For almost a lifetime I have been engaged in the reading, studying and teaching of the Bible at many levels, and I have been amazed, saddened, frustrated and betimes angered by the way some scholars treat the Bible. I have seen a steady move away from the actual text of the Bible to the study of what the flavour-of-the-month 'expert' is saying about the biblical text; which is not the same thing as studying the text. It would seem as if the Bible is no longer studied for itself but only as a source of texts to illustrate different critical theories. The great tragedy of this is that sincere students wanting to serve people in churches and in the community at large waste much of their time learning forgettable ideas when they could have been working on what the Bible itself says. They are being taught supposed 'problems' about the Bible rather than biblical answers to the very real problems they will meet in life. The usual term for such studies as we are about to look at is Biblical Criticism, a spin-off from the long established discipline of Literary Criticism, however the term has negative associations and I prefer to speak of Biblical Analysis.

Only now have I some time to put down my thoughts, and give some examples of poorly crafted work in Biblical Studies. My sub-title ' A plea for believing scholarship' represents my own position; I am not an obscurantist who sticks a thumb in a verse, usually in the 1611 Authorized Version, and claims that nothing more need be known - this is the Word of God, take it or leave it. I am often distressed by the way in which some preachers and high profile fundamentalists, such as popular TV evangelists, treat the Bible, making phrases and verses, of themselves, into some sort of magic talisman. But reaction to that should not become over reaction. Too far East is West.

I am open to what scholarship can do, and has done, to make the message of the Bible clearer, but I argue for believing scholarship, by this I mean that we should trust the Bible to be God's revelation of Himself to mankind, as people down the centuries have done. We will then find this trust well founded as we pursue our studies and seek to put what we have learned into practice. Moreover we have in the Bible an overall unified consistency that carries real weight. In contrast to this willingness to give the Bible the 'benefit of the doubt' lies a suspicion that some scholars do the opposite and would rather trust any other theory, source or text ahead of scripture. An example of this can be seen in the prominence now given to the Gospel of Thomas, which is a collection of esoteric riddles and sayings of doubtful date, devoid of any narrative and permeated with gnosticism¹. In such an atmosphere of ignorance it has been easy for the multiplicity of 'conspiracy theory' books about Jesus to become best-sellers.

For the sake of simplicity I move quite quickly through my arguments and have set them out in 'bite-sized' pieces, however for the scholar or the unconvinced I supply footnotes for the assertions I make, and to give reference to some of the supposedly scholarly claims which I believe to be invalid. The area of study is immense and no one could embrace it all, but it is not necessary for my purpose to look at the whole field since I am not arguing about details of scholarship but rather about the presuppositions that affect methodology and about carelessness that distorts results. My aim is modest, I know I will not solve every, or any, critical question but I do want to alert students to the need to think, read, search and check out sources for themselves. Not Caveat Emptor but Caveat Lector "Let the Reader beware".

NO FREE LUNCHES: NO SCHOLARSHIP WITHOUT PRESUPPOSITION

We approach most things with our own baggage of presuppositions. Take a simple and homely example: John Smith allows himself to be appointed as Honorary Treasurer of his local Church. But if I have a prejudice about, or maybe just a dislike of, John, then I might be found saying 'You see, he has done that to get his hands on the money'. Whereas if I have confidence in John I may well say ' he has volunteered because he wants to help in any way he can'. Now, to take the illustration a bit further, if by some circumstances there arises a discrepancy in the Church finances, again presuppositions will come into play. One person will say 'I told you so' while another will say 'I'm sure there is a genuine explanation for this'. In these ways prejudices or presuppositions are seen. As in a simple example like this, so in the world of Biblical Studies. The study of the Bible in the twentieth century has suffered greatly from scholars who approached the Scriptures with an already conceived understanding derived from some view of theology, history or philosophy. They came to the text with a theory they wanted to prove, and not surprisingly they 'proved' it. If they already believed that the Bible was full of myths² they found them. If they came with the notion 'There is no such thing as a miracle' then their Biblical Studies were an elaborate attempt to explain away miracles in the text. Much recent study of the Gospels is built on the presupposition that those who wrote the New Testament had somehow got the idea that Jesus was the Son of God and they then read this back into the text ³. But where did such a disparate bunch of monotheistic 'uneducated' (one of the earliest slurs on Christians Acts 4:13) people get this idea, if not from the overall effect of the life, words and claims of Jesus himself?

ANOTHER DIMENSION

We also need to realise that the study of the Bible cannot be merely a pure academic study. I can study New Zealand wool production with complete detachment since I have no personal interest in the subject, but when I turn to the Bible I meet statements that offer a stark diagnosis of me as a sinner⁴, yet, at the same time, holding out real promise of forgiveness and a new life that will carry over into the age to come⁵. I cannot be neutral to such a book nor read it with detachment. Scholarship cannot ignore the effects of a text in seeking to interpret it, we do not accept that there is nothing outside the text⁶. Two thousand years of world history bears witness to the influence and life-changing power of the Scriptures.

"INNOCENT UNTIL PROVED GUILTY"

The Bible does not set out arguments for the existence of God, it takes that for granted. Nor does it argue that the Word of God⁷ is true, it also takes that as fact⁸. Having made these affirmations the Bible goes on to show, by usage and application, how true and reliable these truths are, and believers in every generation have themselves rich experience of the results of this faith in their own lives. This is not the credulity of those who believe the earth is flat, rather it is belief in a series of realities, arguments and facts of great probability. Furthermore on believing in God and His Word there comes a great understanding of many other realities of life. We believe in order that we may understand. This is not intellectual suicide, but in fact a sound procedure in any enquiry, including scientific research.

When we study the Bible from the standpoint of faith, or with such presuppositions, we take the Bible to be a true revelation of God and his plan for our salvation, and if there are difficulties or even apparent discrepancies we seek answers that are consistent with our overall view of the Bible, and with the good and clear rules of interpretation. If we cannot find an answer, we look further or we suspend judgement until an answer is found. We do not rush to attribute error to the Bible. We operate on the basis of good probability, just as we do in every other walk of life. We eat our dinner because we trust the person who prepared it, we turn on the water tap and wash without checking to see if there is a strong acid coming from the tap. We are not irrational sceptics.

