Early christianity.

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 after scholars successfully identified the lowest "strata" in the New Testament, the earliest pieces of writing, they discovered that the very earliest traditions, not just the latest, speak of Jesus as sharing in God's unique sovereignty over all things. In fact, a fairly "high" Christology of Jesus permeates virtually the entire New Testament. Hence the theory doesn't stand up.

Mr Giffin repeats (I presume) Mr Yoder's historical assertions as fact. For instance, that Christianity separated from Judaism during the second or even third century rather than the widely recognised first century. He also doesn't examine the facts closely enough. For example, the title "Son of God" in Jewish usage may refer to the King or Messiah, but in Christian usage it was intended literally to refer to the second person of the Trinity. That the definitive pronouncement of this in a church general council didn't occur until the fourth century does not mean one is projecting back in history a meaning that wasn't already held from the beginning.

Chris Hilder, Queanbeyan, NSW.