以下英文原文来自此链接：http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/Christian_Credibility.htm 文本原始出处为Lawrence Kelemen的"Permission to Receive"附录。
<原文概要>
以下三个问题是就“新约”福音书里对耶稣生平记载的质疑：
(1) 福音书提到耶稣在复活后向其门徒们显现。 然而，我们不清楚的是这些“显现”的经历到底是发生在耶路撒冷还是加利利 (或在两个地点)。 根据我们的阅读，加利利的说法似乎排除了先前的耶路撒冷一说。耶稣究竟在哪里“显现”？如果他在耶路撒冷显现，那我们又该怎么理解加利利这一说法呢？
(2) 我们发现福音书提供的耶稣的家谱非常可疑。谁是耶稣父方的祖父？ (我们注意到马太福音说他的祖父是Jacob，但路加福音说他是Heli。) 我们同时注意到马太福音宣称耶稣与大卫王相隔仅二十八代，但路加福音的名单显示他们相隔四十三代。 这个矛盾该如何理解呢？
(3) 连接耶稣和大卫王的家族血脉似乎是通过耶稣的父亲。 但因为耶稣是“处女受孕”的产物，他怎么又能分享他父亲家族源于大卫王的世系？耶稣是怎么成为大卫王的子孙呢？
经过一番周折，最终梵蒂冈推荐的学者布朗博士在他的论文里基本回答了以上问题。
在布朗博士的论文里，他承认福音书关于“复活后显现”的记载互相矛盾，对于显现地点没有一致说法。布朗博士同时反对“耶稣多次向12门徒显现”（先在耶路撒冷，后在加利利）这一说法。教会发言人承认，地点和时间的差异有一部分是因为传道者力图展现福音书叙述连贯的外观。换句话说，“耶稣复活后显现”一说是早期传道士的发明创造，根本没有历史根据，福音书的作者们根本没有目击事件的发生。
因为早期基督徒相信耶稣是弥赛亚，而弥赛亚又必须是大卫王的子孙，他们为了将信仰历史化便不得不再次创造耶稣的家谱，宣称耶稣的父亲约瑟夫是大卫的子孙。布朗博士指出，在关于耶稣传道的记载中，我们看不到耶稣和他的家族有丝毫皇家血统的痕迹。福音书中记载的耶稣更像是一个来自不起眼的小村庄，没有显赫背景的平凡人。
布朗博士进一步指出，新约中很大一部份关于耶稣的记载有非历史性改编的嫌疑。马太福音关于耶稣出生的记载非常神奇，文中提到整个耶路撒冷因为弥赛亚在伯利恒降生而不安......有一颗星从耶路撒冷移向伯利恒，并最终停留在一栋房子的上空......整个伯利恒的男婴因此而遭屠杀......这些惊人的描述若是真实的历史事件，为什么没有在犹太历史中有任何记载？
布朗博士提到，早期基督徒可能从其它异教中引进了“童女生子”的概念，但他们并没有意图从字面上来理解一个神话概念。“童女生子”是一个非常普遍的神氐的宗教象征，在古罗马和古埃及的神话中都有记载。因为“童女生子”的概念在后来的基督教中广为传播，人们也就忘记了其象征性的来源。
<英文原文>
The Catholic Church's Response to Our Critique of Christian Credibility
Because Christianity offers the second-most credible claim of any world religion, we opted to provide its most traditional branch -- the Catholic Church -- with an opportunity to respond to some of our critical observations. In early December, 1995, we forwarded the following three questions to Pope John Paul II:
(1) The Gospels teach that Jesus appeared to the disciples after his resurrection. We are unclear, however, whether those appearances took place in Jerusalem or in the Galilee (or at both locales). According to our reading, the Galilean accounts seem to rule out prior Jerusalem appearances. Where did Jesus actually appear? If he appeared in Jerusalem, how should we read the Galilean accounts?
(2) We find the genealogy of Jesus provided by the Gospels confusing. Who was Jesus’ paternal grandfather? (We notice that Matthew says that his grandfather was Jacob, but Luke says it was Heli). Also, we notice that Matthew declares that Jesus was separated from King David by only twenty-eight generations, but Luke’s list shows a forty-three generation separation. What does this contradiction mean?
(3) The genealogical line linking Jesus and King David seems to pass through Jesus’ father. But since Jesus was the product of a virgin conception, then he does not share in his father’s Davidic ancestry. How is Jesus a descendent of David?
In a letter from the Vatican dated 19 December 1995, the Pope's Assessor, Monsignor L. Sandri, responded in the Pope's name. Monsignor Sandri declined to answer our questions, but informed us that the members of the French Dominican Fathers' Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem would probably provide satisfactory explanations.
Through facsimile communications, we forwarded our questions to the Ecole Biblique. In a facsimile transmission dated 11 January 1996, Marcel Sigrist, the institute's director, also declined to answer our questions, but suggested that answers could be found in the world of Raymond E. Brown, a well-known Catholic theologian currently on the staff of Saint Patrick Seminary in Menlo Park, California.
Again through facsimile communications, we forwarded our questions to Dr. Brown. In a letter dated 22 January 1996, Dr. Brown referred us to writings of his held by the library of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem.
(The correspondences from Pope John Paul II, Marcel Sigrist, and Raymond Brown are reprinted at this appendix's conclusion.)
On 2 February 1996 we visited the Ecole Biblique and examined Dr. Brown's writings. As Dr. Brown suggested, his writings did address our questions. Here we will summarize the answers we found there.
