1) We are reading a secondhand account of what Christ said and do not know that the quotes are accurate. And I’m sure you’ve heard of quote mining.
That is a common criticism of secondhand creatures, yet we wouldn't necessarily understand any bit of information first hand even if given the opportunity to see the metaphoric Light that bears information directly anyway. Information relies on an agreement between the sender and the reciever to admit to its nature. Even now you expect people not to dissect you and to accept what you have to say as bits of information, although they are secondhand artifacts of your brain events that may have "errors" naturally enough. If we assume that there is such a thing as error then if there is any unfolding of events after the original word/form is spoken or given then there is the possiblity that it may be deformed and the information corrupted as it unfolds.
2) We are reading an english translation of an ancient language and there are undoubtedly meanings and nuances lost or mangled in translation.
Not to mention the fact that there may be information that cannot even be represented in our degenerate forms of language that would probably look as strange hieroglyphics to us, if we could even see it. The pattern of the ancient narratives have something to say about language/"tongues" and the like, note the original naming of things that separates, forms and informs by the word, then man recognizing things, then later an attempt to merge heaven and earth based on a tower brought about by civilization/language that is ironically separated by words/language itself as it becomes a tower of babel and so a metaphor of Babel. Those with the urge to merge who live in a metaphoric Ivory Tower seem to pick up on some of it, at least metaphorically. E.g. Tower of Babel by Pennock, in which it is argued that civilization itself is at stake! Those with the urge to merge never seem to get the irony as they seek to bring civilization/language/intelligence to their end based on their practical and often violent resistance to transcendence in favor of immanence. On the other hand, intelligence is not all of transcendence either...but never mind.
3) The custody and integrity of the written record is questionable. ... They’ve passed through more or less a lot of hands and could have been modified along the way.
For that matter, it is rather ironic for a secondhand creature that has passed through some of its existence as a bit of information in some sperm and the like to come to think in its current stage of developement that it has a handle on knowledge enough to say much of anything about what forms of knowledge are questionable. I suppose if we cannot take things in hand then it is time to go on a quest to get a handle on things, yet the quest cannot be based on a quest for knowledge that is itself questionable. We have to begin somewhere, don't you know. And despite our age of scientism we can still know that written records preserve and define knowledge in a way that is superior to all others. If anything, what is written is less questionable than forms of knowledge that are not.
4) The difference between the God the old testament and the God of the new testament is so striking that to me they can hardly be the same God. It’s almost like someone saw that a mean and vengeful God in the old testament was losing popularity and that a gentle and loving God needed to step in for the religion to continue. In other words the linkage looks contrived to me. An invention.
(The framework of that argument in Gnosticism*.)
It seems to me that different patterns through the ages follow the scripts of Scriptures rather than such scripts being written as an imitation of their age. It was Christ himself who emphasized a sort of New Age of love in which he would send the Comforter to nurse us back to health and so on when the popular answer seemed to be crucifixion. Even today, we may live in a culture in which the notion of being more feminine is good, so good, impossible for the pattern to be perverted in fact and so there is almost no such thing left as "harlotry" or the like. Yet there are plenty of cultures in which such notions are remarkably unpopular just as there were before Christianity took a feminine turn. Popularity is not the guiding force, or if it was then the gospel writers were wrong about what was popular in the cultures at the time anyway.
There is little evidence that I know of that anything was written and formed to fit so that it could become popular. In fact, there is little evidence that scribbling scribes write to become popular as instead they usually write because they are not and the geeks still tend to be the unpopular to this day, meek little fellows that they are. Maybe in the back of his mind Paul thought, "I'll write a little about love here or somethin' to make Christianity popular in a more feminine age." but it certainly didn't seem to make him popular.
5) If God wanted us to know these things why did He need human spokesmen and human writers to communicate and record it? God could have emblazoned the ten commandments on the face of the moon instead of on stone tablets that Moses could carry down off the mountain.
Hypothetically, what would your argument be to living words that rejected their capacity to bear wit/knowledge because they could also witness the information that they contained and bore witness to? I suppose my argument would be, why reject your opportunity or wish for your own death? Of course God could have emblazoned the ten commandments on the face of the moon if the earth revolved around us, yet it clearly does not. Instead of such writing there is plenty of evidence that there is a sense of good and evil written on the metaphoric hearts of billions of secondhand creatures that unfold biologically again and again. The problem seems to be that people dislike the sense that comes naturally to them because of disordered/perverted desires and so would rather believe nonsense.
Would it be better to have a message written on the moon? Perhaps, although most likely all that would happen with a "Made by Yahweh." written on the moon* is that some fellow named Rael would come along and say, "Yahweh was the Big Meanie God but there's really some Yawehians that he's taking the credit for. And....uh, the first rule of the Yawehians is that young women have sex with me because that's the rule of loooove."
Etc.
*"P.S. This testament is written by the same God as the Old Testament! It's just the different ages based on the patterns you know as Father, Son and Mother. It's not all about you."
*
"In the god of the [Old Testament] he saw a being whose character was stern justice, and therefore anger, contentiousness and unmercifulness. The law which rules nature and man appeared to him to accord with the characteristics of this god and the kind of law revealed by him, and therefore it seemed credible to him that this god is the creator and lord of the world (κοσμοκράτωρ). As the law which governs the world is inflexible and yet, on the other hand, full of contradictions, just and again brutal, and as the law of the Old Testament exhibits the same features, so the god of creation was to Marcion a being who united in himself the whole gradations of attributes from justice to malevolence, from obstinacy to inconsistency."[8] In Marcionite belief, Christ is not a Jewish Messiah, but a spiritual entity that was sent by the Monad to reveal the truth about existence, and thus allowing humanity to escape the earthly trap of the demiurge. Marcion called God, the Stranger God, or the Alien God, in some translations, as this deity had not had any previous interactions with the world, and was wholly unknown.Wikipedia on Marcionism
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