Oh Little Town of Bethlehem...

@kellyjay said
The only thing I'm trying to convey is that it wouldn't bother me if you were the
one everyone saw and heard, and I was a support that no one saw or heard,
because the work is more important than our being acknowledged or seen.

OK, it wouldn't bother you. I see.

@kellyjay said
Scripturally speaking God calls the church a living body, as a body some parts are
the ones everyone see and gives credit too, glory too, and so on. The thing is none
of those parts can do what they do if all the others parts are also not doing their
jobs or fulfilling their roles.

OK, noted. Thanks.

@fmf said
I don't think you are "hard" on me. Instead, I think you just make a bit of a fool of yourself most times when you engage with me.

Oh, geez, Daddy Cool laying down the hurt on me.

@fmf said
Decades and decades of 'Chinese whispers' passed on by all manner of people and groups, and sub-groups, all in many respects in competition with each other; dozens of other supposedly 'eyewitness accounts' rejected; nothing finalized until literally hundreds of years later, when corporate Christianity had finally finessed its fastidiously assembled text.

I have no doubt that ...[text shortened]... ppened. I suppose you find my deductions far-fetched. But I feel the same way about your deductions.

What goes against this is the loads of academic studies on oral traditions that have always brought about surprising results showing that oral traditions are sometimes stronger and sturdier than written ones.

India has really been a treasure trove for this kind of stuff -- they have shown that the Rg Veda is more consistent and without variation while a written text like the Mahabharata has been steadily added to, taken away from, and mutating into different versions, century after century, while some of the oral traditions have kept things the same.

There's actually lots of material covering how this can all be very hard to judge...

Of course, this is not 100% proof of you being wrong, but it is definite argumentation against the notion that oral transmission is flawed.

What also goes against you very, very much are the texts on early Christianity that show Priests in Paris and Bishops in Egypt in the early 2nd century quoting lines from Mark and other Gospels precisely the same. That was the norm.

But something tells me we aren't going to have some amazing dialog on textual criticism.

@philokalia said
What goes against this is the loads of academic studies on oral traditions that have always brought about surprising results showing that oral traditions are sometimes stronger and sturdier than written ones.

India has really been a treasure trove for this kind of stuff -- they have shown that the Rg Veda is more consistent and without variation while a w ...[text shortened]... e norm.

But something tells me we aren't going to have some amazing dialog on textual criticism.

I don't see how your faith in the oral tradition affects my explanation of how I see human nature as being responsible for the mythology surrounding Christ.