Sir – The final two paragraphs of Dr Daniel Emlyn-Jones’ Christological letter (October 15) are spectacularly simplistic and unhistorical.
His cariacature of the Roman Empire as an “imperial culture of cruelty, sadism and power hunger” excludes the debt we in Europe owe to the Emperor Augustus and his pre-Christian successors in matters of law, trade. commerce, agriculture, citizenship, governance, education, engineering, architecture, art, poetry, in short the fouindations of a civic society and what Dr. Emlyn-Jones calls “Western Civilisation and its values”.
As for the influence of Jesus Christ, ‘JC’ in Dr Emlyn-Jones’ parlance, the European empires of the second Christian millennium could also be characterised as cruel, sadistic, and power hungry, with the Church of England, for example, a substantial supporter and beneficiary of the very unchristian slave trade, as was this city of Oxford, yet this would also be to oversimplify. It is of course a reductio ad absurdum to equate the ‘Divinity of Christ’ with the barbarisms committed in his name, but historical inaccuracy and reckless generalisation are neither persuasive nor helpful.
Bruce Ross-Smith, Headington
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