The least silly version of Christianity

[The Grand Nudger]

 If you, or any ancient reader, wants to claim there is potentially a deeper meaning.....demonstrate it. Otherwise it would be legit to interpret anything you want into a text.

Sometimes it's not too difficult.  The story in the garden is an incredibly obvious coming of age allegory.  Broadly speaking, all that follows in the ot is what it meant to be cast out of their fathers house and their deep longing to return.  A compelling story for transportees.

That didn't mean much to christians.  Christianity was a story by and for gentiles - much more concerned with the deep social inequality of their own time and relief from the pandemics which defined it.  Isaiah, probably the best example, could not be about some now long gone nation, about some other people, about their time and their interests.  It must be a literal prophecy even when the text of isaiah explicitly demonstrates that it is not.  So it became about a christ, for them - despite jesus-the-mans alleged admonishions in the nt for even thinking this was a thing.  

By the time that christian lit was taking something resembling it's final form this too had become less of an issue to christians.  They were no longer impoverished outsiders.  The pandemics had taken the old social order with them when they left.  Now they had expansive cultural and territorial claims after the collapse of the classical world - and so, christ becomes kingmaker.

In the most fundamental sense, religious literature always has at least two meanings. Stories about gods are a vehicle for what the authors (or creator-culture) would like to do or see in the real world. That is the essence of religious ideation - which is often communicated in a superstitious narrative but doesn't truly rely on it - as we can see with late pan hellenism, and now, cultural christianity.

(the same is true of the eight legged horse and setanta killing the hound, and those god damned apples, that Boru mentioned)

[The Grand Nudger]

-all of this swirling around a ubiquitous observation on the development of scriptural religions and marketplaces. The least silly version of any religion, the least silly version of any scriptural interpretation, is always the one that services the needs of the contemporary host culture, never what was important to the predecessor. That some characters or events persist between revisions is not narrative continuity - but an artifact of a continued and insurmountable cultural affinity.