Sir: No one would deny Professor Trevor-Roper as an historian
the right, indeed the duty, to treat all sources, written or oral, as only primary data, to be rigor- ously examined and compared with all other available data be- fore an historical conclusion or account be attempted. We should be grateful to him for explaining his position in a full-length article in the SPECTATOR (27 February) (owing to postal peculiarities re, ceived by me after my letter to the SPECTATOR (27 March). Is not the truth of the matter that all the evidence we possess is not sufficient to prove the truth or the non-truth of the origins of Christianity. Faith, God-given, secs it in one light. Non-faith sees it in another. Both spectacles are tinted. Professor Trevor- Roper's certainly are. It is his- torically unsound to isolate the feeding of the five thousand from all other related facts of the Gos- pels; to try and see an exoneration of Pilate to please Rome in the gospel narratives; to assert that `St Paul knows neither Christ's miracles nor his teachings nor the details of his trial and crucifixion'. This is to see things through tinted glasses indeed. Almost in- credible as the Christian faith is, the facts as we know them support it historically and make more sense than any other explanation.
John H. Bishop Singleton Rectory, Chichester, Sussex.
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