What standards (reason and experience??)do u use to determine the validity or lack thereof of their conclusions? The “fantastic myths and stories” you mention. How do u compare those beliefs to the revelation of God in Jesus written by those same authors?
While I do not take an “all or nothing” approach to scripture…as you seem to indicate I should by the way your question was asked…I find great spiritual truth in scripture.
To illustrate my point concerning “reason”…I once watched “Jason and the Argonauts” and the “Ten Commandments”, one right after the other on a Saturday afternoon and I was struck by the amazing similarities of the “mystical/magical” events each portrayed. Jason spoke directly with Hera…Moses spoke directly with YHVH. Jason’s crew was saved from being smashed by clolliding mountains as he sailed through a narrow channel by Posiden…The Israelites were saved by the parting of the Red Sea. The sowing of the Hydra’s teeth produced ‘death’ personified by long dead soldiers bones rising to kill all in their path…the “angel of death” killed each first born…whether innocent or not…if one did not have the “magic” blood on the door posts and lintels…the first born died…even the children.
I mark this as the beginning point of my “liberalness”. From that point on, I read every book on biblical criticism I could find…I found that much of things I was taught as to when and who wrote the Pentatuch to be false…Moses did not write the “Five Books of Moses”…they didn’t take their present form until after the Return from Exile in the 6th century BCE.
Much of Israel’s history is “pious myth” with a lot of verifiable history thrown in. I then read about “2nd and 3rd Isaiah” and the “prophetic” passages being written concerning Cyrus years after the fact…there was no “soothsaying” going on…no “events foretold” long before they occured to “proove” the divinity of scripture. I read the so called “messianic” prophesies in a whole new light…“prophesies” which the fledgling Christian movement appropriated for themselves to “proove” that Jesus of Nazareth was the long expected “messiah”. As I got into the New Testament I found that some of the writers that claimed to quote from the prophets…‘misquoted’ and were in error as to who’s writings they were quoting…it would seem that…in my mind anyway…if the NT scritpures were divinely inspiried by the Holy Spirit…He didn’t know His own bood too well…he gave the wrong author to the “prophesy” quoted by the gospel writer.
Only when I began to understand how the scriptues were written was I able to finally see the value and worth of them. They are not history books…they are religious writings, put down to seek to convey how God was experienced by these people.
In the NT the life of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels were not “biographies”…but “gospels”…Good News that God has removed all ritual impediment in Jesus of Nazareth and “true religion” was not based on rituals and rites…but in serving one another.
Friends approach God “experimentally”…God is not a character long silent and confined to only ancient times…but a Living Present Reality in our lives NOW. Each of us could put to pen a new ‘scripture’ of how God deals with us in the present…and write concerning how He has manifested in our lives…and the “miracles” we have experienced…and some decades or centuries after we are long dead…some one may pick up our “book” and say…"This is the word of God inspired by the Holy Spirit.’…as some of us could relay what we perceived was God’s “voice”…how many times have we heard someone say "God said to me…“Go and begin” a particualar ministry. Or “Go and take so and so some food and clothing”…did God really…factually…audibly say…“XYZ”? Did He vibrate the air around us to sound was piced up through our auditory system? Or was is a ‘sense’ of what we shoud do?
Oh, I know there are those who claim that God told them to join a certain religious group…or start a new one…but FOR ME…unless that “voice” they heard inspired them to minister to very human needs…it is of no consequence.
How each of us experiences God is a diverse as we are as individuals.
The writers of the NT “experienced” “Something” deep and profound in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. He spoke words that had never been spoken in the way they were spoken…he loved as no one had ever loved…he gave everything…he poured out his life…he “loved extravegantly” and completely…and in this “Solitary Life” those who met him and heard his words experienced God in their midst…and they wrote about that experience…they didnt’ write a “biography”…but “good news” that God had moved among us in a unique and profound way…
Those called “heretics” by those that eventually formed the religious institution which became the “Orthodox/Catholic” church also sought to express what they had experience and came to believe about this man…and the leaders of the “proto-orthodox/catholic” group gained prominence and insisted that their view was the “correct” view of how this man was to be understood…
I have given a very “simplistic” synopsis of the many books and classes I have read and taken over the decades…but essentially that is the conclusion they…and I…have drawn concerning the matter.
(cont"
) right up to Jesus’ healing miracles and the Resurrection.
He talks about the creation, the flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Jonah in the belly of the fish as all literal historical events. Who am I, o man, to argue with Him? 