The Gospels and the professor
Sir: For an historian Professor Trevor-Roper has a curiously haughty attitude towards docu- ments.
His review of Dr Dodd's hook on Jesus is so petulant that it fails to situate Dr Dodd within an in- telligible contemporary context, and, since Dr Dodd's book is itself very old-fashioned, the result is chaos. The Gospels happen, alas, to be our only real sources for the life and death of Jesus: they tell us a lot. It would be nice to know more! It is the very role of the early Church in shaping them that enables us to sketch a rough out- line of Jesus's career from the nuggets of fact that have withstood the homogenising, universalising, glorifying tendency of doctrine.
Dissatisfied with the amount of information in the Gospels. Profes- sor Trevor-Roper seems prepared to toss out even the little we have; at the very outset he contradicts his flat statement about the lack of contemporary evidence of Jesus's existence, when he refers to Paul— an exact contemporary of Jesus— who certainly indicates that Jesus existed, though Professor Trevor- Roper then hastens to complain of Paul's inadequate interest in Jesus the man.
Professor Trevor-Roper even misunderstands Dr Paul Winter's sensible remark that the 'last things were remembered first': surely this implies that some first things were remembered last. At least some. Does it not interest Professor Trevor-Roper to know that Jesus was a °lolls Pharisee (Matt. xxiii.2) who thought that 'Hear Oh Israel, the Lord Our God Is One God' (the basic prayer of Judaism) was 'the first commandment of all' (Mark xii.28-9)? That he took the Temple by force, and was crucified
by the Romans as an insurrec- tionist (Mark xv.26)?
Wouldn't it be wiser to find the Gospels fascinating just because of their enigmatic gaps? To be sure, Jesus's character remains elusive, but isn't the history of the early Church itself—the foundation of the religion of a third of mankind —of some secular interest, after all?
Professor Trevor-Roper's review, despite its juvenile `scepticism'— roughly six generations out of datel—sounds very nearly like the heart-cry of a baffled believer.
Joel Carmichael 28 Hollycroft Avenue, London Nw3
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