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Listen, I understand the instinct to be contrarian, I really do. But if you're going to try to understand Christian theology you shouldn't start from the weirdest fringe interpretations and non-standard translations, and then work backwards to conclude that actually this is a totally normal perspective and it's the early Christians who suppressed this clear truth. This is conspiracy-brain thinking.
Maybe you're just new to Christianity, but these objections have been dealt with over and over again. The fact that one of your big objections is inconsistency in the birth narratives shows that you haven't made the most basic effort to seek out the standard Christian answers to these questions. Though to me perhaps the bigger absurdity in your thinking is that you found that the genealogy of Adam adds up to 4000 years and decided this means you should throw out the entire Old Testament. This is deeply unserious thinking.
I don’t know man. People trot out Aquinas and Augustine like it’s some slam dunk (at least in the catholic circles I used to frequent a few years ago). Then you read the guys and they’re riddled with logical fallacies.
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Rude. I want my spiritual writing to have correspondence with observable reality, otherwise it's just LARP.
The logical OR, which is unconvincing. That's the answer to all of the gospel inconsistencies, IIRC.
I've seen sciences that were settled, that were in fact settled wrong. Sciences, with an s. The objections I have seen are unconvincing; maybe you didn't notice but a major way we learn about Marcion and Valentinus are through his detractors which « settled » them. These detractors often just come off as ignorant and illogical, just like an HBD denier arguing in favor of a popular dogma, contra superior evidence.
This is name calling. I think we have good evidence for a process of redaction in the gospels. I think it wasn't a conspiracy, but rather a competing religious group.
Overall, your comment is mostly sneering. Please try to explain where I am actually wrong, instead of just calling it a conspiracy to have doubts about a religious canon. Surely you don't believe every word of the Quran, every hadith, and so on are accurate, right? Why not? Is it because there's a math mistake in the Quran? Because there is some other empirical embarrassment in there? « That is deeply unserious thinking. »
I have read the Gospels multiple times, I know standard Christian theology though I never picked a church; the trinity, the fall, salvation, judgement, the resurrection, all of that. I am not expert but I am familiar, it's not like at all if I were a 14 year old that had never opened the Bible who decided to start spouting some heresy to own his parents. You are just sneering.
This assumes that 'observable reality' doesn't change over time. IMO the most reasonable interpretation of, e.g., much of what's in Genesis is that reality used to be one way, and now it's different. Sort of like how in The Silmarillion the earth used to be flat, but now is round (unless you're an elf). Spiritual reality, on the other hand, can independently remain constant.
I think material reality is downstream of, and manifested from, spiritual reality, and that the nature of that manifestation can and does change. Including retroactive evidence. Starlight from billions of years ago, for example.
This is the sort of thing which seems to be indicated by the Fall.
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