Well, TOT, you seem to be arguing that the Christian myths should be accepted as valid representations of real events and that those of other cultures shouldn’t be. I could be wrong. Am I?
Validity is no the issue. The issues I was focusing on were style and intent. The Christian stories from the gospels to the letters that follow, whether true or false seem to have been written in such a way as to reflect that those who wrote them believed the events they wrote of actually happenned and were real as opposed to allegorical events.
Again, this has no bearing on the truthfulness of the accounts, but it does seem to indicate that the writers believed and were trying to communicate and relay accounts of what THEY either thought or wanted others to think were actual events.
From reading Homer, I do not find his intent (metaphorical vs. literal) to be as clear as the writers of the NT, though his accounts may in fact hold the same amount of truth as theirs.
The bible is indeed a compliation of various writers, and we don’t know what any of them *really* intended. So we have a mess that Christians pick and choose out of to create their own religion and god, with no way to determine which thought what was metaphor and what was literal. As it stands, with no actual evidence of the events in the bible, it could have been that people simply thought things were literal and they never were, just like those who never saw Zeus and Hermes descend to speak to Baucis and Philemon but were sure that they caused a flood to kill those who didn’t belive in them, or that Apollo drove a literal chariot with the sun in it, etc. Any compliation of Greek myths can be read quite similarly to the bible and has as much evidence to say that it was real, e.g. none.
I am curious to know more about why my interpretation of the resurrection as a metaphor would be so hard to extract from the NT.
For starters, those that wrote of Jesus like the writer of Luke said things like this:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.
The writers, like Luke above often were clear in expressing their intent of giving accounts of events they beleived happenned and were true, but as you indicated, with there being no actual evidence that's been uncovered that to suggest that the events described were real, the accounts could be erroneous.
As far as the resurrection being written and intended by the writers to be a metaphor, what evidence suggests such a conclusion?
