Sir, - May I reply to Father Dominic Johnson's claims (April 25th) before they are accepted as "facet". by default?
(1) He states "the assassination of John F. Kennedy was seen by thousands, yet the details and sequence of events are disputed" ". . . The four Gospels. . . were variously composed in the last 40 years of the first century." If details of an event which happened only 33 years ago and which has been scientifically analysed in thousands of books and articles can still be "disputed", then surely the same applies to the details of an event which happened 2,000 years ago and where, 33 years after the event, the first documents were written by persons unknown, based on hearsay evidence - St Paul's comment "I taught you what I had been taught myself" admits as much.
(2) Apart from the time delay, the Gospels have additional problems, e.g., the Gospels detailed "courtroom dialogue" between Jesus and Pontius Pilate would have needed an interpreter, as Jesus, we assume, would only have spoken Aramaic and/or Hebrew and Pilate probably spoke Greek? Therefore how accurate was the 33 year old oral record of the event, before it was even "committed to papyrus"?
(3) He states that the "discrepancies and differences" between the various Gospels "are not serious". I would respectfully suggest that any discrepancies in what he claims are "inspired Gospels" are serious and therfore undermine the whole, e.g., Matthew's Gospel connects Jesus's birth with the latter years of King Herod the Great while Luke's connects it with the taxing of Quirinius, Governor of Syria, in AD 6, when this particular Herod was long dead!
(4) Contrary to what an unnamed "graduate of the Ecole" told Father Johnson, the Dominican Order of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem did try to confine the examination of the Scrolls to themselves and their selected scholars, for nearly 35 years. This point is made in a number of books on the subject, one of the most recent being The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered by Robert Eisenman, Professor of Middle East Religions at California State University and Michael Wise, Assistant Professor of Aramaic at the University of Chicago. The importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that, while it is accepted by most historians and theologians that the "official" Gospels have been censored and added to throughout the centuries, the scrolls themselves are untouched since the day they were written, and they portray a very different view of events, at the time of the "Resurrection".
While I feel that some of the events described in the Gospels cannot be proven or disproven, I still envy those whose faith convinces them to believe otherwise. - Yours, etc.,
Stoney Road, Dublin 14.