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"Christology?" I don't think Steven was asking for a discussion of "Christology." Is that what John meant when he said to "try the spirits"? (1 John 4:1-2) Whether they confess that Jesus has come in the flesh? Steven asked what you believe about Jesus, and on what you base that belief. It doesn't take volumes, or cleverness, or research to answer that. You've already told us you believe in neither the virgin birth nor the resurrection -- don't quibble terms and come back with a redefinition of the "idea" of the resurrection. You don't believe that we know Jesus' genealogy as a man, or that he had a honest claim to being the son of David, and you don't believe he spoke or lived without error, but you don't think that matters. You don't believe his life story was set down by eye witnesses, nor that he performed genuine miracles. I expect that you believe Jesus was the "son of god" in an existential sense, and that any of us might also be the "son of god" in the same sense, but not by virtue of eternal existence, divine conception, sinless life or literal resurrection and ascension. True or false? Your series of posts do "speak for themselves", I think. I'll be glad to be told I'm wrong about any of my perceptions of what you believe. Accepting the supernatural and believing the Bible in its entirety does not require believing "things that cannot possibly be true." You are stubborn about your skepticism, but the assertion is absurd, no matter how often you repeat it. If God is there, if the universe has a divine origin, then nothing in the Bible is impossible or beyond belief. If God is not there, then existence and life itself are truly beyond belief and freakish beyond conception. The vocabulary word for the day is "redactor" as in the statement "The editors [of the Anchor Bible] are among the best Jewish, Catholic and Protestant scriptural redactors in the world. I don't think any of them agreed to participate in the project with the intention of picking people's faith apart, and I don't have that intention either." Redactor is the right word.
re·dact 1. To draw up or frame (a proclamation, for example). 2. To make ready for publication; edit or revise. [Middle English redacten, from Latin redigere, red³ct-, to drive back : re-, red-, re- + agere, to drive; see ACT.] --re·dac?tor n. (The American Heritage Dictionary) I have a Bible that was delivered a long time ago in a finished form to the people of God. It needed to be translated for my everyday use, but it doesn't need drawing up, or framing, or editing or revising. Translating is very different from redacting, and you have used the right word to describe the approach of the Anchor Bible. The "scholars" involved have no particular concern about what effect they have on anyone's faith. They are perfectly willing to edit, reinterpret, and modify the Bible according to their own theories and imagination. With regard to your idea about little boats, if I had to cross the ocean in a small boat, I'd want good navigational aids, I suppose. Oh, you didn't mention that option. You thought it was a time issue, ancient or modern, but its not. I'd want aids that were prepared by someone who knew the ocean, winds and currents, who knew the destination, and had experience with boats like the one I was in, and experience on the seas. I'd want documents that conformed to the means of navigation available to me. I would in fact take the documents of a 17th century sea captain, or a 1st century fisherman, over those of a 20th century theorist who'd never been to sea or depended on a handline for fish, and over a manual that depended on technology and devices found on big ships that might not be available to me. Would you rather have recent theories than ancient truths? Especially when the recent theories conflict with the ancient evidence and known facts? Your prejudice against the ancients is showing again, no matter how ill founded that prejudice is.
You fall back on inflamatory prejudice against people who believe the Bible and choose to follow Jesus too often. Your contentious slander of people of believe that God has spoken is insulting. "These people" whom you say "must be opposed" are sick of the fruit of materialistic evolution and the violence and moral carnage it has fostered. The public schools are ill suited to teaching religion appropriately. I don't want them to teach the religion of some nominally Christian sect, or any other sect, including materialists. However, they will persist in teaching a religion of materialism and futile process, and evolutionary science is intrinsically a religious philosophy, a dogma, and a faith. But the spirit of the Sanhedrin and of Nero lives on. Blame the ones who believe in Jesus, attack them, imprison them, burn them, feed them to the beasts. Listen to yourself, Susan, that is the spirit you promote. My stomach literally churns to think of what the people who think as you do have done and rationalized doing to the people who believe the Bible over the centuries, and seemingly that spirit of hostility will never be satisfied. Down through history those Biblical literalists you disdain have been "firebrands," but not as you imply with your revisionist perspective. In the "Christian era" they burned in Jerusalem and Rome. They burned all over the empire, and continued to burn in the so-called "holy" empire. How do you respond to people who accept the scriptures and believe they can interpret the Bible for themselves? In the 12th century they burned the Waldensians in France. In the 12th and 13th centuries it was the Cathari or Albignesians in France that they burned. In the 14th century it was Wycliffe and the Lollards in England. They wanted scripture over clergy, so they burned. In 16th century England it was Tyndale, thinking people should have the Bible, the source of all truth, in their own language, and he burned, but only after he was strangled. Inquisition has not been the tool of those who believe the Bible, rather it has been directed against them. Things don't change much. Your terror of "creationism" is notewortny, not because it is informed or reasonable, but because it is irrational and antihistorical. Believing in design and purpose is the only trustworthy basis for the human rights you would surely espouse, the right to choose to believe and live as you desire. Freedom has never been preserved by philosophies that deny the existence of divine imperatives, and it never will be.
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