METHODOLOGY

The methodology of many academic biblical scholars is different. Working in University settings they seek to apply the same methods to the Bible as their colleagues use in the sciences. Nothing is accepted till proved beyond any imaginable doubt, no hypothesis is ruled out until shown to be impossible. One writer⁹ says that some scholars think they must prove that they are good critical scholars by showing how much of the Jesus tradition or the New Testament in general they can discount, explain away, or discredit. He goes on to say that "Oddly . . . they often fail to apply the same critical rigour . . to their own pet extracanonical texts or pet theories". This thoroughgoing sceptical methodology may be fine when analysing chemicals in a test tube, though it is argued by purists that no experiment, even under rigorous laboratory conditions can be entirely free of some element of bias imposed by the experimenter, but that is not our problem. From this 'scientific' approach the theologian will look at every possible alternative to accepting the Bible as true. A frantic search of every imaginable source and theory will be made to avoid being so 'na�ve' as to think that maybe the Bible is right. Yet, pardon my stating the obvious, but it is reasonable to assume that the people there and then actually knew what they were talking about, more than a Professor two thousand years later in a very different culture¹⁰. A very influential commentator on Acts¹¹ first of all rejects the Luke of the New Testament as being the writer of Acts. He then comes up with a shadowy figure whom he calls 'Luke'. He then proceeds in his commentary to mention over 400 times (I counted them) where he 'knows' that his 'Luke' : imagined, was wrong, freely invented, supposed, was a good story teller, altered, was in utter confusion, and made a jungle of problems. What amazing knowledge from the school of criticism.

Out of this academic world we are given theories to 'prove' that Jesus didn't walk on water: he knew that there was a sandbar just in the right place (!) and walked on it. And this fooled seasoned fishermen? And Mary's giving birth to Jesus without male intervention was because she and Jesus were in fact twins, Jesus being an undeveloped embryo, and only after years did the embryonic 'Jesus' begin to form and come to birth. The feeding of the Five Thousand was only an instance of one person's generosity (the boy with the bread and fish) triggering an atmosphere of goodwill in which everyone shared their 'packed lunches'. So why had the disciples wanted to send the people away to get food? And, a larger question, why did the early Christians accept a writing that claimed a miracle if the very dogs in the street knew that everyone had shared their food? We need some reality here, if there were at least five thousand who knew it wasn't a miracle, and each of them talked to four or five people, then you have over 20,000 people at the centre of events who knew it was a fraud. Add to that similar numbers connected with other miracles, and yet we have the rise of the early Church from such unlikely ingredients.

MAKING SAND CASTLES

Much of recent scholarship on the Bible looks into the social structure of First Century Palestine and by looking at housing, working conditions, poverty and peasant powerlessness this type of scholarship tries to find or construct Jesus, seeing him as only the product of a type of religiously coloured peasant society. This search-in-the mud approach is because of the unwillingness to consider that he might be unique and that he might indeed be God incarnate. One scholar¹² arrived at the quite reasonable figure that only 3% of peasants in Biblical Palestine were literate, but he then proceeded to deduce that therefore it was unlikely that Jesus was literate. This is the sort of illogical non sequitur that would be laughed at if found in the work of a conservative scholar. Not surprisingly the 'Jesus' they find is hardly worth knowing. For this form of bottom-up construction the power of human reason alone becomes the measure of truth, no matter how unreasonable. Nothing is gained by denying the reliability of God's Word and then trusting completely in one's own fallible mind. The claim is that no incident happens in the way the Bible describes it, everything was concocted afterwards according to later needs of the Church. Though it is of interest that such major issues for the early Christians as the question of circumcision, the inclusion of Gentiles or the place of charismata is not the subject of any words 'put into Jesus' mouth'. Many years ago one sane critic¹³ poked fun at this popular methodology thus:

"There is a world . . . I do not say a world in which all scholars live but one at any rate into which all of them sometimes stray, and which some of them seem permanently to inhabit . . which is not the world in which I live. In my world if The Times and the Telegraph both tell one story in somewhat different terms, nobody concludes that one of them must have copied the other, nor that the variations have some esoteric significance. But in that world of which I am speaking this would be taken for granted. There, no story is ever derived from facts but always from somebody else's version of the same story. In my world almost every book is written by one author. In that world almost every book is produced by a committee, and some of them by a whole series of committees. In my world if I read that Churchill in 1935 said that Europe was heading for a disastrous war, I applaud his foresight. In that other world no prophecy, however vaguely worded, is ever made except after the event. In my world we say, 'The first world war took place in 1914 - 18'. In that world they say, The world-war narrative took shape in the third decade of the twentieth century'. In my world men and women live for a considerable time, seventy, eighty years . . and they are equipped with a thing called memory. In that other world, it would appear, they come into being, write a book, and forthwith perish, and it is noted of them with astonishment that they 'preserve traces of a primitive tradition' about things which happened well within their own adult lifetime".

In what follows I am not arguing that every traditional understanding of the Bible is correct and sacrosanct, and I am certainly not suggesting that old is good, new is bad. Neither am I suggesting that certain positions in scholarship such as holding to the apostolic authorship of John's Gospel are necessarily the hallmark of orthodoxy or the evidence of godliness. But I am arguing that all too often the Baby (of truth) has been thrown out with the Bath Water (of ephemeral speculative ideas).

CORRECT DIAGNOSIS, WRONG MEDICINE

These questions and theories are not just subjects of scholarly debate, they permeate our lives, especially because they are so effectively spread by the media. Films, books, TV, electronic and print media are their pulpits. The beautiful people in the headlines are their evangelists. Their advocates have vast amounts of money at their disposal, and when they fail, as fail they do, they have very professional ways of hiding the mess and projecting the next fashionable trend. So ? Well the Christian Church has always had to make its message heard against such a backdrop, there is nothing new under the sun. The first Christian writers were doughty defenders of truth in a world awash with ideas. Even in NT times competing world-views were a difficulty and a challenge. (Mt 4:8, Lk 9:25, Jn 16:8-11, 17:14-16 I Cor 1:20, Gal 4:9, Col 2:8,20 ). The problem is that sometimes the Church bends too far in trying to shape its message to conform to fashionable but passing ideas. This is usually done with good intention 'We must make our Gospel understood' it is said and 'We must not make it hard for people to believe'. The mistake which is always made is to argue that we are now in a 'new world' or 'new age' which requires 'new thinking'. If it's a new world how come there are a lot of very old sins about ?

The Gospel is squeezed to fit the passing moment or it is planed down to fit, with the knots and high spots removed. From this we get an environmentally friendly 'gospel' or a 'politically correct' one or one with a 'feel good factor', or some permutation of self-redemption. For this some theologians remove the Virgin Birth, or the Resurrection or the Authority of the Bible or the reality of the New Birth. Thinking to do the Gospel a service, they end up not even satisfying the scepticism of the unbelieving world, for the sceptic always cries out for more and more evidence, because he does not want to be convinced. They also end up with no gospel left to preach. The sincere seeker does not want, nor will he be satisfied with a milk and water gospel of little moral platitudes, served in a sauce of do-it-yourself pseudo psychology. Such a gospel changes no lives, carries no convictions, cannot confront the world, leaves people feeling empty and gives nothing worth passing on to others. Every other field of study and academic discipline forged ahead with confidence in the 20th century, only theology turned in on itself and lost sight of its unique calling in a maelstrom of doubt and in-fighting.

