First things first. I'll start with the end. The post was basically created after a pattern of Ben ignoring my participation in any of his threads. That's fine. My wife ignores me. But the reality is this a pattern which cuts through scholarship. The 'experts' inevitably ask questions only to confirm the answer they want. So at the forum Ben or Ken says 'X' Ken or Ben answer (or someone else with similar 'reasonable' views) they allow idiots to chime in to prove that only 'idiots' would object to their prejudices and so on.
At first I was annoyed by this pattern but in the end it stimulated a thought - these Americans have a worldview that it is possible for the truth to prevail in the world. So, as you cite, I said Mark, Matthew and Luke can be 'good forgeries.' Given the choice of Matthew and Luke's additions to Mark 'the best answer' is that Matthew and Luke 'knew things' that Mark didn't and so acted as 'reasonable editors' and expanded Mark's original narrative.
My question was - why is it more reasonable to assume that the synoptic forgeries were 'gooder' than other texts? More critically I followed up with the psychological inquiry what about people like Ben and Ken makes them think that 'what survives' is better, gooder than what perished. Like for instance there is something noble about the guy who sits at a bar downing scotch as in a Sinatra song lamenting the one that got away than the Ben and Ken-type husband who just married 'a girl' (metaphorically speaking not commenting on their actual marriages) because it's 'what everyone else does.'
My point was again, I get that if you want to 'make it in scholarship' you have to produce something. You have to write something, say something and that means accepting as true certain things about let's say 'the gospels,' 'the letters of Paul' etc. I get the need for productivity. I get the need to make a living. But why can't you become a professor as a criminal, as an outsider. Yeah I had to publish what they wanted me to publish just to get 'inside the system' and now that I made it, be ruthless in my prosecution of the system. Why do the Ben and Ken types inevitably have this annoying American quality where they buy into the system, that they believe the system is good, truthful even beautiful?
So for instance they 'went all the way in the study of early Christianity.' I was watching this motivational video this morning (rather than annoying my family with music like this
) and the guy cited this study where there were two groups of people - those who affirmed that life was great and those who woke up and said life is pointless and bad and the first group lived 7 years longer than the other. This was supposed to prove that if you developed a 'positive attitude' you'd live longer. But what if the positive group were just positive because they were healthier and thus had more zeal for the better life they already had?
My point is that if you similarly had two groups of people - the Ben and Kens of the world who somehow bought into the 'appropriateness' of the surviving early Christian literature and another group of people who thought it was bullshit and that it only survived because the powers of the world encouraged its development and favored these new fake gospels over the original stuff which in some form was more 'unworldly' the study of early Christianity is always going to filled with the Ben and Kens. How many insane intellectual guerillas are going to infiltrate the study of the Bible to propagate nihilism.
Moreover because they spent a lot of time 'buying into the system' - i.e. flattering people in power, 'experts' who they respected and loved (often times surely because it had advantage for their 'life goals') - they are never going to stray that far from productivity to see the possibility that life is corrupt and pointless. They aren't going to end up in a Motel 6 in some nowhere town fraternizing with crack addicts and whores and seeing the nature of existence beyond personal achievement and teleological purpose. There will always been this sense that 'everything has a purpose.' The preservation of the Bible is one such 'grand purpose' - a kind of Olympic torch that was passed on through the monasteries to us in order to resist the corrupt nature of the world which is understood to have never occurred to the Bible.
I am just saying that if you spend enough time in the Motel 6 you start seeing that everything gets corrupted. If you spend time on the career path you're biased toward purpose. But everyone ends up in corruption. So in my opinion it is more reasonable to suppose that everything succumbs to corruption including the Bible.