Madam, - Your coverage of Mel Gibson's new film The Passion of the Christ (February 26th) is interesting, but many of your Christian commentators miss an essential point.
This is borne out above all by Dr Trevor Morrow's comment (for the Presbyterian Church in Ireland): "If there were elements that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic then the same criticism can be made of the Gospels". Exactly. And because, for most Christians, the New Testament is the inspired "Word of God", what is in the Testament is inevitably correct, and the Gibson film is, consequentially, correct to mirror that.
Most Christians have not yet absorbed, let alone understood, the message of Salmon Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Just as there are, provably, interpolations in the Koran, so too the same is true of the New Testament. The Quaker Rufus Jones articulated the need for moving over to a "new centre", beyond the previous "centres" of "Church" and "Bible". And Unitarians, wisely, vis-à-vis the Bible, view the revelation of God to man as an ongoing process - in other words, the Bible is not the only source of truth, and may on occasion be mistaken.
In this particular instance, the disappearance of the original Jewish-Christianity (between the fall of Jerusalem in 70 and the definition of the New Testament canon nearly a hundred years later) and the wish of the emergent Christian Church to separate itself distinctly from its Jewish roots caused, provably, anti-Jewish sentiment to be added to the primitive accounts. Matthew's line "His blood be upon us, and upon our children" (27.25) is, significantly, mirrored in Paul's "Your blood be upon your own heads" (Acts 18.6). These sayings are not original. And a comparison between New Testament Paul (in the Epistles and Acts of the Apostles) and extra-canonical Paul (in the Acts of Paul) reveals many further details of anti-Jewish interpolation into the canonical texts.
What emerges from all of this is something that is accepted by Unitarians as a fact of life, but which most other Christians approach with blinkers on: the New Testament is not everywhere inspired, but is sometimes corrupt, sometimes misleading, and sometimes mistaken. Certainly this is the case with its anti-Semitism, which is a travesty of the view of Jesus himself, and of his earliest followers. - Yours, etc.,
Dr MARTIN PULBROOK,
New Meeting House,
Prince's Street,
Cork.
Madam, - A fact that may be overlooked in the current debate is that the writers of the New Testament do not emphasise the physical suffering of Christ. - Yours, etc.,
KEN RYAN,
Raheny Park,
Dublin 5.