in isolation from their natural context of the Old Testament and the Epistles (which latter, it is worth remem- bering, were for the most part written first). He should now see more sense than perhaps he used to see in the counsel to " ordinary simple people " to read the whole Bible rather than the Gospels alone. • But how did Professor Joad come to think that Biblical critics would be rushing forward with attempts to prove that " the passages to which he has taken exception either (i) do not mean what they say . . . or (ii) are later interpolations ; and that the most obnoxious of them are not to be found in Mark or in Q"? He seems quite unaware that most Biblical criticism has long outgrown the stage of trying to " square " what Jesus actually taught with what people nineteen centuries later think He ought to have taught, and is if anything rather
more careful than other forms of historical study to do its work scientifically and accurately and without sentimentality. With regard to the suggestion that critics will attempt to prove that the earliest strata of the Gospel text are the least " objectionable," one might mention that the late Sir Edwyn Hoskyns (who has probably exerted more influence in recent years upon the English theological world than any other single New Testament scholar) speaks of the " staggering brutality " of Mark, and says that Matthew and Luke, if anything, tend to " tone down " the " roughness " of the earlier tradition. Further, the " disconnectedness " in the Gospel narratives to which Professor Joad draws attention is nowhere more strongly emphasised than by the Continental " form critics" ; and it is a commonplace among all contemporary critics that the Gospels do not provide, and do not attempt to provide, a connected and straightforward " biography " of the man. Jesus. There are, in fact, very few Biblical scholars today who would quarrel with any of the main features of Professor Joad's picture of the Gospels taken just as they stand.—Yours, &c.,
London, W.C.2.
ARTHL1R N. PRIOR.
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