Early christianity.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: The article by Michael Giffin, "Writing and Reading the Canons" (June 2007) and his book review of The Jewish-Christian Schism by John Howard Yoder (January-February 2008) have made me wonder whether he has succumbed to the modem literary disease of prioritising theory over evidence that he discussed in this own article "On Interpreting Literature" (January-February 2008).

In "Writing and Reading the Canons" he hints a number of times at a largely discredited historical theory that for the disciples of Jesus, Jesus was a rabbi, perhaps a prophet, but nothing more, and that it was only after the Jesus Movement spread out into the Gentile world that his followers began using grandiose language that described Jesus as having divine or quasidivine status. The theory then postulates that it was the early Greek followers of Jesus who simply adapted Greek "divine man" myths to speak about Jesus.

The evidence for such a theory would be that the earliest Christian tradition would speak of Jesus as a simple teacher, the later as an exalted quasi-divine figure. But ...