Young people with idealism turned from such a pale unchallenging faith and give their energies to 'Save the Whales', hugging trees or restoring Georgian buildings. We are called to be the salt of the earth, not the sugar, and certainly not the sedative. Meanwhile men seek out many inventions. While some in Church are preaching an 'As You Like It' message, with no redemption, no cross and no supernatural the very people they are trying to coax, turn away and begin to search for spiritual reality elsewhere. While pulpits are saying 'You don't really have to believe very much', the people with influence over millions are turning East for something to believe in, or are warming up old pantheism and calling it New Age. When men do not believe in the living God they will believe in anything.

GHOSTS

While many university Biblical Scholars are sceptical of any statement of Scripture, they show remarkable willingness to accept the so-called 'assured results' of critical scholars of the past. Or as someone put it: they strain at half a verse of Mark's Gospel but swallow whole pages of German speculative theology. A good example of this is the four source theory (JEDP) of Wellhausen¹⁴. Wellhausen worked in a vacuum as far as modern knowledge of the Biblical world is concerned, there was no knowledge of the whole field of study including the Sumerians, no Code of Hammurabi, no Hittites, no Ugarit and there was no systematic archaeology by strata¹⁵ when he worked. He was unaware of the ancient writings that have since been discovered, so for example when he attached much significance to the use of differing names/titles for God, and built his hypothesis on that idea he was unaware that 'multiple names for a god in a single text is reasonably common in other Near Eastern texts¹⁶. Old hairy excuses such as there were no camels or portable shrines (ark of the covenant) in Patriarchal times have long since been proved false. Moreover Wellhausen's theory has since been so decimated as its component parts became unstuck, that it is no longer recognizable or valid. His four sources have become multiple, J J1 J2 J3 E D P P1 P2 P3 H etc and fragmentary to an extent that is unbelievable outside the sort of patchwork ransom note you see in films, cut from a dozen newspapers and magazines. And constantly down the years, to keep the theory alive, where the text did not fit the theory, the text was 'emended' to make it fit and this in the name of objective study. Yet his theory is still taught to beginners¹⁷, and having been taught at foundation level it colours all their subsequent work. Likewise some scholars under the influence of an evolutionary theory by which things are said to get better and better, argued for a reversal of the whole understanding of the chronology of the Old Testament, putting supposedly simple and 'primitive' religion first, then a shadowy Monarchy and only then finally the Law. This without a shred of objective evidence. A smooth unilinear evolution of events in human history is a fallacy and is not found in the ancient Near East, indeed in the same period of history Egypt had a thrice repeated rise and fall¹⁸.

Similar ghosts from the past are invoked to colour the first understandings of fresh students in approaching the New Testament from Renan's picture of a 'harmless' Jesus¹⁹ to Bultmann's existential demythologised New Testament with a Jesus devoid of personality²⁰. A recent scholar²¹ still harks back to Strauss (b.1808) when he wants to downplay the historicity of John's Gospel, despite all the work on John since then²² And along the way other 'assured results' of critical scholarship are put forward as facts to build on. For example Q23 , the name given to a number of verses common to Matthew and Luke, takes on a life of its own and scholars discuss editorial layers within it despite its conjectural nature. We need to remind ourselves that nowhere does it exist as a manuscript. Also it is routinely denied that the Pastoral Letters²⁴ were the work of Paul, again without clear evidence²⁵ , indeed this is one of the first 'dogmas' taught in New Testament Studies in Colleges and considered to be in no need of further examination²⁶. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that some writers and critics just repeat what they find in a favourite textbook, without really looking into the question for themselves.

"YOU CAN NO LONGER USE JOHN'S GOSPEL AS EVIDENCE" (Statement to students in a theological college) Also axiomatic in most theological Colleges is that 'no credible scholar' believes that the Apostle John wrote the Gospel attributed to him, this last point is accepted as so much beyond argument that many scholarly works no longer use the title 'John' but refer to the Fourth Gospel. One writer²⁷ makes the bald statement that it is 'profoundly untrue'. Does this show prejudice against the Gospel that is the most clear on the deity of Christ and the reality of eternal life. Undoubtedly the authorship of John involves complex arguments, which would take too much space here, but as always the student should look into the matter for him/herself²⁸. The discovery of the John Ryland's fragment a piece of early manuscript that brought the writing of John to within the timeframe of conservative scholarship and exploded theories of a Second Century 'John', and the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls which showed that many of the terms, used by John, were indeed in circulation in First Century Judaism and not later Greek ideas, have done much to allow for a far more sane assessment of John.

Just to give a glimpse of what we find when we do some Johannine studies for ourselves, we find a typical attack on John is that he thinks that Jesus was born in Nazareth (Galilee) and not in Bethlehem as the Synoptic Gospels say. This is on the basis of John 7:52 . . . but John is not saying that Jesus was born in Nazareth/Galilee, but that some Jews thought he was. Many of us know what it is to have been actually born in one town or city but have grown up in another, perhaps from within days of birth, and are looked on as being from the place of our upbringing not of our actual birth.

MAKING THE WRITERS CONFORM TO THE CRITICS' PATTERN

In this, as in many questions of Biblical Studies, you get the impression that scholars apply a rigidity to their subject matter that just does not exist in reality. For them no one can take longer on a journey than they think is the correct duration (Acts and Pauline studies). Long ago George Salmon joked that some critical theories on Paul would have required Paul to have had a private yacht to get around the Mediterranean²⁹. No one can use a word that they normally don't use (Pauline studies), and, very definitely, no one can do or say something twice without scholars claiming that it is a duplicate (Life of Jesus). On this latter point I have a little day-dream of scholars in two thousand years time coming across two accounts of the sinkings of large four-funneled steamers, with the loss of over a thousand lives, in the teen-years of the twentieth century, both of them either having left Ireland or approaching Ireland and both of them having the letters ITANI in their names (I refer, of course, to the Lusitania and the Titanic). My day-dream is of the scholars convincing their students that 'of course these are duplicate accounts of the one tragedy'. But we, who are within living memory of these events, know better. Those who are good at modern history know that England and France went through very similar convulsions, albeit about a hundred years apart. (Revolution, regicide, republic, military dictatorship, Restoration, restored royal family misgoverns, are deposed and exiled, then replaced by a relative who succeeds, on different terms to the Throne). But historians don't go around saying 'Myth, Duplicates, Multiple Sources', only biblical scholars do that. I am not saying that there are no duplicate stories in the Gospels, for example, but I am saying that not every similarity indicates a duplicate.

You also, at your most discerning moments, get the impression that some scholarship plays the old 'Heads I win, Tails you lose' trick with biblical evidence. If an epistle is like Paul's other writings then it has been written by a close follower who knew Paul's mind, if it seems to be unlike Paul's other writings then, of course, it wasn't written by Paul. It either case it isn't by Paul, heads I win, tails you lose. If John's Gospel, somewhere, is like the Synoptics, then it couldn't be by John the Apostle, for he wouldn't have copied a secondary witness, if it, somewhere else, is unlike the Synoptics then it was not by an eye-witness and therefore not by John. They can't lose.

