Born to mystery

Donald M Macdonald claims that the scholarship on which I rely is outdated (Letters, 14 December). Then perhaps he can explain how and when the conclusion that the Gospel s birth narratives are invented was replaced by the view that they are true? It seems unlikely that scepticism would be replaced by acceptance. It seems that it is Mr Macdonald who is out-of-date.

I did not claim that the early Church “fabricated a sto - ry”; I claimed it was Matthew and Luke who did that inde - pendently, which is why the accounts differ. The early Church merely accepted the accounts, as they seemed to place Jesus on a par with other saviour gods.

Mr Macdonald's letter is full of gratuitous speculation: that the two evangelists “obviously selected their material...”; that Luke “probably” obtained an account from Jesus' mo ther; that Matthew was a highly educated Jew (that is not known ). Such speculation devalues his argument. Certainly the absence of these narratives in the Gospels of Mark and John does not prove that they were ignorant of them. In the case of Mark, the Gospel on which both Matthew and Luke based their accounts, it does look as if he was ignorant of such stories. In the case of John, writing after both Matthew and Luke, whose Gospel she must have seen, it shows his disinterest, perhaps because he knew better, or didn't care. The fact is that the two accounts are incompatible; both cannot be true and almost certainly neither is true.

STEUART CAMPBELL Dovecot Loan, Edinburgh