Madam, - Brian Arkins (December 19th) discounts St Matthew's account of the Nativity. However, cuneiform inscriptions on clay tablets discovered at Sippar near Baghdad show that Babylonian astronomers predicted a rare alignment of the sun, the earth, Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BC. This triple conjunction would have motivated the Magi to undertake their long journey and, taken with the presence of sheep in the fields, suggests that the most probable time for Christ's birth was the autumn of 7 BC.
Some scholars assert that the census mentioned in St Luke's Gospel was made some 14 years before the AD 6 census. All these issues are discussed in The Star of Bethlehemby David Hughes, former professor of astronomy at the University of Sheffield. - Yours, etc,
IAN ELLIOTT,
Pinecroft,
Kilternan,
Dublin 18.
Madam, - I wonder if Prof Brian Arkins is missing the point of the Nativity stories in the Gospels? The facts he states are not in dispute. But what may be in dispute is his interpretation of the Gospels as a literary genre.
I find Morna Hooker's book Beginnings: Keys that Open the Gospelsmore enlightening than Prof Arkins's array of petits faits vrais on the point of Matthew's and Luke's opening narratives. Of course they are fictions - what else do you expect religious poetry to be? But being fiction isn't the same thing as being fraudulent, false or meaningless - or, worse still, well-meaning. Nor need fictions be without allusion to "real" places and events, though that is not their "point".
The 18th-century champions of the European Enlightenment were reluctant to go beyond the "hard facts" of history - as, curiously enough, are contemporary fundamentalists. Prof Arkins is certainly doing his bit to try to drag little Ireland, kicking and screaming, into the 18th century. But who wants to live in the 18th century? - Yours, etc,
MARTIN HENRY,
Lecturer in Dogmatic Theology,
St Patrick's College,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.