Okay, I cannot resist
Here is a contemporary headline---like this week, of May 14, 2011
Is the Bible full of 'forgeries'?
From MSNBC:
A biblical scholar has raised a holy fuss by declaring that more than a third of the books of the New Testament were "forged" — that is, written by scribes other than the apostles to which they've been ascribed. By itself, the suggestion that nearly half of Paul's epistles....
For starters, God didn't write the Bible? Are we charging god with forgery? If he made the world, can't he do what he wants? If he inspired people, aren't they just being tacky by claiming they wrote something themselves anyway?
Alright, enough with the jokes. And so much for that childhood.
Forged huh? You know, what I grew up believing, that god wrote the bible, might be closer to reality. Can someone fake being awake? If the author of those books did a better job than the person they were supposed to be by, what is the harm here, harm in the sense of diminishing a spiritual tradition. At least in the medieval European period, art was not signed, people did not imagine that an individual could claim credit for what was an act of worship. This whole idea of individualism might be a lack of historical imagination. So could we be misunderstanding historical reality by even raising the question whether some books of the bible were forged?
Am I going to have to read this article, to find out if any of these questions are mentioned? Nah.