The Gospels and the Professor
Sir: Trevor-Roper's new argu- ments can be reduced to three heads: (a) the miracle stories of the Gospels are obviously historic- ally untrue; (b) the Gospels cannot be dated and probably reached their present form as gradual accre- tions of material over a long pro- cess of time; (c) the silence of St Paul's epistles indicate that none of the Gospel material was in cir- culation at the time he wrote. Apart from the consideration that every one of these propositions must necessarily be an 'undocu- mented speculation', the last two of them are definitely unsound.
It is indeed impossible to date
the Gospels accurately, but the generally agreed position (as dis- tinct from any number of tenable positions) is as I gave it. And it really will not do to be still insist- ing, despite the evidence that other correspondents have produced, that the only acceptable indication of the date of a given work in a given form is the date of the earliest surviving manuscript.
The argument from the silence of St Paul's epistles assumes with- out evidence that unlike the Gospels these are author's texts. The pre- mise, therefore, is very doubtful. But further, since Trevor-Roper is prepared to concede that it makes best sense of certain features of the Gospels to assume that, how- ever remotely, they do refer to an actual historic figure, unless he is arguing that St Paul wrote prior to the existence of this figure, the conclusion is even more doubtful.
The first proposition is, of
course, conceded; the miracle stories of the Gospels are most un- likely to be historically true in the form they are told, despite the fact we have no documentary evidence of this. But what follows? Ap- parently for the Professor it fol- lows that they are 'palpable rub- bish'. I should have thought a fairer conclusion would be that whoever confines his interest in them to their historical worth is evidently missing the point of them.
Doesn't that seem reasonable?
D. B. Taylor 170 Divinity Road, Oxford
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