A friend believes in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God, and that he is saved thereby. I asked him on what basis he holds these beliefs, and he gave me the following explanation. Thoughts?
His comment:
I’m going to do my best to tell the story as I understand it. Sometime in the era of Sumeria, there was a belief in a Devine counsel that had a patron diety that oversaw each country of the Levant and Mesopotamia. Nations understood who their god was and believed that each God only ruled over their area.
Sometime between 3500-3100 BC the city of UR saw a massive flood that devastated the city. In this city was a man represented as Abraham in the Bible. After the flood destroyed the city he led his family northwest and settled them foothills and mountains of the land around Jerusalem where they accepted Yahweh, the God of that territory. This later became Judea.
Separately, sometime around 1,800 - 1,500 bc a group of people, likely the Hyksos dynasty, fled Southern Egypt to northern Egypt and settled in the foothills and mountains around Samaria, to become Israel.
For hundreds of years, the Israelites and Judeans slowly brought people from the larger urban areas of Canaan into their folds to worship Yahweh and likely his consort Ashera. As they grew stronger, the land of Canaan largely became worshippers of Yahweh. These two civilizations slowly grew in strength until Israel was conquered by Assyria and the remnants of that religion fled south to Judea and brought many of their stories with them.
Then the Babylonians conquered Judea and destroyed the main center of worship in Judea and took a lot of the Jews as captives back to Babylon.
During this exile, the first philosophers of the religion began developing and formulating the theology behind their religion and eventually took this back with them to Jerusalem where the temple was rebuilt. With the temple rebuilt, the priestly leaders began compiling and crafting their origin stories into one set of stories. During this process, the priestly leaders filled in gaps and embellished stories to have the land protected by a supreme God. This helped them standardize and document their beliefs, which helped them grow again, until the successors to Alexander the Great conquered Canaan. The Macabees came and over threw Antiochus and then led a second round of redacting and editing of the scriptures.
Then Jesus came to deliver people from the round and round meyham of worldly conquerors to provide them another way forward as God’s son.
Now, that is essentially the same story we have at a high level, that is supported by the facts as we have them, and it doesn’t change Jesus’ role in my salvation or the world’s salvation one iota.