Two scholars, William Ramsay early in the twentieth century and Kenneth Kitchen later, who have done actual work on the ground in the Near East, both make the point that you can come up with any hare-brained ideas sitting in a comfortable book-lined study in a European University, but in the field you find the facts. Ramsay, as a young lecturer, had accepted the Tubingen rewriting of Acts until a legacy enabled him to travel in Greece and Turkey, and there tracing Paul's travels on the ground he realised that Luke was accurate. Kitchen, an Egyptologist, has always maintained that it takes a scholar to spend years in Egyptology before being able to begin to work on early Old Testament history.

I have seen again and again that the 'assured results' of modern scholarship are by no means as certain as they are made out to be. The student should be allowed look at the evidence of the text for him/herself, instead of which, their teachers, taking these 'results' as beyond discussion, move on quickly to build further shaky edifices on them. In my own experience of many years ago, our New Testament Professor would tell us about 'very real problems' with such and such a passage of Scripture, and, of course, being undergraduates these assertions were new to us. The sad thing was that the 'problems' were not in the Bible, but in trying to make the Bible conform to some thesis or other. So we went off and looked at the matter in various text-books and saw other interpretations. We were then ready to have a good discussion when the question came up in the next lecture. But when the next lecture came the Professor had moved on to another 'very real problem'. We really only got a satisfactory look at the matter on the rare occasions when two lectures where devoted to one topic. When I was young I thought that the story of the King's New Clothes was just a delightful funny story. Years of theological reading has taught me that it is a perceptive comment on scholarship. The theme of the story: 'that only a wise person can see the clothes' is a cynical and bullying appeal to intellectual snobbery. Every time you come across statements like "All competent scholars agree" or " No serious scholar now believes that . . ." or "it is generally recognized" someone is trying to pull the King's New Clothes trick on you.

NOT THE BIBLE, BUT LITTLE BOOKS ABOUT THE BIBLE

Much university level Biblical Studies is misnamed and not really the study of the text of Scripture itself, rather it is the study of little books about the Bible, written to advance some theory or other. There is a wealth of good scholarly literature³⁰ which takes the Bible as God's word and then is able to construct a self-consistent interpretation that does not require a scissors being taken to great chunks of the Bible. The academic book publishing world can bring undue influence to bear on people's perception of the Bible. During most of the twentieth century the cognoscenti got their books published, only their peers reviewed their books and so colleges, unless they had any independence of thought, bought the 'right' books to educate the next generation of 'reputable' scholars, thus independent thinking was steam-rolled and errors perpetuated.

BEWARE EXPERTS AT WORK Sixty years ago, when I was in Primary School we had a visit from a School Inspector. Of course in our naivety we thought it was us, individually, he was examining and we were on our best behaviour. He walked around the room asking questions, as each of us hoped he would ask someone else. In his awe inspiring perambulations he picked up my friend's wooden school ruler, 'How long is this?' he asked. 'Please Sir 12 inches' 'No' 'Please Sir One Foot' 'No'. Now we were in trouble none of the safe answers pleased him. 'You see' he said 'they make these rulers with a small piece at the each end and so this ruler is actually longer than 12 inches'. Triumph of the expert over semi-literate eight year olds! Then with the boldness that comes from having the truth, my friend spoke up: 'Please Sir, that is my ruler and I sawed the two extra bits off it, it is actually 12 inches long'. I don't remember the Inspector's reaction, I suppose I was too busy keeping the head down . . . but I do remember to this day what I learned from it . . . never rely on the expert, always check things out for yourself. This lesson has often stood me in good stead in theological and biblical studies.

C.S. Lewis, known to most people nowadays as the author of the popular The Chronicles of Narnia, was an academic of the highest level in the field of literary criticism with a lifelong study of every sort of literature behind him. This qualified him to be most scathing of the Biblical scholars who wandered into the area of literary criticism with little knowledge of the subject, making sweeping pronouncements about how John or Paul or Luke would have written. Among things he says is 'Has it taken 2000 years for someone to come along who 'knows' that Jesus didn't speak in parables'. He says of many biblical critics 'I distrust them as critics, they lack literary judgement'. With reference to the New Testament writings he says 'I've been reading poems, romances, legends and myths all my life. I know that not one of them is like this'. He also tellingly criticises the 'experts' who claim to know what went on in the minds of the New Testament writers. He points out that the critics can be found pontificating about writers of long ago, far away, who wrote in a different language and culture, and he goes on to say 'I have seen scholarly reviewers, of my own time, language and culture reconstructing the origins of my own writings, and have been surprised at how far off the mark they are³¹ .

SOME EXAMPLES I combed through a small selection of recent scholarly books with an eye to noticing when experts missed that the ends had actually been sawn off the ruler, and the following are some examples. By the way, I am not saying that whereas these experts make mistakes I never do, or 'believing' scholars never do . . . No, all I am saying is check the facts for yourself, don't assume that experts must always be right.

Prof John Riches' small but popular survey of the Bible³² asserts that John runs counter to the Synoptic Gospels in that John (19:17) says that Jesus carried his own cross whereas the Synoptics say that Simon of Cyrene carried it. However when we read Matthew's account (27:32) we see that there need be no conflict, Simon was 'available' and was compelled to carry it, sometime after they had set out with Jesus carrying it. Real life is always more complex than a bare narrative statement, the problem with critics is that they want to squeeze the New Testament into an artificial rigidity.

Gerd Ludemann wrote a small book called What Really Happened to Jesus on the Resurrection in which he concludes the Resurrection was 'not a historical fact'³³ The fabric of his book is so shot through with questionable assertions and actual errors that his conclusion must be declared 'not proven'. For example on Page 3 he says that the testimonies of the first witnesses are 'full of inconsistencies and sometimes contradictions'. Now 'full' is a very strong word and easy to prove, yet we are not given any list, even partial, of these inconsistencies or contradictions. Instead we get a philosophical rehash of early twentieth century theories about how the New Testament was written. Typical of his sweeping assertions we find him on page 9 saying that 'Jesus is always depicted in the Gospels as the risen Lord'. Again 'always' is a very complete word but I do not think that any reader would come to that conclusion unless already immersed in some theory of sources. Where Ludemann does get down to specific texts we meet the same undigested assertions. On page 11 referring to the words of Paul (1Cor 15:6b) that of those to whom Christ appeared 'most . . . are still alive though some have fallen asleep'. Ludemann says that these words 'are certainly not part of the tradition which Paul handed on . . .' How can a twentieth century writer be so certain as to what Paul knew and when. There is no manuscript variant here and the phrase 'fallen asleep' is one Paul uses cf. 1Cor 7:39, 11:30, 15: 6,8,20, 51; 1Thess 4:13,14,15. The suspicion arises that the only problem with these words is that they don't suit Ludemann's theory. On page 17 of this book he says that 'Jews buried Jesus' as distinct from Jesus being buried by Joseph of Arimathea. To support his statement he quotes John 19:31-37, but these verses do not say that the Jews buried Jesus, moreover John goes on at verses 38 - 42 to tell how Joseph of Arimathea buried ( really: 'laid to rest' ) Jesus. This sort of sloppy inaccurate work would fail a First Year student, yet as the work of an 'expert' it gets published. It could be argued that these are only details and don't affect the overall thinking of the book, but this will not do, no conclusion is sound if built on faulty steps. My advice to any student is to check all references and inferences for him/herself.

