By the time Rome weighed in...!? Even on your own case, accepting or rejecting is making a judgment on what gets accepted or rejected. That edits the totality of text. That editing like that occurred is the point being made to you.
But Rome had nothing to do with it -- no authoritarian heirarchy did. The canon was approved by people on the ground, often people who had known Jesus, who knew the Apostles, weighing in on what fit with what the eyewitnesses had handed down. The Gospel writers didn't get to spin anything; they could only write what was validated by the combined witness of those who had also been there. The standard by which anything was accepted or rejected was whether it held to what was known to be true. So what you're stretching the term "editing" to cover was edited in favor of truth, not of any agenda.
The cult pattern is similar. Veneration of the founder and the texts. Eyewitness accounts of the event of Hubbard's life. And, of course, the determination of the believers to believe.
No, it's opposite. In Scientology the texts were handed down from on high, they didn't arise from the community who had been there. Further, they have to ignore much of Hubbard's life, so they can avoid the fact that his real skill lay in making up stories and risking concluding that Scientology was just one more.
Wishful thinking, I assume based on perhaps some historical fact. For example, hundreds of people did not witness the resurrection. If those hundreds then told hundreds more, then you have mass belief rather than any real indication of what actually happened. As for "a culture where getting it 100% correct was a very high value", that sound wholly fanciful. Prophets and magicians were a dime as dozen. Judaism and Islam see Jesus differently than your 100% correct view.
No wishful thinking involved -- that was a value of the culture; you didn't change things, you passed it on accurately. As for witnesses to the resurrection, Paul would not have claimed hundreds if there hadn't been hundreds, or people would have called BS -- and there's no indication that anyone did, just as there's no indication that anyone claimed the tomb wasn't empty. If there had been such challenges, the early community would have recorded them, as that's the pattern: they reported challenges and addressed them.
Seems to me that the Biblical God clearly says one thing and does another. Thou shalt not kill, etc., etc. Hence, the endless word games to explain the contradictions and inconsistencies. The Biblical God says faith is a gift. If faith is a gift of God, it does not require evidence. That's the clear message from the St Thomas story. Let the word games continue.
"Thou shat not kill" is a superb example of God being consistent, not inconsistent. It only appears inconsistent due to the ignorance propagated by the choice of word in translation. The only "word games" are from people who assume they know what they're talking about without having bothered to actually learn anything -- the most prominent example being young-earth Creationists who never bothered to understand what the opening chapters of Genesis are in the first place and so just read them as though they were addressed to twentieth-century materialist-literalists, just in quaint language.
"If faith is a gift of God, it does not require evidence" is just a restatement of a false dichotomy. It's a statement made, in fact, on the same basis that young-earth Creationists make theirs: it assumes a materialist-literalist interpretation rather than bothering to take into consideration that the text wasn't written for materialists or literalists or, for that matter, modern linear thinkers. So you're engaging again in the fallacy of trying to interpret something without asking what it actually says, imposing outside definitions rather than doing the thinking to understand it.
If the Thomas story supported the "no evidence" position, Jesus wouldn't have offered any -- He would have just told Thomas to believe because it was a gift. Instead, He offered evidence. And what was the result of that evidence? It was faith. So plainly evidence and faith are not in conflict.
A grasp of the Bible would show that dichotomy to be empty in the first place: one of the unstated themes is that God works through means. He used a wind to part the Red/Reed Sea, a wooden boat to save Noah & Co., etc. This is why the Psalmist can say "You are a God who hides Yourself": God consistently uses intermediaries or means to accomplish things, a pattern only broken when Jesus is on the scene and does things directly -- yet even there God is hidden in/as a man. So the use of means -- in this case, evidence -- does not contradict that it is the action of God.
