preferable to the written one. By the time Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, wrote at the end of the second century the oral tradition has gone for good. He has to put his trust in the canonical writing and does so in full confidence; but what he says about their authorship and emergence is, in part at least, manifest nonsense. In short, by the end of the second century, a well-informed ecclesiastic like Irenaeus, professionally engaged In putting down heresy and establishing the truth, knew no more about the Origins of the gospels than we do: rather less, in fact. This is a depressing qualification we must bear constantly in mind: the sheer ignorance of even those figures quite close in time to Jesus. The earliest Christian document is Paul's first Epistle to the Thessalonians, which can plausibly be dated to about AD 51. Paul was writing in the fifties and early sixties: his authentic epistles (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians. Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon) are in an evidential sense straightforward written documents; there is no oral tradition behind them and the editing process is minimal - indeed some of them may have been circulated or ‘published’ in edited form even during Paul's lifetime. Paul is the first witness to Jesus, the start of any historical inquiry. He is the writer who gets closest to the actual Messiah. But there is nevertheless an unbridgeable gap of several years between Jesus’ death (circa AD 30-33) and Paul's first contacts with the Christian circle, for though Paul was in Jerusalem at the time of Stephen's death in 36, he did not return, as a Christian, until two years later. This chronological gap was quite adequate to cloud everything connected with the historical Jesus, as men, dazzled by the fact of the Resurrection, thought back from this to the Jesus they had known and reconstructed him in their minds. Paul got there too late in the day; the well of truth had already been muddied. We probably know more about the Jesus of history than he did, despite the intervals of nearly 2,000 years. This is one chief reason why Paul, who was obsessed by truth, tells us so little about Jesus the man. He says only that he was a Jew, born under the law, of Davidic descent, was betrayed, crucified, buried and rose again. He rationalizes his silence and, as it were, defends his ignorance (or uncertainty about the true facts) by remarking (2 Cor. 5: 16): 'With us, therefore, worldly standards have ceased to count in our estimate of any man; even if once they counted in our understanding of Christ, they do so now no longer.. He cannot present himself as a disciple of the historical Jesus. On the contrary, he was commissioned apostle by the risen Lord. His Jesus is the son of God, pre-existent and supernatural, who accepted the form of a 'servant' so that he could identify himself as man and be available for his sacrificial _ fole. The only details of Jesus’ life which matter, for Paul's strictly theological purposes, are the proof of manhood and the crucifixion. He also has to show, and he does so in impressive detail, that Christ rose again and appeared to many people, including himself. Here Paul becomes a historian and an eyewitness: he is our prime documentary proof that the very earliest Christians believed Christ rose from the dead and walked the earth. Paul's authentic epistles, therefore, are thus strict primary sources. Of course they do not go very far. He probably had no Christian documents, though primitive Christian writings were circulating towards the end of his life. Where he does deal with events, however, we get the picture direct, as he saw it, heard it or believed it; there is no distorting editorial lens and no generational interval, erosive of truth, between oral and written composition. It is a different matter with the canonical gospels. Though presented as historical narratives, their origins are complex and their reliability variable. Their starting-point, in all probability, was Jesus’ efforts to train his followers as teachers by ordering them to learn by heart key passages in his sermons. This process, interrupted by his death, was resumed with intensity after his resurrection and now centered round the narrative of his passion, which was learnt in various polished forms and used not only as a continuous evangelical story but as the centerpiece of the earliest liturgical services. The second major element was what we call the Sermon on the Mount, or ‘great sermon’, which also seems to have achieved a definite form at a very early stage, and was probably memorized by disciples while Jesus was still engaged in his ministry. At some stage individual sayings of Jesus were written down, and later gathered 12