In a book³⁴ he wrote with Jonathan Reed, 'joining biblical studies to archaeology', according to the blurb on the cover, John Dominic Crossan dissects the story of Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4). One point he makes forcibly is that it 'is simply false' that there was a cliff (his word) from which anyone 'could be hurled to death³⁵. There are at least three things wrong with Crossan's claim. One, Luke does not say it was a cliff, but the 'brow of a hill'. Secondly Luke does not say hurled to death, but simply 'throw him down headlong'. And thirdly Crossan's own book has a beautifully painted overview of Nazareth complete with a hill . . . down from which I certainly would not like to be thrown.

The Church of Ireland recently produced a small report called The Authority of Scripture. In it Dr Pierce attempts a quick survey of approaches to the authority of scripture, with particular care that his readers avoid fundamentalism. In the course of his survey Pierce tells us that some of the statements in Proverbs are 'utterly banal' (his phrase); however to try to demonstrate this he misquotes Proverbs 17:22³⁶. Again, on page 34, he tells us that Mark ''presents Jesus receiving John's baptism 'for the forgiveness of sins' Mark 1:4-11''. Now Marks tells us that John was preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (verse 4) and that Jesus was baptised by John (verse 9); but Mark does not 'present' Jesus receiving a baptism of repentance, in fact the whole thrust of the story is about how different the baptism of Jesus was. These things do need to be studied and debated, but loose quotes and misquotes do not serve any cause well.

BOY'S TOYS

It is hard not to get the impression that some scholars too readily latch on to the latest passing fashion in the world's thinking and then try to shape the Bible message to it. Schleiermacher followed the lure of Romanticism and took theology into the realm of feelings not facts. Under pressure from sceptics he was trying to 'have his cake and eat it at the same time', saying something like: 'Yes, we know that it's not really true, but isn't it such a nice story'. The Tubingen School, trying to establish a pattern of thesis and antithesis on History rewrote New Testament history and drove a wedge between Paul's theology and that of Peter. Bultmann espoused existentialism and tried to reduce Jesus to mere existence. Today we have theologians following our sociologists and thinking that if they study the (scant) sociological data of First Century Palestine they will discover Jesus embedded in his strata of society. They seem to think that if they put together data about trade, wages, travel, diet, and politics of First Century Palestine they will explain (away?) Jesus. This, to me, is as if a 16 year old landed a plane after the pilot gets a heart attack, and instead of saying this is a very special, courageous, unique, cool and collected young man, we begin to trawl through socio-economic data, ethnic studies, media studies, family history and so on so forth to try to explain him . . . . or find him!

A recent toy is Narrative Criticism, whereby having spent years taking the text apart, and getting nowhere, some scholars following the lead of general Literary Studies, have now decided to look at the text as if it really was a joined-up composition. (Now why didn't we think of that !) A result of this new found fascination with Narrative is that students have to write essays on ' The house as narrative setting in Mark's Gospel'. Go ye into all the world and explain that.

In all this I am reminded of another story . . . there was this family of mice who lived contentedly in the bottom of a piano, enjoying the music that was played from time to time. Then some mice began to wonder what caused the music. They explored and found that the music came when the wires vibrated. So the Twanging Wires Theory was born. But other mice said that there had to be Someone out there. So the progressive mice explored further and discovered that the wires twanged when the hammers hit them. The Twanging Wires theory gave way to the Hammer Theory. But the other mice weren't convinced, the music was too beautiful and well structured, there had to a Great Musician out there . . . I believe the progressive mice are now talking about linkages to the hammers. This is not a na�ve simplistic story, a Mickey Mouse story ! Behind the story lies the crux of the present dilemma in Biblical Studies: is the world, including all human achievement, just a meaningless random collection of chemico-electr??ical events in blind cause and effect sequence, (the wires and hammers) ? Or is there purpose, beauty, design and a rich depth of something that meets human need . . . . . . is Someone in fact playing Music, and perchance have we the score to that music in the Bible ?

REDUCED TO CRUMBS

We now have 'deconstructionism' , a child of post-modernism. Believing that there is No Big Picture, No Absolute Truth, except, of course, their own absolute truth that there is no absolute truth, some scholars now break down every text to mere orphaned marks on a page³⁷. Not surprisingly theologians have joined the fun and dissected the Bible and, surprise, surprise, they have found that there is nothing in it. It is as if I were to come to your house and you set a tasty meal before me, you would expect that I will enjoy the totality of the dish: Appearance, Warmth, Smell, Taste, Presentation and Appetite Satisfaction. If, however, I let it get cold, and then spoon parts of it over a number of plates and begin to analyse each ingredient . . . . 'Ah I see you have got a carrot that originated in the Netherlands, and these peas didn't all come from the same plot. The gravy contains flour made from Canadian wheat' . . . . and so forth, you will not be surprised that I didn't enjoy the meal and that it did me no good as food.

Too much of Biblical Studies consists of exhaustive over-analysis, footnotes about footnotes while a lost world longs for a message of hope. A saying of Jesus is broken down something like: This word, or rather its Hebrew equivalent, comes from Isaiah and this one is found in Amos, this comparison is also found in Jewish writing of the second century, and the man he mentions is a typical Palestinian living under the Roman occupation, therefore this saying is (a) not really from Jesus' lips (b) insignificant (c) a late addition. Here, from Crosson³⁸ , is an example: He looks at the Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth event (Luke 4), a narrative of about 15 verses. In this he discerns three layers, of which he also claims, the third layer itself contains three levels. He finds material going back to Jesus (!) pre-Pauline material, Q material, Mark material, unspecified independent material, possible hints of the Gospel of Thomas and/or The Didache, Matthew material and Luke (!) material, and some John mat??erial. Amazing. Very similar in approach is Vermes' book The Authentic Gospel of Jesus. Further theories are created on the back of theories of dissection. Does anyone, sitting down to read the Bible, realise that, according to Wim Weren³⁹ : "If the elements A and B belong to the same textual unit, their relationship is not the same as if they belong to two different units. Thus reducing or enlarging the units changes the interplay. This problem returns when we bring small units together in a medium sized text. The limits of this determine the network that is marked out within such a meso-unit." ? Really ? Is this the message that turned the world of the Roman Empire upside down (Acts 17:6)?

