In his book, "The Screwtape Letters," C.S. Lewis, a Cambridge professor and Christian apologist, writes a series of letters from a high-ranking devil named Screwtape to his younger nephew Wormwood, a tempter. This incredible book was written around either 1950 or 1960 (my current edition doesn't give the original printing date) and reveals some of the ways that the devil works in order to destroy society. I don't read much outside of the Bible, but this is one book that I highly recommend. Look at what the Screwtape says to Wormwood about the Historical Point of View. I believe it is quite instructive as "scholars" buy into their own theories of the "historical Jesus". As you read this treatise, please remember that Screwtape is a devil and when he refers to "our father" he is talking about Satan.

Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood, (specially by the learned man's own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question." To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or you behavior-this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to Our Father (Satan) and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are...little nourished by the past...

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Lewis appraised the New Testament documents as falling in the realm of authentic history-and so at this point he was anti-Bultmannian. He opined: "As a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are, they are not legends." In another context he reiterated: "I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths." Elsewhere Lewis stated that finding "a 'historical Jesus' totally different from the figure in the Synoptic tradition.I confess is a mode of 'research' I heartily distrust."

Predictability was not the trademark of C. S. Lewis. Nor was his an assembly-line theology. The liberal scholars of his day regarded him as a mousely Reepicheep in his attack upon their "assured results" of biblical criticism. Yet, because of his denial of biblical inerrancy, conservatives could not regard him as their knightly Dr. Ransom. When it came to New Testament historicity, Lewis siphoned off of his own expertise in the field of literary criticism to deny the Bultmannians free reign (or rein). Similarly his popularity as a BBC speaker and in spiraling book sales (especially children's fantasies!) made him unpopular with some scholarly colleagues in the Oxbridge world.

(Source unknown).