I find it difficult to see why Tom would go to all this trouble.
If the “non-rational” parts of the Gospels are untrue, what reason is there to believe the remaining parts bear any relationship to what actually happened?
I’ve read several bios of Tom, and there’s little doubt he was not either an atheist or a Christian in the traditional sense.
He was quite devout in the Church of Tom, where Tom decided what was true and what wasn’t. A kind of megalomania, IMO.
I'm SURE you're one of the exceptions./s
"In a sense, we each form our own canon of acceptable ideas; we each have our own "apocrypha" of marginal thoughts, and our own collection of ideas which we discard into the void, dismissing them from our canon of thought entirely." "One man saw another sitting at the table with a Bible, pen in hand. He was using the pen to make a series of horizontal lines in the Bible's text.
"Underlining your favorite verses?" the first man asked cheerfully.
"Nope," the man with the pen replied. "I'm crossing out the parts that don't apply to me!"
".....The basic claims of Christianity are still there, canon or no canon.
The anecdote above, indeed, reveals the pointlessness of arguing about the canon. The tendency towards syncretism, and the application of personally-preferred truths to the minimization of those found less comfortable, is inescapable, especially in our modern, post-modern environment. Whether God had a hand in the selection and forming of the canon, or whether it was just a random assortment thrown together by the winds of history, the result will be the same: There will always be those, believer and non-believer alike, who will take mental pen in hand and "cross out" the parts of the Bible (or any set of ideas, for that matter) that they find uncomfortable, or add on things that will personally give them a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. ...."