do this in ways which I could not. My own line was to
say that I was a professional literary critic and I thought I did know the difference between legend and historical writing:
that the Gospels were certainly not legends
(in one sense they're not good enough) : and that if they are not history then they are realistic prose fiction of a kind which actually never existed before the eighteenth century. Little episodes such as Jesus writing in the dust when they brought Him the woman taken in adultery [John 8:3-8] (which have no doctrinal significance at all) are the mark.C.S. Lewis, "Christian Apologetics" (1945) included in God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970) 101.
