It's very easy to say that "Unsupported objects tend to fall down" because, of course, it is so widely observed. It is an open and notorious fact that the Church has a long and often ugly history of acting to put a privileged few in a position of domination over other people, and that small religious groups (such as the Christians were before "the Church" is well-documented) frequently show such motivations to dominate even more strongly.
Black-and-white all-or-nothing thinking is, if you'll pardon me, quite stupid, and not the attitude that I expected to hear from you. Reality is that even extravagant mythologies start from
something: obviously the episode in the
Iliad where Ares God of War personally descends to the battlefield, then whines like a baby about the bloody nose he gets from Diomedes, is not something we are going to accept; but the 19th-century skeptics who decided, therefore, that there wasn't even such a city as Troy or any major war were just being silly. Now, sorting out what is the original material, from what is later accretion, can be approached as a difficult scholarly puzzle, which is how I deal with it; but for those who have not the patience or the aptitude for that, sifting out the genuine from the concocted on the basis of what does or doesn't make any sense in terms of one's experience in the world is really the only possible approach. (I can hear you saying, "No! Another approach is to accept the great Tradition!" but think:
why? Because you have gone into deep scholarly examination of the basis for thinking they have some claim to authority? Or are you accepting them because, subjectively, you trust that what they are saying makes sense? Surely you are not saying that we should throw a dart at a board marked with every old school of thought that is out there, and "accept" whichever one gets hit?)
You can, of course, point to the more extreme outliers of what people end up thinking on the subject, based on their own particular psychologies; but the big picture is that rational people in the world are gradually settling on a view of how it was, a view that is not going to look anything like "Every word in the NT is true" nor "It was all made up out of nothing".
Some theses have more basis than others. I like his approach, of saying that we should
start with what we are
certain is original, which is similar to Meier's multi-volume
A Marginal Jew series, which I also commend to you (note: Meier is a staunch Christian believer, but is discussing what should, to a
rational unbeliever, still look supported by the evidence). Breech and Meier have similar criteria for deciding what is "certain" (scare-quotes are obviously necessary around a word like "certain"!) to be original: we ask questions like "Is there another possible source?" and "Is there a motivation to make it up?" Breech does not "reject" the idea that Jesus said "Love thy neighbor as thyself" but doesn't consider that the proper starting point for understanding Jesus because it
could be just copied from conventional sentiments of the same kind expressed elsewhere; likewise with wonder stories, either of the miraculous healing type (including rising from the dead) or the multiplication of material (a standard part of magicians' repertoires). Similarly, things which
could have been invented to serve the purposes of the organization are not the proper starting point (you can say "Nuh-UHHH! They weren't made up!" all you want, but if you want to discuss with someone who doesn't share your presuppositions, the
possibility of an alternate origin makes this a bad place to start); Meier similarly talks about a "criterion of embarrassment", such as the account of John the Baptist expressing grave uncertainty whether Jesus was the Messiah (not likely to be made up, indeed rather embarrassing to have to admit).
Breech doesn't focus on the parables just because he "likes" them, but because, as literary pieces, they are startlingly original (not the idea of "parables" as such, but the particular style of
these parables, is something unlike anything else in the literature) and obviously the product of a powerful mind; and their enigmatic nature is precisely what makes them unlikely to be a propagandists' creation: they are challenging you to think, not ramming home some point. So: take this "certainly original" batch of texts as if this were all you had from Jesus, and see where that takes you.
And why do you think parroting something that has been passed down from days of woeful ignorance is preferable to thinking anew?
Here, I have to agree with you. It is an inevitable problem; Meier says something like "Catholics investigators always tend to discover that Jesus was a Catholic, while Protestants find a Protestant Jesus, and liberals find to no-one's surprise that Jesus was a liberal."
Um... well... all the texts do agree that Jesus was one of those kinds of beings with, you know, two legs and two arms and a head with a mouth in it, and so on. I don't think "anthropomorphism" is the proper term for talking about a human as if he were a human. Talking about a rock formation as a "face" that "expresses" some "deep sadness" or whatever...
that is anthropomorphism. "God" is not in the category of "human", so talking about "God" as if similar to a human in some way is something that needs justification; "Jesus" is in the category of "human", so talking about him as if he is something else besides is likewise something that needs justification.
) 30 minutes of hymns each Sunday. It was framed as "praising" the Lord. I personally think it goes back to the idea of an anthropomorphic "jealous" God that wants us to worship/praise him.