What questions is a non-professional critic entitled — indeed, bound — to put to the scholars concerning the current debate about the New Testament? What kind of comments is he entitled to offer? The studies in question are complex and specialized; they involve languages which he does not know and disciplines which he has not practised. The complexity is such that individual scholars will tell you that no one of them can master it; one has to concentrate, for example, on a single topic, such as textual study, or on only a part of the New Testament material. Communication between the scholars has become difficult, as it has in other learned disciplines, and perhaps no conspectus of what is being done in the field as a whole is possible. And yet the layman cannot leave it to the experts, since the debate concerns the documents which purport to record the events from which his faith derives, and the reactions of those who witnessed them. It is the recognition of this that leads some people to protest that the questions that scholars feel bound to ask should not be asked at all. It is felt that they undermine the faith of those who do not follow the debate but are aware of its repercussions when they reach a wider public, probably in some over-simplified and distorted form. I assume that the questions which scholars (or others) feel bound to ask ought not to be repressed: that intellectual honesty demands this, whether they are answered well or ill. I assume, equally, that the layman should not simply accept the answers that the experts offer him. He could, in fact, hardly do so, given the diversity of opinions which obtains among them. The notion of a consensus of the faithful is important, if Christians are to believe that they are, in some sense, one in Christ; but it cannot, in our present situation, be founded on a consensus of the scholars. So what is he to do if, on the one hand, he cannot ignore the debate while, on the other, it provides him with no firm and indisputable conclusions?