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Questions for the Evangelists
Brendan Butler • 2 April 2021
Dear Mark, Matthew, Luke, John,
Thank you all the work you all put into writing the gospels from your own communities . Now almost 2,000 years later you will be happy to know that your writings still survive.
But the problem I and so many others have is why is it that so many Christians today take every word you wrote as evangelists as the literal truth.
It seems that when you wrote the accounts of the life of Jesus people of your time understood that it was not to be taken as actual history but as catechesis for new communities.
The continued misinterpretation by Christians over the centuries down to my own lifetime has been the source of division within and persecution without.
Take for instance this week when we read your different accounts of the events of this Holy week.
I'm sure you never intended to contribute to the persecution of the Jewish people through the centuries.
You all probably witnessed the Roman army suppressing the Jewish uprising in 70 AD with savage cruelty years before you wrote your gospels. You saw or heard them invade Palestine destroying and looting the Great Temple in Jerusalem and carrying back to Rome all its sacred contents.
You all ascribe the responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus to the Jewish people present in Pilate's praetorium in spite of Pilate wanting to release him.
Matthew , you in particular, dramatise the scene further with the screaming words of the crowd "May his blood be on us and our children".
I wonder what were you thinking when you wrote those words?
Did you not realise that your words would reverberate down through the centuries as a real historical description of what really happened on that fateful Good Friday morning ?
Did it not even strike you that your words would possibly incite and inflame Christians to accuse the Jewish people of the crime of Deicide and to use that charge to force Jews to live as persecuted outcasts for 2000 years and to end up being massacred in pogroms throughout Europe ending up with the Nazi Holocaust ?
I wonder what motivated you to ascribe the responsibility to the Jewish people instead of to the Roman Governor ?
While at the time of writing your gospels 40 to 70 years after Jesus's crucifixion there was much antagonism between you and the Jewish people especially over your refusal to support their uprising against the Romans did that influence how you ascribed the responsibility for Jesus death?
It shows us all the dangerous use of words and their power for good and bad.
So my dear evangelists for the moment that is about all I want to say to you all.
(Isn't it a great pity that you can't respond to my questions)
Brendan Butler
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C/O 49 Rockfield Avenue,
Perrystown,
Dublin 12.
D12H6F6
Ireland