IT'S LIKE SAYING 'I LOVE YOU ' IS JUST A THREE WORD SENTENCE But the sayings, teachings and parables of Jesus are more than the sum of their parts. Otherwise we do reduce everything to banality. Those, friend or foe, who heard Jesus, recognised that he spoke as no one ever spoke (Jn 7:46). It is a great tragedy when 'experts' cannot see the wood for the trees, whereas ordinary 'uneducated' (where have we heard that before?) people find light, joy, peace and life changing truths in the very same words. Take for example the words "Come unto me" (Matt 11 : 28 ). We can, of course, say the words are common and the idea widespread. But we must add the fact that Matthew thought them worthy of recording, we must add the personality of the One who said them and we must, if it were possible to amass it all, add the testimony of thousands upon thousands who have taken them as significant and thereby been challenged, reassured, encouraged, converted, changed or whatever.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS FOR STUDENTS OF GOD'S WORD

So what's to be done? First don't bury your head in the sand. There is much to be learned from the discoveries of the past 150 years. No book has been so analysed and inspected as the Bible. Next to biblical times themselves, we know more of the background of the Bible than any century before us. Linguistics, archaeology, literary criticism and so on, have thrown light on the Bible. As long as the student is discerning in what he reads and hears he will gain much from recent books and studies. Secondly, do not be discouraged, there is a wealth of good, up to date, scholarship out there, while the theory-driven scholars were treating the Old and New Testaments in such an off-hand manner scholars from non-biblical disciplines: History and Archaeology, dealing with the facts on the ground have been building up the picture of the biblical world and finding out how reliable the Bible is. It is well known that secular historians who specialise in studies of the First Century cannot understand the scepticism of? some theological scholars with regard to the New Testament documents⁴⁰. There has always been this strand in academic study of the Bible, in this strand serious effort has been made to get at what the Bible says and then at how to apply that to changing circumstances and the needs of the people in real life, for whom it was written. Commentaries, Introductions, Atlases, and Dictionaries have been written that have treated the Scriptures as prima - facie deserving the respect of any other well attested documents. They have built for us a consistent picture of the world of the Bible. But they have often been neglected, sight unseen, by being branded 'conservative'. Thirdly, if you are studying, or intend to study, in a Theological College, make sure you know the text of the Bible thoroughly for yourself. There is no better antidote to wrong ideas, unfounded assertions or sweeping statements. The Bible does not have to be handled with kid gloves, or defended by unthinking fundamentalism, so treat it with the same respect that secular historians treat their primary sources, you will be enriched in your own life and will have a message of Good News to pass on. Finally, the Victorian preacher, Spurgeon, used to say "Defend the Bible ? Why you might as well defend a lion, let it loose and it will defend itself". Folksy and simple as this may seem it contains a lot of spiritual wisdom. The Bible is about life and for life. It will be in the reading of it, combined with obedience to its precepts that the best proof will come. Out of the Word God's Spirit will produce the fruit of Love, Joy and Peace and all that makes for life that is life abundant (Jn 10:10).

APPENDIX

THE PASTORAL LETTERS

The Pastoral Letters ( 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus) are a good example of many of the points raised in this booklet. For a long time now it has been 'one of those dogmas first learned in theological college as being in no need of further examination'⁴¹ that these letters were not written by Paul. For instance we have in Kee & Young The Living World of the New Testament the words: "Since both the language and point of view of the Pastoral Letters show that they were not written by Paul . . . (p.307). And in Duling and Perrin The New Testament, Proclamation and Parenesis, a book recommended for Biblical Studies at Trinity College Dublin, we have "the large majority of critical interpreters (the King's new Clothes syndrome again ! ) think that Pauline authorship is impossible . . . . "(p. 486). In what follows I am not suggesting that the argument as to whether Paul wrote them or not is simple, or easily settled in favour of Paul being the author. But what I do maintain is that despite sweeping statements to the contrary, it is by no means one of the 'assured results of modern scholarship' that an unknown author "used Paul's name to give authority to his attempt to address problems in some post-Pauline churches"⁴² There are three main lines in the argument: historical, doctrinal and linguistic. Space here would not allow them to be fully explored, the student should consult good up-to-date commentaries and New Testament Introductions. However to demonstrate something of the need to look at the evidence for oneself rather than taking the conclusions of any expert I will open up the argument from linguistics somewhat. Since the work of Harrison⁴³,on the statistics of word-usage in the Pastorals as compared to the other Pauline letters, in which he produced a plethora of numbers 'proving' that Paul did not write the Pastorals, most scholars have followed him and taken the matter as proved. Now no one doubts that the Pastorals do contain words not used elsewhere in Paul, and even some that do not occur anywhere else in the New Testament. However, it must be said firstly that the number of words actually in these letters is too small a sample to give any guarantee of accuracy. We are talking of about 170 words not found elsewhere in the New Testament and another 130 which are in the New Testament but not in any of Paul's other letters. We all know that there are lies, damn lies and then statistics! Having said that the following points are significant:

• The subject matter is different ( Paul is speaking about groups of people and situations within the church etc) and this will involve 'new' words

• Paul is now at least 10 - 15 years older than when he wrote some of his earlier letters, we all pick up/use different words. (A fascinating thing about watching films of the 1970s and 80s is to notice the words then in use, but now redundant, and to be aware of current phrases not used then.)

• Paul is most likely to have been in Rome and to have picked up some Latin words. This would account for the 'latinisms' found in the Pastorals. E.g. membrana 'parchments' 2Tim 4:13

• Paul is writing to close colleagues rather than to Churches, as was the case in his other letters (except Philemon). Those who teach / preach know that they make an effort to use easier, more everyday words when speaking to an audience/congregation whereas when talking to like-minded friends they relax and use those more technical words that are common currency between them.

• Paul is giving administrative/pastoral instructions in the Pastorals rather than evangelising / imparting doctrine as in his other letters. Therefore we find he uses direct imperatives where in other letters he is more rhetorical and persuasive.

• Paul may well have been using a scribe to write the Pastorals, as is the case in most of his letters (see Rom 16:22; I Cor 1:1, 16:21; 2 Cor 1;1; Gal 6:11; Col 4:18 etc) some scholars have suggested Luke, in which case Luke would have been given a good deal of liberty. And it is a fact that some of the 'rare' words in the Pastorals also appear in Luke/Acts.

• Or . . . intriguingly, and I have not seen this mentioned very often . . whereas Paul appears to have used a scribe / amanuensis for most if not all his other letters . . he may in fact have actually penned the Pastorals himself.

• Some of the words in the Pastorals which scholars say were not words Paul would use are merely cognates (other grammatical form) or compound forms of words he does use in his other letters. For example we have 'to turn away' (apostrepesthai 2 Tim 3:5), but this only a compound of the common word 'to turn' (strepho) common in Luke and used by Paul at Acts 13:46. It is like saying I can use the word 'market' but not supermarket or hypermarket.

