BIBLE QURAN AND SCIENCE - 22

In his book The Gospels of Childhood (1967) Les Evangiles de l'Enfance) , Cardinal Danilou invests Matthew's 'numerical schematisation' with a symbolic value of paramount importance since it is this that establishes Jesus's ancestry, which is asserted also by Luke. For him Luke and Matthew are 'historians' who have completed their 'historical investigations', and the , genealogy' has been 'taken down from the archives of Jesus family'. It must be added here that the archives have never been found. Cardinal Danilou condemns out of hand anyone who criticizes his point of view. "It is the Western mentality, ignorance of Judeo-Christianity and the absence of a Semitic outlook that have made so many experts in exegesis loose their way when interpreting the Gospels. They have projected their own categories onto them: (sic) Platonic, Cartesian, Hegelian and Heideggerian. It is easy to see why everything is mixed up in their minds." Plato, Descartes, Hegel and Heidegger obviously have nothing to do with the critical attitude one may have towards these whimsical genealogies. In his search for the meaning of Matthew's 3 x 14, the author expands on strange suppositions. They are worth quoting here: "What may be meant are the common ten weeks of the Jewish Apocalypse. The first three, corresponding to the time from Adam to Abraham, would have been subtracted; seven weeks of years would then remain, the first six would correspond to the six times seven representing the three groups of fourteen and leaving the seventh, started by Christ with whom the seventh age of the world begins." Explanations like this are beyond comment!

The commentators of the Ecumenical Translation-New Testament-also give us numerical variations of an apologetic nature which are equally unexpected: For Matthew's 3 x 14:

a) 14 could be the numerical total of the 3 consonants in the Hebrew name David (D= 4, V= 6), hence 4+6+4= 14.

b) 3 x 14 = 6 x 7 and "Jesus came at the end of the sixth week of Holy history beginning with Abraham."

For Luke, this translation gives 77 names from Adam to Jesus, allowing the number 7 to come up again, this time by dividing 77 by 7 (7x 11= 77). It is quite apparent that for Luke the number of variations where words are added or subtracted is such that a list of 77 names is completely artificial. It does however have the advantage of adapting itself to these numerical games.

The genealogies of Jesus as they appear in the Gospels may perhaps be the subject that has led Christian commentators to perform their most characteristic feats of dialectic acrobatics, on par indeed with Luke's and Matthew's imagination.

Contradictions and Improbabilities in the Descriptions.

Each of the four Gospels contains a large number of descriptions of events that may be unique to one single Gospel or common to several if not all of them. When they are unique to one Gospel, they sometimes raise serious problems. Thus, in the case of an event of considerable importance, it is surprising to find the event mentioned by only one evangelist; Jesus's Ascension into heaven on the day of Resurrection, for example. Elsewhere, numerous events are differently described-sometimes very differently indeedby two or more evangelists. Christians are very often astonished at the existence of such contradictions between the Gospels-if they ever discover them. This is because they have been repeatedly told in tones of the greatest assurance that the New

Testament authors were the eyewitnesses of the events they describe! Some of these disturbing improbabilities and contradictions have been shown in previous chapters. It is however the later events of Jesus's life in particular, along with the events following the Passion, that form the subject of varying or contradictory descriptions.