I was privileged to be present at the last lecture he gave before his retirement as Principal of the St. Mary's College. I don't remember much of what Matthew Black said about the technical problems of Biblical exegesis in that final lecture, but I do remember this. He said that in all his years of studying the sayings and person of Jesus, he learned most about him from three elders in the little parish he served as a young minister. The butcher, the postman, and the mailman who sat on my Kirk Session. Matthew Black served his parish church in the early years of this century.
Times have change since then.
Nowadays people are unlikely to listen to arguments for the Christian faith. Fewer and fewer people these days know much about the God of the Bible, and what little they do know is often distorted and trivialized. It's not the God revealed in the Scriptures as you and I read them. There are only the gods of given cultures. There is no one true God, because there is no ultimate truth.