Words in all their forms are fluid things and to limit a writer to only one form of a word is to say he can write 'convey' because he uses it elsewhere, but if I find the word 'conveyance' in a writing I know it cannot be his. For example we have the word 'affirm' ( diabebaioomai) in 1 Tim 1: 7 and Tit 3:8, another word Paul would not use say the critics, but it is only a compound form of 'affirm' (bebaioo) found in Mk, Romans, 1 & 2 Cor, Col and Hebrews. Akin to the close meaning between our 'affirm' and 'confirm'. Much is made of differences in Paul's use of particles (small connecting words like our then, so, yet, but). An early but very influential authority (James Moffat Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament in the International Theological Library Series T&T Clarke 1918) says that the difference of usage of particles is ' one of the most decisive proofs of the difference between Paul and this Paulinist' (p.407). Moffat gives us a list of these supposedly tell-tale particles. But when checked out we find that he gives the omission of 'instead of' (anti) as evidence, but then we find that 'instead of' only occurs once in Romans, a work twice as long at least as the three Pastorals together, likewise with 'before' (emprosthen) not in the Pastorals but also not in Romans, yet Moffat accepts that Paul wrote Romans. The impression is given that many scholars in the twentieth century were brought up on Moffat and accepted his details without ever looking at them for themselves. As well as disproving some of these negatives there are arguments that run the opposite way e.g. the word 'conflict' (agon) found twice in the Pastorals is, apart from one occurrence in Hebrews, only found in Paul's writings ( Phil, Col, 1Thess). Having taken a brief glimpse at the complexity of the linguistic argument I can only mention a few points with regard to the other arguments against Pauline authorship. The main plank of the historic argument against Paul being the writer is that the events mentioned in the Pastorals cannot be fitted into the narrative of Acts. But this is begging the question and making the completely unsupported assumption that the end of Acts is the end of Paul. Whereas what little traditional and inferred evidence we have supports the opposite scenario: that Paul was released and travelled again, including to Spain. On the supposed doctrinal differences between the Pastorals and the other letters of Paul it can be said that any Preacher / Teacher will discuss different topics with an insider colleague from those he will discuss with a general readership, and also will discuss basic doctrines from a different perspective. For example I may talk of Justification by Faith with one body of people and yet speak of the same truth under the general theme of Relationship with others. There is also said to be a much more advanced form of Church structure / office-holding in the Pastorals. But this seems to be a case of reading backwards into the text. Simply put, do you think of a bishop in the New Testament as an(y) 'overseer' for that is what the word means or do you think of a (modern) Right Reverend Bishop of a diocese? For example some writers speak of the Pastorals has having a three fold ministry of deacons, elders and bishops. Yet the Pastorals, like the rest of the New Testament, treat bishops and elders as synonymous or virtually so, and nowhere mention the three offices as three distinct ministries. 1 Timothy mentions bishops and deacons in Chapter 3, but no elders. Then in Chapter 5 we have elders but no bishops. At Titus 1:5 Paul tells Titus to appoint elders, but it is the qualifications for a bishop that he gives to him in verse 7. One other point: would anyone purporting to be Paul have described him as 'the foremost of sinners' (1Tim 1: 15) and had his pseudo-letter accepted. The early Christians were not unaware of the possibility of forgery, see 2Thess 2:2. I am very aware that I have only skimmed the surface of some of these arguments about the Pastorals . . . . but I hope I have done enough to make the reader realise that it is not an open and shut case, and to make the reader question some of the statements s/he meets in text books and in Lectures.

NOTES

I use standard abbreviations for books of the Bible, these abbreviations can be found at the front of most Bibles.

1. Gnosticism, from the Greek word for 'knowledge', has always been around in one form or another. Basically it is the claim to special, esoteric or 'insider' knowledge. It was / is a danger to the free grace of the Gospel in that it claims that we need special 'knowledge', or that we need to know certain secrets, in order to be saved. It was a recognized threat within New Testament times e.g. 1 Cor 8:1, 13:8; Col 2: 8 - 23; 1Tim 1:4 etc. The student should consult a good Bible Dictionary on the subject.

2. The manner in which the word 'myth' is used by some scholars is somewhat disingenuous. They claim to use it in a rarefied sense, claiming that it means a religious idea or story without any claim as to whether it is actually true or not. But the meaning used by the ordinary man is that a myth is a legend or fairy-story and not actually true. See article by Simon Gathercole in Themelios Vol 28 Issue 3 (2003).

3. See e.g. Wim Weren Windows on Jesus SCM 1999 Pages 140, 256/7.

4. See e.g. Isaiah 53:6, Rom 3:23, Eph 2:1.

5. See e.g. Ps 32:5; Jn 5:24,6:40; Eph 4:32; 1 Jn 1:8,9.

6. This refers to the most recent ideas of post modern Literary Criticism from the School of Deconstructionism. It is held that we can bring nothing to the text in attempting to interpret it, and that we should not go beyond the mere marks on the page for any understanding. See excellent article in Willem A VanGemeren (ed) Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (Paternoster 1997) pages 14 - 44.

7. There are, of course, subtle differences of meaning between words like Scripture, The Bible, God's Word, The Word (as Jesus Christ) and The Word (as the Bible). For a study of these differences appropriate books should be consulted. For the purposes of this booklet the overall meaning or idea will be a common understanding of the Word of God as: 'God's revelation of Himself and His purposes to humankind in the Bible and most particularly in the Person and Work of Jesus Christ'.

8. See e.g. Jn 17:17; 2Tim 3:16; 2Pet 1:19 - 21.

9. Ben Witherington III What have they done with Jesus? Harper SanFrancisco 2006 page 5

10. The famous writer C.S.Lewis makes the point well in his little book Elephants and Fern Seeds (details in bibliography). He says that he has read reviews of his own writings by literary scholars belonging to his own age, language, university, background and culture, and they have misunderstood his reasons and the influences that worked on him . . . so how much more should we be cautious about scholars talking of the world of the New Testament, two thousand years, and miles, distant and with difference of language and culture.

11. E. Haenchen The Acts of the Apostles Blackwell Eng.Translation 1971

12. J.D. Crosson in Excavating Jesus SPCK 2001 Page 30.

13. Green-Armytage quoted in L.Morris Studies in the Fourth Gospel Eerdmans 1969

14. Wellhausen Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (in German) 1878

15. Details in K.A.Kitchen On the Reliability of the Old Testament Eerdmans 2003 pages 485 / 487

16. Raymond B Dillard, Tremper Longman III An Introduction to the Old Testament Apollos IVP 1995 page 45.

17. It is still used in Prof Riches popular little book: The Bible A Very Short Introduction Oxford 2000 page 19.

18. K A Kitchen Ancient Orient and Old Testament Tyndale Press 1966 page 113.

19. Renan Life of Jesus 1863 In connection with this see G.Salmon A Historical Introduction to the Books of the New Testament Chapt 1, (This latter book is now quite dated, but in terms of methodology is excellent ).

20. Wim Weren Windows on Jesus page 258.

21. ibid page 256.

