In his comments below, Democracy Lover brings up the whole issue of "myth" in reading the Bible. As he is not up on scripture scholarship, DL may not be aware that 65 years ago a German New Testament scholar named Rudolf Bultmann wrote an article for a German scholarly journal in which he argued that Biblical scholarship would not advance unless a vigorous program of demythologization was undertaken; Bultmann followed his own advice and the rest of his career was spent in a painstaking re-writing of scripture according to the rules he laid out in that 1941 piece. A practicer of what is called form criticism, Bultmann was confident he could separate the "ethical/religious" wheat from the "mythical" chaff through a meticulous culling of each and every scrap of original text; it involves rhetorical and grammatical analysis, comparing choices of words and phrases to figure out which may (or may not) be original and which may (or may not) not be so. This is predicated, of course, on the assumption that the larger chunks that may (or may not) go together constitute whatever was orginally intended by the author, and that the smaller pieces are add-ons. It also assumes that the divisions come up with in this way have any verifiable credibility. While there were many who supported Bultmann's program, the disagreements about what was or was not original text raged for a generation until someone had the brilliant idea that such a program was doomed to failure because what a modern mind may consider dross or irrelevant may have been central to an earlier time; all the presuppositions upon which Bultmann's program crumbled one by one, but the point he wrote about in his original article is still held by many.
My own feeling is this - what is myth? Whose definition of myth do we use? Franklin Fraser's? Joseph Campbell's? Any one of several offered by cultural anthropology? Part of the problem actually doing what Bultmann (and you) suggest is that there is no way to determine beforehand what is myth and what is not. Another difficulty is, to repeat what I said in an earlier post, it is based on the assumption that our own modern world-view is inherently superior to any ancient one. Your comments on advancing scholarship miss the point - Bible scholars are always using actual discoveries of how people lived to understand how people thought and therefore how and why they wrote the way they did. We cannot assume that where there are fundamental disagreements, for example (and one I hardly think matters) in the Biblical accounts of creation, there is a general consensus that the Bible is "wrong" and our modern view is "right". This is only true if you think the people who compiled those stories were writing about science. It is actually a story about God, who God is, and what God wants from this creation. If you ask a text questions it was never designed to address, you always come up empty.
TO take another example, of more than a little consequence, the resurrection stories have too often been lumped in with the "myth" category, under the assumption that they were generally held as credible by ancient peoples, but are incredible to a more contemporary view of the world. N. T. Wright wrote an eight-hundred page book called The Resurrection of the Son of God in which he shows that (a) the idea of resurrection was around in the ancient world; (b) was conceived of differently by different people; (c) even among those who professed to believe it, it was never supposed to occur as it did with Jesus; and (d) most educated ancients were as disdainful of the ideas as are educated moderns. In other words, it was considered mythical nonsense in the first century, except by those who were understood to be religious fanatics by the powers-that-be. To ignore this reality - the result of meticulous textual and archaeological research and analysis - in favor of a broad, and wrong generalization, that our modern worldview is inherently superior to the ancient (or any other) is a kind of cultural hubris I find distasteful. Does that lend credence to the accounts in the Gospels? Of course not, and neither Wright nor anyone else wourld argue that it does. It does, however, show that trying to come up with even a broad, generally accepted understanding of "myth" goes wildly awry more often than not because it is itself based on assumption of cultural superiority that are wrong.
Learning to read the Bible is an on-going process. This is why it is read and re-read and studied an d commented upon, and these studies and commentaries are read and re-read and attacked and replaced - each generation is trying to figure out how to place these very ancient texts in their own world, figure out how to derive meaning from them, figure out how to live with parts that seem incapable of providing any sustenance at all (my favorite in this last category is the last line from Psalm 137: Happy is he who smashes their child's head against the rocks; I often ask my wife to preach a sermon on that particular verse!).
I think you are correct about agreeing to disagree. I am glad this discussion took place, because (a) I have been forced to think through, in a public way, what I think about these things; (b) present them coherently; (c) do so in an environment of disagreement that never sunk to the level of name-calling, but took place where we respected one another (although you might think I'm kooky for believing what I do); (d)provided an opportunity for me to do what I wanted to do with this whole blog-thing in the first place, i.e., present the Christian faith in a way and forum that was free of the cant and nonsense of the Christian right.
