How can the New Testament be seen as the word of God when it was written by man for man?

Home - Quora Link

Sayed Jawad has a great point when he distinguishes mystics from theologians, philosophers and linguists. You have to read the book from the perspective of mysticism and not from the perspective of wanting to find historical or literal truth in it. When it was written, nobody was even bothering to think about these things, they weren’t material to the goal they were trying to accomplish.

Once you unhook all the massive amount of scientific indoctrination, and try to see the New Testament for what it is, you’re left with a book that was doing the best it can to convey spiritual truth. They collected all kinds of writings into the Old Testament. The Song of “Solomon” was a love letter that had nothing to do with Solomon.

The people that curated these books were doing it for a different reason than you have been led to expect.

Christians need to start grappling with the realization that their scripture is a book of myth. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t hurt Christianity. It doesn’t make it invalid or stupid. It doesn’t make belief in Jesus dumb.

The people back then knew what myth was. They weren’t stupid. It’s a literary form that was quite useful for people looking for spiritual understandings. You see the same dramatic forms in stories everywhere, from the Bhagavad Gita to Star Wars.

Mythic stories differ from real stories in that only the parts that inspire are kept in the narrative. And that creative stretching or even breaking of the fabric of reality to serve the thematics is not just beneficial but absolutely necessary.

It didn’t matter to them what the historicity of David or Abraham was. They didn’t really even care all that much about Jesus’ real story. It was hundreds of years later, they couldn’t even have possibly known the full truth anyway, and even if they did, they would have embellished it anyway. That’s how myth works.

No, what mattered to them was the power of the story to intrigue, motivate, and inspire. Today we can do that without lying to people about the literal truth of those stories. Back then they couldn’t. They didn’t have philosophy. They didn’t have history. They didn’t have the edifice of academic doctrine that all of our modern science rests on.

All they had were storytellers. And primitive paper. And we’re still passing their stories around, thousands of years later. Think about that.