22. See e.g. C.L.Blomberg The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel IVP Apollos 2001 Especially pages 17 - 67

23. On 'Q' see the article the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels IVP 1992 also available on the CD (details in bibliography)

24. The Pastoral Letters is a name given to 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus because their content is largely of a church based pastoral nature.

25. For a fuller discussion of the issues involved in the authorship of the Pastorals see the Appendix at the end of this booklet.

26. See L.T. Johnston's introduction to his First and Second Letters to Timothy Doubleday 2000

27. Maurice Casey in Is John's Gospel true Routledge 1996, quoted in Blomberg op. cit. page 17.

28. As with all these questions be sure to consult works from different publishers, do not rely on any one publisher, especially if 'highly recommended' by Lecturers.

29. G.Salmon op.cit page 301

30. See my bibliography for a start. Make enquiries, get catalogues.

31. See footnote 10 above.

32. See footnote 17 above.

33. G.Ludemann What really happened to Jesus? SGM 1995 See page 134.

34. John Dominic Crossan & Jonathan L Reed Excavating Jesus SPCK 2001

35. Ibid page 30. The use of the word 'cliff' at verse 29 in the NRSV is also going too far: the Greek word means basically to hurl down headlong, and that can mean down a bank, a hill, a precipice or indeed a cliff, but not necessarily a cliff.

36. The Authority of Scripture Church of Ireland Publishing 2006. See page 23 Pierce translates Prov 17:22 as: "If you are cheerful, you feel good; if you are sad, you hurt all over" Which does sound banal, the verse however in the NRSV, for example, reads: "A cheerful heart is a good medicine, but a downcast spirit dries up the bones " It is not so much the sloppy quoting of Scripture but the hubris of a scholar who feels that he can pronounce that a portion of Scripture is 'utterly banal', that is what amazes.

37. See footnote 6 above.

38. Crossan op. cit. pages 36 - 39

39. Wim Weren op.cit page 35

40. See E M Blaiklock 'It never ceases to amaze a classicist, how methods of criticism will be accepted in New Testament studies which would be dismissed as na�ve or ridiculous if applied to other ancient documents'. Layman's Answers Hodder & Stoughton 1960 page 41. Students sometimes lose a sense of perspective as to the reliability of the text of the New Testament. We have fragments of the NT from within 30 to 50 years of the first manuscripts. From within the first hundred years we have thousands of copies, part copies and references, whereas in the case of the great classical writings (Horace, Caesar, Tacitus, details in F F Bruce Are the New Testament Documents Reliable?) the gap between when they were written and the oldest surviving copies is often at least a thousand years. This seems to trouble no one and these writings are treated as authentic while the New Testament is looked on with disdainful suspicion by some biblical scholars.

41. See footnote 26 above.

42. Joulette M Bassler in her Introduction to First Letter of Paul to Timothy. HarperCollins STUDY BIBLE NRSV 1993 page 2229

43. P N Harrison The Problem of the Pastorals Oxford 1921

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The following may be found useful in trying to get a more balanced understanding of the Bible. Mark D Thompson A clear and Present Word Apollos IVP 2006
K A Kitchen On the reliability of the Old Testament Eerdmans 2003
F F Bruce The New Testament Documents, are they reliable? IVP various editions
Van Gemeren W A (Edit) Dictionary of Old Testament Theology & Exegesis Paternoster Press 1997
Linnemann E Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology? Baker 1990
Blomberg Craig L Historical Reliability of John's Gospel Apollos IVP 2001
Witherington B What have they done with Jesus> HarperCollins 2006
" " The Jesus Quest IVP 1995
de Silva David A An Introduction to the New Testament Apollos IVP 2004
Lewis C S Fern-seeds and Elephants Collins Fount 1975
Gasque W W History of the Criticism of the Acts of the Apostles Eerdmans 1975
Neill S & Wright T Interpretation of the New Testament 1861-1986 OUP 1988
Darrell L Beck Studying the Historical Jesus Apollos IVP 2002
On CD: The Essential IVP Reference Collection 2001

"And in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle.

The description of a human figure in Rev 1,13-16 in not entirely original, it contains some hidden quotations. On the other hand, it is not either a mere compilation of the borrowed elements, but it is based on the personal experience of the author, who, in Rev 2-3, presents an interesting conception of christology.

The analysis of Rev 1:13-16 has shown that it contains hidden quotations, in other words that it is not entirely original. There is textual evidence, however, to prove that it is not a mere compilation, but a description based on the author's personal experience.

The first part of the article deals with the two stanzas which make up Rev l:l7c-18 where the expression �one like a son of man� is found, following Dn 7:13. It analyses the epistolary style and the structure of the seven letters, and the parallel of expressions found in Rev 1:9-20 with other passages of Rev, of the Old and New Testament and with apocryphal Jewish books.

The second part concentrates on Rev l:13-16, particularly on the symbolism of the seven stars in the right hand of the human figure and the seven lamps. It compares the text with Dn 7:13 to ascertain that, apart from the expression �like a son of man�, the typical motives of Daniel are missing in Rev: the clouds, the Ancient of days and the court; the human figure is not enthroned: the text does not talk of authority, royalty nor asserts that all peoples shall serve him. Only those attributes befitting a celestial being coincide with those found in Daniel and other canonical writings.

The context provides elements to define the identity of the human figure, since some attributes, although taken from the OT, have a clear christological meaning. Furthermore, the expression �like a son of man� in l:13 has a messianic character, since here the author of Rev gives a messianic interpretation of Dn 7:13. It must be pointed out that the christology of the son of man in Rev 1:13-16.l7c-18, although it contains many borrowed elements, is an original conception of the author. And, contrary to other writings in the NT, in Rev there appears no connection with the messianic traditions of the Old Testament.

If the terms used in the initial formulas of the seven letters (Rev 2-3) are analysed in their formal aspect, it appears that they contain seven titles, seven attributes and seven roles, although not always adequately differentiated. In other words, using seven as a symbolic member, the author wanted to represent in the initial formulas all the titles, attributes and roles of the risen Christ. The author of Rev does not deal with the theoretical problems concerning Christ's nature, being or person: he is presented as the Conqueror, thus emphasysing his role as Lord of the communities.

Rev uses many terms borrowed from the OT and so the human figure, although not belonging to the OT, takes on OT features. Christ the Conqueror is also given the attributes and roles of the God of Israel. The risen Christ, in his being, titles, attributes and roles, is the equal to the God of the OT. This is of particular importance for the Christians of Jewish origin. Thus it seems that the letters were addressed more to such Christians in the diaspora than to those of pagan origin.

It is unlikely that the redactor of Rev l: 13 was influenced by Judaic traditions. On the other hand, there is practically no relationship between the use of the formula in Rev 1:13 and �the Son of Man� of the Gospels, except in the title �the Son of God� and in the two references to life and death.

From the analysed texts it can be seen that the author of Revelation was a christian of Jewish origin, whose knowledge of the OT and of Jewish tradition was extensive, but who at the same time interpreted the basic content of the New Testament revelation in a very profound way.