{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.025981873111782478, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.671232876712328, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A Reply To Francis Watson

I am grateful to the editor for the opportunity to clarify one or ! two points in response to Dr Watson’s comments on my paper. I shall resist the temptation to discuss every point of contention, and restrict myself to essentials. First, the framework which he attributes to my paper: that the ’non-existence of the New Testament is established’, that I appeal to the ’twofold authority of a scholarship that is not only scholarly but also contemporaneous’; that I tell the ’story of the triumphs of modern scholarship’. There is no such rhetoric either explicit or implicit in my paper. Rather, in my opening paragraphs I rejected the possibility that my description of current work could be any more than the offering of a few interpretations among many, interpretations which I considered interesting principally because their implications for ethical theory have been explored either scarcely or not at all. Second, the assumption. Watson assumes that I agree with every writer whose views I discuss. I do not believe that there is any reason in my text why he should have made this assumption. I have read it again with this possibility in mind and (with the exception of a little self-quotation) still find no reason for it. Third, Watson’s interpretation of my thesis. This interpretation is that ’The New Testament is useless because it does not exist’, that it is ’a fiction’, that I offer a ’multiple fiction that the New Testament is attended at every level by chaotic diversity, that it therefore does not exist, and that it cannot possibly be useful in ethical discussion’. Watson is assuming that the New Testament