Estel:
Your new rendering of 'Tolkien is to God as Bilbo and Frodo are to St.s Paul and Moses' does work better. In the sense of authorship.
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The same is said by Bible scholars about the Bible: in God's 'reality', He is the real author of the complete book known as the Bible.
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That depends on which Bible scholars you choose to listen to. Other Bible scholars say that what are known as the Old and New Testaments are riddled with errors, that the Pentateuch is a collection of oral tradition stories whose errors actually often help prove that they are based in reality, compared to most of 'myth'.
I'll accept your historical evidence regarding the widespread acceptance of the Roman Catholic Scriptures (which are quite different from the Protestant). Nevertheless, considering all that was lost in the Germanic sackings and burnings and the Viking raids, it is a great leap to say that "Christians never quoted from the Apochrypha". More accurately,
as far as we can tell from the evidence that remains to us, Christians never quoted from the Apochrypha. But I believe, based on my own readings, that that is not even accurate. You don't account for the Persian and Indian churches, who did indeed consider the "non-canon" gospels and letters to be legitimate.
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Yes! Divine Inspiration is not natural, it is supernatural.
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This is assertion, and just a tad cocky. What, my friend, is your definition of 'supernatural'? How do you know for certain that any such distinction is valid in terms of an accurate understanding of reality? Yes, I know that there is a great tradition for the distinction between the two, but that only argues for the fact that there is a traditional way of thinking about all this; it does not argue that the tradition is in fact correct.
[ June 24, 2002: Message edited by: littlemanpoet ]