جدید علم کلام کے عالمی اثرات — Page 120
۱۲۰ Through an account of Jesus's words and deeds, the Gospels were intended to make known to men the teachings He wished to leave them on completion of His earthly mission۔Unfortunately, the authors of the Gospels were not eyewitnesses of the data they recorded۔They were spokes- men who expressed data that were quite simply the infor- mation that had been preserved by the various Judeo-Chris- tian communities on Jesus's public life, passed down by oral traditions or writings which no longer exist today, and which constituted an intermediate stage between the oral tradition and the definitive texts۔This is the light in which the Judeo-Christian Scriptures should be viewed today, and-to be objective-one should abandon the classic concepts held by experts in exegesis۔The inevitable result of the multiplicity of sources is the existence of contradictions and oppositions: many ex- amples have been given of these۔The authors of the Gospels had (when talking of Jesus) the same tendency to magnify certain facts as the poets of French Medieval literature in their narrative poems۔The consequence of this was that events were presented from each individual narrator's point of view and the authenticity of the facts reported in many cases proved to be extremely dubious۔In view of this, the few statements contained in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures which may have some-thing to do with modern knowledge should always be examined with the circumspection that the questionable nature of their authenticity demands۔Contradictions, improbabilities and incompatibilities with modern scientific data may be easily explained in terms of what has just been said above۔Christians are nevertheless greatly surprised when they realize this, so great have been the continuous and far-reaching efforts made until now by many officia! commentators to camouflage, under cunning dialectical acrobatics orchestrated by apologetic lyricism, the very obvious results of modern studies۔A case in point are the genealogies of Jesus given in Matthew and Luke, which