not of this world

we’ve been doing some initial dabbling into new testament textual/source criticism methods this week.
the thought came today that to the whole ‘people who love sausage and politics shouldn’t watch either being made’ should be added people who love Scripture, with of course the slight alteration that they shouldn’t watch the attempt to reconstruct how it was made.

i know it has to/will be done, (unlike the koran we don’t foreswear by fatwah critical textual scrutiny) but woe to those who have to be the ones to wade thoroughly through the maelstrom of hypotheses and charts and 6000 fragments theorizing. (okay, not woe woe, but woe-don’t-think-i-could-do-it-woe) the bare bones 2 source theory (Mark and a missing Q ’sayings’ text being the sources for Matthew and Luke) is helpful to account for textual variances (as is a consideration of human author/audience narrative intentions), and while the author we’ve been reading has analogized the process to setting a workable model to account for light behavior apart from actually understanding what the heck the nature of light consists in, seems to me that the best that can be said about the best of these theories is that it’s a simpler ptolemaic account for the synoptic problem appearances than the rest. but then we’ve just begun, and a little knowledge is dangerous etc.

when you have documents professed by faith to be written 100% by diverse human authors and 100% by divine inspiration, you’re in a strange realm where scrutiny behavior is reasonably proper but precise scientific exactitude like one wants with the results just isn’t. if only God had just dictated straight out like he did with mohammed (pbuh), then we could just call it a day (facing east of course) and behead anyone who insists on asking too many bothersome questions.