RE: Reading the Bible is "Like Picking Out Diamonds from Dunghills"--Part 1
I cited every scholar either in the lead up to the quote or else in the parenthetical immediately after the quote. So, I'm not sure what you mean by "un-cited" assumptions. Also, if you've not read the prior chapters, then they may provide some context.
There is absolutely no evidence that the first churches had agreed upon scriptures. I'm not saying that they didn't, only that we have no reliable evidence for it. I talk about the early churches here:
https://steemit.com/christianity/@sean-king/early-christianities-weren-t-orthodox
Finally, you enourage everyone who "believes in the Bible's underlying truth" to study Mike Licona in search of validation of those beliefs. Respectfully, that's backwards. Evidence should come before belief. Pre-existing beliefs in search of evidence are dangerous and subject to all lines of cognitive biases (as are Licona's arguments).
In any event, I would very much enjoy debating Mike. Why don't you encourage him to join Steemit, post his own stuff, and respond to my arguments however he sees fit?
Admittedly, I haven't read what you wrote outside of this article. But the un-cited scholars I was referring to are up in your section about Paul's "Pastoral Letters". You start off that section quoting Bart Erhman, who actually debated Mike Licona on this very topic
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But Erhman has an anti-Bible agenda. He has the same confirmation bias you say Mike Licona has.
As for the first churches having agreed upon scriptures - logic says that they did based on evidence found in the New Testament and other secular history of how they were structured, culture, etc. Our Bible is different from what they had both content and translation-wise. But I was referring to the "underlying truth" that I believe is most definitely in the Bible. I'm not a Literalist, as you call them, but I have put four years now of study in to the Bible and my Christian faith and I do believe the Bible is a true story about the relationship between God and man.
Pre-existing beliefs are what gives rise to discovering evidence is many cases. There can be just as much danger in suppressing a pre-existing belief for the sake of needing to see evidence first. A lot of harm has been said to be avoided by listening to this pre-existing "intuition". I disagree that evidence should come before belief. It can come at any time to encourage, reinforce, or refute belief. It's up to each individual to be cognoscente of their own confirmation biases and to seriously consider each side before digging their heels in.
In any case, I want you to know I respectfully disagree with you and I would love to get Mike on Steemit to share his much more capable opinions on this subject.
Erhman doesn't have an "anti-Bible agenda". He's a life-long student of the Bible, and he had build his career around its study. He was originally a fundamentalist, Literalist Christian who started out attending a Bible College.
Read my dialogue with @stan in the comments to this post and you'll better understand why I think your confidence in the Bible is misplaced. When you can only arrive at your conclusions regarding the Bible's message by interpreting it in ways that you'd refuse to interpret any other collection of documents in any other context, you can know that your interpretation is almost certainly contrived.
Simply because someone starts out as a fundamentalist Christian doesn't mean they're not now out to prove that the Bible can't be trusted with an agenda. In retrospect I might change anti-Bible to anti-Legalist/Literalist agenda. But in his quest to prove that Legalism is wrong because the Bible has contradicitons (which many Christian theologians would agree with. Legalism/Literalism seems to be slowly on the decline thanks to our information age), Erhman has taken a stance in opposition to the Bible en masse as any sort of truth on his own fundamental level. Something happened in his life that planted the seeds of doubt in his Christian faith, and he surely found lots of people corroborating that doubt which led to his bias in his research of discrediting, in the video's case, the New Testament. He had a confirmation bias from the moment he found an argument in opposition to Legalism/Literalism. I just don't think any of those arguments stand up to scrutiny where he does and you do.
I didn't "refuse" to interpret any other literature in the same way as the Bible. I'm actually under no obligation to do so considering no other literature asks me to interpret it in the same way. Christianity is the only religion that says God bridged the gap to us by becoming our servant. No other religion that I've studied (limited, again I admit. But also ongoing) has that same message. Every other is a works-based approach of impressing a god or gods in some way to achieve enlightenment or get in to some version of heaven. The counter-culture of Christianity best explains a loving God and the human plight to me. It's not almost certainly contrived, it was the natural progression from simply reading, interpreting, and digesting in the only ways I knew how. I just happened to agree and believe in it. It's just begging the question to say anyone who interprets a religious text differently than, say, a novel or textbook has an interpretation that is almost certainly contrived.
Your "argument" in the second paragraph is entirely circular. Essentially you say that you're not under any obligation to interpret the Bible as you would any other text. Why? Because the Bible says so.
The question isn't whether Christianity's message is different or not (and it's not nearly as different as you suppose) but rather whether we can believe that message. Believing just because you like the story, or because the story is different, or because it bests soothes your existential angst doesn't make the story any more likely to be "true". It just makes the story convenient.