watching people rediscover old knowledge that’s common among subject matter experts is pretty fun. All of this is standard first year seminary curricula in many

watching people rediscover old knowledge that’s common among subject matter experts is pretty fun. All of this is standard first year seminary curricula in many denominations. A standard joke is that “seminary is where eager young fundamentalists go to be turned into atheists”, because the gap of knowledge between the laity and the seminarians is so huge that most of what one group knows is anathema to the other. Tell your average, nominally protestant, church-going american that we’ve known for centuries now that there’s absolutely no way that moses himself if there ever was such a person literally wrote anything and they’ll look at you like you’ve got four heads. If you believe or think you have to believe that “the” bible is “literally” “true” then your hermeneutic sucks because you’re using a worldview that’s at best 200 years old to naively interpret a loose collection of texts by hundreds of authors that span thousands of years and a myriad of translations. I don’t care if you’re concerned about the truth of the text or whether there’s a god or what it/he/she/they are like: “gotcha!” readings are a disservice to the texts. The bible is a messy millennia long argument between humanity and itself trying to figure shit out, using every literary trick in the book. Dominic Crossan’s quote: “ My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.” It’s like being fully and ideologically committed to newtonian mechanics circa 1840 and then talking to a modern high energy physicist: you’re in for a big bucket of ice water down your spine! incidentally: the jesus narrative came before the mithras cult; the transmission went the other way!