Lastly, you yourself may be the one falling victim to confusing myth and fact. Scholars with axes to grind (e.g., John Crossan) and semischolars with delusions of grandeur (e.g., Dan Brown) don't necessarily add to our store of truth.
I'm going to skip all my thoughts of response to what precedes this to cut to the chase. What I am hearing in here can be summarized in these terms; traditionalist views, modernist views, postmodernist views, post-postmodernist views. Your views reflect the traditionalist views. Those have their place and serve their function. I will not slight you that.
However the purpose they serve is not universal. Not even necessarily for all those who hold them over the course of their lives. At a certain point, the questions become such that the mode of thoughts becomes insufficient for them. They need to open to a new way of seeing the same things they were before, now within a different light. It is not a different object they are looking at, but a different way of seeing and understanding the same thing.
Those like Dom Crossan, you mentioned, and the others from the Jesus Seminar (one of which I've spent some time with in discussions) are reflective of the modernist, or rational approach. Traditional approaches are much more rooted in the mythological view (i.e, the myth of apostolic succession you hold to). The modernist approach is not "rejecting God", or having some "axe to grind", simply because they are rejecting for themselves a previous mode of thought that no longer serves them, or others as they may see it. (Dan Brown, of course is just doing his whole ExChristian thing on the public scene, which is part of his process to say "not this" to the mythic-literal interpretation of the world. I would not count him among modern scholars). The modernist approach is trying to salvage the baby of religion from the bathwater of mythic systems in a modern world, using the tools of modern scholarship available to them. It is another approach to religion, not a rejection of it, just as the traditionalist approach is.
Then there is the postmodernist approach which goes it one step further, taking the tools of postmodernity and looking at things like ethnology, anthropology, linguistics, myth studies, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, etc applied to understanding the religious experience and its place in human society and culture. Again, another approach, a new light of understanding to the same thing. Traditionalism is not THE right or only valid approach. Modernity isn't either. Postmodernism isn't either. The problem is they all think and believe each of the others are "wrong", and that they are "right".
I was chuckling to myself how that in this discussion, InChrist, sees me as a heretic. Doubtless, she sees you as one as well! I'm sure you see me as one too. And probably see her as one.
I on the other hand don't see you or her as this. That is a way of understanding Truth from ones vantage point as being the only vantage point through which to legitimately approach understanding. To me, how you believe is valid for you. It works, and is "true" for you. The same thing holds true in how I see InChrist. She is where she is. You are where you are. I was where I was. I am now where I am.
The point of view I most relate myself to would be the post-postmodernist view, or the Integral view. It does not throw away all of what traditionalist, modernist, or postmodernist views offer. Instead it takes the things of value (the power of myth in traditionalist views; the power of reason in modernist, the power of deconstruction in postmodernism), and attempts to integrate them into a holistic worldview that see the need, importance and necessity for all points of view to flourish and function towards the movement of the greater whole on its path towards Unity (not uniformity). In so doing, it negates the overall reality that a mythological, or rationalist worldview embeds someone within.
In each worldview, it can be best describe as where we "live and move and have our being". But just as you no longer live and move and have your being through the eyes of who you were as an early teen, it's the same thing as someone who is an adult. That worldview they use, is not THE worldview, but a tool, a structure of reality to support them on their growth.
I acknowledge your structure for you.
What you are saying here suggests that you think the gates of hell have indeed prevailed, making Christ a liar. In such a case, all you can do is wander about, staggering from one scholar to the other, cobbling together your spirituality by best guesses with no real basis for thinking you're getting it right (or wrong, for that matter) other than your own subjective feelings, which can be self-justifying or self-deluding.
You are assuming I look to external authorities in which I form and hold my belief structures to, and subsequently the substance of my religious experience, or spirituality. This is not how it functions for me.
I firstly am on a contemplative path. And in this, in what opens to me, I, and others as well who go there, realize the nature of the world we create in our minds, through our beliefs, through our culture, our language, etc, in which we subsequently "live and move and have our being", is not "The Truth". We realize we are, or at the least can be, freed from that illusion of our thoughts as "the truth" ("where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty). It is the experience of that freedom, in Spirit, that allows us to see the world more "lightly". We hold 'truth" with an open hand.
It is not that we have no anchor, no cornerstone. It's just that that is Truth that is itself not "a truth", not a "thing" or some propositional truth you "believe in". Beliefs become more supports, not the anchors. The Anchor, is Spirit. It is knowing Spirit in yourself. It is your Ground. Not your beliefs, your doctrines, or your views, or your systems, your traditions, your culture, your ego, your religion, etc.
It is from this understanding internally, and along with understanding the world through ways of thinking about it exposed through our models of understanding through the tools of our minds, that I am able to live a life of Peace within myself first, and a way of practically integrating that into my life in the world within which I live. But my views are not my Anchor. They are simply tools, simply temporary structures upon which I hang the ornaments of Spirit upon, as you hang them on your structures of traditionalism.
