QUOTE : I tried to explain what I thought I was seeing: that the four gospels had, as it were, fallen off the front of the canon of the New Testament as far as many Christians were concerned. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were used to support points you might get out of Paul, but their actual message had not been glimpsed, let alone integrated into the larger biblical theology in which they claimed to belong. This, I remember saying, was heavily ironic in a tradition (to which he and I both belonged) that prided itself on being “biblical.” As far as I could see, that word was being used, in an entire Christian tradition, to mean “Pauline.” And even there I had questioned whether Paul was really being allowed to speak. That’s another story.