of Abraham," he wrote in Many Religions, One Covenant (1998), "guarantees salvation history's continuity from the patriarchs of Israel down to Christ and to the Church of Jews and Gentiles." The way in which the Bible is to be read by Christians is exemplified by a conversation that Jesus had on the way to Emmaus with two disciples (who did not realise that it was he speaking to them, as depicted in the 13th-century miniature, above). "Beginning at Moses and all the prophets," St Luke writes, "he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself." After they had recognised him later that day, one said: "Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?" To read the Bible with the academic eyes of historians or textual critics is to miss its formative dimension: God's intervention in history. "The opinion that faith as such knows absolutely nothing of historical facts and must leave all this to historians is gnosticism," wrote Joseph Ratzinger in 2003. By "gnosticism" he means a human system of enlightenment that rejects the incarnation of God, a distortion of Christianity denounced by the second-century thinker St Irenaeus. The way that Jesus shows his disciples of reading the scriptures, is, Scott Hahn suggests "normative". Joseph Ratzinger, now the Pope, does not mind using words such as hermeneutic, a term that passes the lips of not one in a thousand people unless they