Scholars like those in The Jesus Seminar have developed criteria for (tentatively) separating the wheat of Jesus' own words from the chaff of his editors.
How's that for a short course in biblical scholarship? (Scholars, please forgive my oversimplifications!)
Story over Abstractions
So, if it's all so complicated, why not just pitch it all in favor of Paine's reason and Deism which sees God as the Great Watchmaker who set the world spinning according to its own laws and hasn't been heard from since? Why not just reason out everything abstractly?
To my mind, the answer is because we are humans. And human beings need stories. Perhaps some sophisticates find abstract reason and an even more abstract concepts of God more inspiring and helpful. If so, good on them.
But I repeat: most of the rest of us need stories. In fact, many like Nesrine Malik hold that with everything falling apart in our world, we need even more stories - new ones to help us make sense of it all.
My reply however is that we already have the stories we need. And the ones found in the Bible are particularly valuable since they are shared across the western world and by Islam. Everyone knows about Adam and Eve, the crossing of the Red Sea, manna in the desert, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, about Christmas, Passover, and Easter. Those are the tales that can bring us together and shed a penetrating transcendent light on issues that plague our world just as they did those of Jews living under foreign imperialism - including Jesus and the early Christians under Rome.
When those issues are confronted in the face of the liberating God of the Exodus or of Jesus and his pronouncements about his father's (not Rome or America's) Kingdom, they have the power to move even formally uneducated people to revolutionary action.
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