So where are you going with this thread?
Where the evidence points to, where else would a scholar go? If I were to set a course to a predetermined conclusion it wouldn't be scholarship; it would be propaganda, no?
The evidence, as I see it, is conclusive that the bible, including the gospels, has been repeatedly edited and redacted.
So I frequently hear, but to be honest I have seen little "evidence" presented pertaining to the Gospels especially...merely repeated allusion to this evidence. Perhaps an obstacle on my part is that I am not a learned linguistic scholar, but I like to think I am "with it" enough to hum along while the choir sings rather than blindly accept on faith such lofty claims. Perhaps you may be so kind as to present some of these evidences?
This is an obstacle to acquiring faith and hope from these scriptures, but not an insurmountable one. Just because a text has been tampered with doesn't mean it should be entirely discredited.
The questions should be asked, however, why these changes have been made? and what conception of the those scriptures has resulted from those changes?
One can find hope in literary places far afield from sacred texts, the "Chicken Soup" series of books come to mind. Faith on the other hand seems to me to demand a necessity of sacredness, or at least something quite comparable and substitutional. A person may have a kind of faith that evolution works as is commonly described, trusting that those who tell them so know whereof they speak. The same may be said for those who have faith that gravity will continue to work as a balance against centrifugal and centripedal forces, strong and weak nuclear forces and electricity; even though we still have no working model of what precisely gravity *is.*
So I can agree to a point about "a text has been tampered with doesn't mean it should be entirely discredited," at least in principle if not in practice. You are most correct, it should be asked; "why were these texts tampered with, and does it affect the meaning?"
Earlier you suggested that both Gandhi and Martin Luthur King Jr. were respectable and respected religious leaders, both of whom admired the words of Jesus, yet whom had also written inspired and moving works. I agree. Nevertheless it remains, neither Gandhi nor King, Jr. have religious denominations named for them, nor are their teachings the basis of any new branch of faith. There is no "Gandhianity" nor "Kingism." Neither one is put forward as a Messiah, let alone in Biblical terms "*the* Messiah."
Jesus, on the other hand, was and is.
The importance of this is not to be underestimated. The whole foundational principle of Christianity rests upon it...which is to say, without Jesus as *the* Messiah, Christianity as a whole crumbles to dust and ash.
Though I see the importance of researching scholarly analysis of texts to discover which words stylistically clash with the context of other words, it is also important to approach scripture with one's own living sense of spirituality, faith, to discover which words are in harmony with what one discovers in one's own spiritual life.
"Stylistically clash?" Doesn't that in itself leave a rather wide berth for interpretation? Hearsay is hardly evidence, opinion is not evidence at all. Let's see, I like this part, but I don't like that part, and this part is too controversial, and this one just doesn't make any sense after we remove these others...
Don't get me wrong here, I do understand there are some competing and conflicting manuscripts, and the tendency (I want to believe) is to side with the earlier script presuming age can be somewhat reliably determined.
In the end analysis though, since Jesus didn't write anything that remains, all we have is hearsay to begin with.
"(T)o discover which words are in harmony with what one discovers in one's own spiritual life" while simultaneously dissecting it *scientifically* seems to me to establish a dichotomy between truth and reality, in which case *evidence* is irrelevent and serves only to support the need for the scientific faction to exert authority over the religious faction. I suppose the question needs to be asked and the issue made plain: what is the relationship between truth and reality, and what role does evidence play? If truth and reality are to be distinct and separate issues, then it hardly seems fitting to use the reality nature of evidence against a fleeting phantom of philosophical truth. Therefore evidence can only realistically be applied if Jesus is indeed real; really lived and really died. What the evidence tells us about this is that we don't even *know* that much, there are no trustworthy secular or otherwise dissociated sources to confirm that Jesus even lived. Doubt is cast upon even the trifilling reference to Jesus in Josephus...while his mentioning of John the Baptist and Salome are not disputed by those same scholars.
The whole "greatest story ever told" *might* be a complete and total fabrication, according to the evidence (or great dearth thereof). And yet the reality of Christianity has been built upon that possible fiction over the course of 1700 plus years, which suggests circumstantially that there may be more to the pudding than simply what is in the list of ingredients.
As for Jesus singing a psalm to himself on the cross, it could be as simple as how any slave would have sang himself a spiritual while being whipped.
Then why *that* particular Psalm? Why not one more uplifting, more spiritually hopeful? Why not the 23rd Psalm...yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil, for thy rod and thy staff comfort me?
Yet a closer reading of the 22nd Psalm displays so much that transpired that there is no way an earthly human could preset or predict or orchestrate. Not even with a group of conspiratorial partners.
I don't see much point in looking for the fulfillment of prophecies. Prophecy and psalms are concerned with the here and now, the always moving present.
What I do see in both psalm 22 and in Jesus' life is that some people, perhaps all people, have a calling to fulfill. Often, it seems, the most meaningful callings involve the most suffering. I do believe that Jesus was called to live a divine life, and to teach the world about divinity and how humanity should live.
Fair enough, you are certainly welcome to interpret as you wish. Evidently prophecy has little remit to your outlook. Of course I cannot help but think of all the times in the Gospels Jesus is noted as referencing the Old Testament. From an early age (10 or so) "arguing" with the rabbis in the Temple to his ministry teachings referencing directly to passages in the Jewish Bible, so it is evident by what is written that Jesus was quite well versed...all the more compelling his choice of Psalm to *sing* as he was dying.
The alternate translation above does give a different slant to the singing of this psalm. Either way, though, the recital of this psalm on the cross need not mean that Jesus was exasperated with his fate, it could simply be that the psalm came to his mind and seemed appropriate to his situation at the moment as he bled from the nine inch nails in his wrists.
I never have believed Jesus was exasperated with his fate, and I am not so inclined even now. The *suffering* component still is lost on me, but sacrificial lamb in context makes far more sense to me. All the more intriguing to me if there is any sense of reality as truth at all contained in the Passion story collectively told in the Gospels.
