In pursuit of this particular discussion, I made the observation that standing behind much of the worry over "authority" is the question of "authenticity". Since the Protestant Reformation, many have declared theirs to be the "original faith" of the "Apostolic Church", or at least approaching it far more than other rival claims. This same desire to recover the "original meaning of the text" lies behind the historical critical method of Biblical exegesis. Stripping away the layers to get to the "real text" has absorbed Biblical scholars for generations.
This is a desire not limited to Biblical studies. The debate over "original intent" that seem to engage Constitutional scholars relies upon the unspoken assumption that there would be something more authoritative about finding that "original intent" rather than whatever passes for our current understanding.
Another variation on this theme was heard in the wake of the '06 mid-term elections. Right-wing blabbermouth Sean Hannity could drone endlessly that the American people rejected the Republicans that year because they weren't "real" conservatives. What was marvelous about this particular bit of nonsense was Glenn Greenwald. He did the entire country a service by taking this particular piece of anti-intellectual drivel apart (which isn't really that hard to do). Greenwald's point is so simple as to be easily overlooked. Hannity's argument ignores the fact that what "conservatism" is, is what "conservatism" does. We had conservative governance, in two if not all three branches of the Federal government, for six years at that point, and already the foundations were shaky. The American people judged, quite rightly, that conservative governance was responsible for much of that shakiness, and booted them out.
This same argument - what a group calls itself and what that name really signifies being two different things - was heard by Marxists in the wake of the collapse of the Eastern European Soviet satellite states, and the Soviet Union itself a couple years later. Alas and alack for all those western Marxists who shouted, "Leninism/Stalinism isn't Marxism!", there was a real, honest to goodness Russian Marx scholar, Vladimir Yakovlev, who published a book entitled The Fate of Marxism in Russia that went to great lengths to show that Marxism inexorably leads to tyranny. It isn't that Lenin and Stalin were bad people who misunderstood what they were doing. Despite Marx's desire for a truly moral society (read Cornel West's The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought for details), the practical effects of putting his theory in to practice is . . . totalitarianism, the terrorist state, and impoverishment. Yakovlev makes the remarkable statement that he argued for sloughing off much of Marxist nonsense with the consolidation of power by Leonid Breshnev in the late 1960's, in a long memo. He ended up being "exiled" to the Soviet embassy in Ottawa for decades, his writings banned.
All this is to say that the pursuit of the "really real", whether in Platonic terms, or historical terms based in some quest for authenticity, is itself a kind of contingent human desire that has no basis in reason or fact. It might be nice to understand the Gospel stories as the first hearers and readers understood them, but I have to wonder why one would want to do so. We aren't those original hearers and readers, and pretending we are is as phony as the results of such a search would most likely be.
