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The ancient Christian charge of deicide is universally regarded by scholars as the foundation of anti-Semitism. And yet the Second Vatican Council, when issuing its historic repudiation, could not resist including the following seventeen words: “True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ.” But what source did the bishops use to justify such an unequivocal declaration about an event that took place in a remote corner of the Roman Empire nearly two thousand years earlier? The answer, of course, was that they relied on the accounts of Jesus’ death contained in the four Gospels of the New Testament—the very source of the vicious slander they were at long last disavowing. Needless to say, the Second Vatican Council did not suggest excising the inflammatory passages from the Christian canon. But Nostra Aetate nevertheless set in motion a scholarly reappraisal of the canonical Gospels that is reflected in the pages of The Order. Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy will no doubt take issue with my description of who the evangelists were and how their Gospels came to be written. Most biblical scholars would not. No original draft of any of the four canonical Gospels survives, only fragments of later copies. It is widely accepted by scholars that none of the Gospels, with the possible exception
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