I. Post-Resurrectional Appearances: Galilee or Jerusalem?
In an essay carrying the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur (official declarations by the Catholic Church that a book is "free of doctrinal or moral error"), Brown admits that the apparent contradiction in records of the post-resurrectional appearances is real. "It is quite obvious," Brown writes, "that the Gospels do not agree as to where and to whom Jesus appeared after his resurrection." "Just as the Jerusalem tradition leaves little or no room for subsequent Galilean appearances," explains Brown, "the Galilean narratives seem to rule out any prior appearances of Jesus to the Twelve in Jerusalem." Citing immense textual evidence, Brown then declares his disapproval of the simples solution to the contradiction: "We must reject the thesis that the Gospels can be harmonized through a rearrangement whereby Jesus appears several times to the Twelve, first in Jerusalem, then in Galilee." Rather, concludes the Church spokesman, "Variations in place and time may stem in part from the evangelists themselves who are trying to fit the account of an appearance into a consecutive narrative." Brown makes clear that the post-resurrection appearance accounts are creative, substantially non-historical attempts to reconstruct events never witnessed by their respective authors.
II. Genealogical Contradictions
In the same essay, Brown observes that "the lists of Jesus' ancestors that they [the Gospels] give are very different, and neither one is plausible." Brown takes the surprising position that "because the early Christians confessed Jesus as Messiah, for which 'Son of David' was an alternative title, they historicized their faith by creating for him Davidic genealogies and by claiming that Joseph was a Davidide." In another essay, also carrying the Church's Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur, Brown expands upon this proposition:
Increasingly, the purported descent from David is explained as a theologoumenon, i.e., as the historicizing of what was originally a theological statement. If I many give a simplified explanation, the process of historicizing Davidic sonship is though to have gone somewhat in the following way: the Christian community believed that Jesus had fulfilled Israel's hopes; prominent among those hopes was the expectation of a Messiah, and so the traditional title "Messiah" was given to Jesus; but in Jewish thought the Messiah was pictures as having Davidic descent; consequently Jesus was described as "son of David"; and eventually a Davidic genealogy was fashioned for him.
Brown explains that Matthew probably created fictional genealogical links back to Abraham and David also "to appeal to the mixed constituency of his [Matthew's] community of Jewish and Gentile Christians." As evidence that Jesus was really not a descendent of David at all, Brown points out that:
There is not the slightest indication in the accounts of the ministry of Jesus that his family was of ancestral nobility or royalty. If Jesus were a dauphin, there would have been none of the wonderment about his pretensions. He appears in the Gospels as a man of unimpressive background from an unimportant village.
Brown goes even further, calling into question the reliability of large sections of the New Testament. He encourages his readers to face the possibility that portions of Matthew and Luke "may represent non-historical dramatizations:"
Indeed, close analysis of the infancy narratives makes it unlikely that either account is completely historical. Matthew's account contains a number of extraordinary or miraculous public events that, were they factual, should have left some traces in Jewish records or elsewhere in the New Testament (the king and all Jerusalem upset over the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem; a star which moved from Jerusalem south to Bethlehem and came to rest over a house; the massacre of all the male children in Bethlehem). Luke's reference to a general census of the Empire under Augustus which affected Palestine before the death of Herod the Great is almost certainly wrong, as is his understanding of the Jewish customs of the presentation of the child and the purification of the mother in 2:22-24. Some of these events, which are quite implausible as history, have now been understood as rewritings of Old Testament scenes or themes.
Brown's most extreme statement in this regard, appearing in the same essay, suggests that the Pope himself might reject the historicity of the resurrection altogether:
It was this interaction [of the eschatological and the historical] that Pope Paul pointed to in the same address when he spoke of the resurrection as "the unique and sensational event on which the whole of human history turns." This is not the same, however, as saying that the resurrection itself was a historical event, even though editorial writers quoted the Pope's speech to that effect.
It is crucial to remember (a) that these words appear in an essay carrying the Church's approbation; (b) that they were written by a scholar whose works were endorsed by the Ecole Biblique; and (c) that Ecole Biblique is the institution that we were referred to by Vatican authorities.
III. The Virginal Conception
Brown cautions that "we should not underestimate the adverse pedagogical impact on the understanding of divine sonship if the virginal conception is denied." On the other hand, admits Brown, "The virginal conception under its creedal title of 'virgin birth' is not primarily a biological statement." He stresses that Christian writings about virginal conception intend to reveal spiritual insights rather that physical facts. Because record of the virginal conception appears only in tow Gospels, and there only in the infancy narratives (which Brown suspects are largely fictional), the Catholic theologian tactfully concludes that "biblical evidence leaves the question of the historicity of the virginal conception unresolved."
Brown mentions the possibility that "early Christians" might have imported a mythology about virginal conception from "pagan or [other] world religions," but never intended that that mythology be taken literally. "Virginal conception was a well-known religious symbol for divine origins," explains Brown, citing such stories in Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Greco-Roman and ancient Egyptian theologies. He proposes that early Christians "used an imagery of virginal conception whose symbolic origins were forgotten as it was disseminated among various Christian communities and recorded by evangelists."
Alternatively, Brown also considers the possibility that Christianity's founders intended to create the impression that an actual virginal conception took place. Early Christians needed just such a myth, Brown notes, since Mary was widely known to have delivered Jesus too early: "Unfortunately, the historical alternative to the virginal conception has not been a conception in wedlock; it has been illegitimacy." Brown writes that:
Some sophisticated Christians could live with the alternative of illegitimacy; they would see this as the ultimate stage in Jesus' emptying himself and taking on the form of a servant, and would insist, quite rightly, that an irregular begetting involves no sin by Jesus himself. But illegitimacy would destroy the images of sanctity and purity with which Matthew and Luke surround Jesus' origins and would negate the theology that Jesus came from the pious Anawim of Israel. For many less sophisticated believers, illegitimacy would be an offense that would challenge the plausibility of the Christian mystery.
In summary, Brown leans towards a less miraculous explanation of Jesus' early birth.
