You ever read MacBeth? The Iliad? Even the ghastly parts are wonderful because they tell us the truth about ourselves. I mean, even the awful stories
are amazing, for the most part.
The problem is that I have a hard time distinguishing the reality from the myth in the Bible, especially in passages where it claims Jehovah spoke or gave a command. Sometimes, his commands were brutal. I can just give an example on Jehovah regulating slavery. This is problematic for you. You reject that part because it suits you, or rather interpret it to be that the Israelites made that part up, Jehovah didn't say that at all. Well then, which part do you hold true, and most importantly, why? The Illiad and other works of fiction are, on the other hand, just that. So again, this all boils down to your preference for rejecting some parts of the Bible, yet allowing others to be literal. How convinient.
Orthodox teaching is that Jesus is God and that, after his death, he was raised transformed, but still human. So, that makes him a Jew. Still.
I'm sorry, but I could care less about orthodox teaching. Just like I don't believe "might makes right", I don't believe "tradition makes true".
Reality? Yeah, we are primordial soup that got struck by lightening or whatever and, you know, boom! That's great and all, but I'm not sure that tells
us something more important about us than either of those creation myths. In the same way, The Iliad is more true than any history of whatever war
happened during the time.
It tells us our origins, which are far more profound than any myth you can imagine, by virtue of it being true. Truth cares not for our fancies.
Well, I think the JW / fundamentalist approach to scripture is a catastrophe for reasons that are probably the same ones you have. But, look, any reading of, say, the gospels simply must not allow itself to be amazed to find that the synoptics and John disagree on the day of the Last Supper. We Catholics put the NT together and we did it knowing very well that there are differences in the gospel acounts. I guess the fact that John and Peter (Mark) remember it differently must not be what we mean when we say both works are inspired.
Same with the OT. Jews have been reading it for a very long time now -- they know there are different traditions expressed in it. They have left them in because the importance of the Jewish scriptures is not diminished by that fact. Not to them, anyway. If you find that the presence of more than a single tradition in some of these stories makes you think less of those scriptures, well, you must not be viewing them in the same way Jews are. I guess you have that right, but that ain't the way the people who wrote / edited those works viewed them. So, yeah, you'd be doing it wrong.
Again, I could care less how they are "supposed to be viewed", whether by Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or whatever "authority". At the very heart of it all, something like Christ's resurrection must be a physical, or rather literal, event that happened, otherwise it's all untrue. The genealogy presented at the beginning of Matthew and Luke go all the way back to Adam. I know there are people that existed beyond any possible Adam. In other words, no matter how I feel about it, no matter how I connect with my pet belief and with others, it still doesn't make it true. Something to ponder upon.
