Can we have such confidence in the prophets? Were they able to deliver God's message to us correctly? Did they not make some irremediable error in transcription? This error: the laws, the doctrines concerning the messiah. They were unable to see beyond their own society and their own temporal concerns into the eternal God. No one can; the work of the prophecies is the great failure: it is a failure because it cannot be taken literally, but it is great because it is the clearest revelation of God's message that we have. It is a failure of rich rewards.

God is infallible; it is human beings who have erred.

This is not to invalidate the work of interpretation, the writings of the rabbis, or perhaps even the writings of the Church, though I think I would have to hold that if the Jews erred in taking the prophet's message too literally, which was still essentially God's message, then the Christians erred in taking too literally the message of a man who may or may not have been privy to any directly divine insights at all.

A distinction: God of course reveals Himself to all human beings who seek him earnestly. However, simply because He reveals Himself doesn't mean that all men attain to the same rung of revelation. There are those who see God from afar, as the Israelites in the desert, for whom God was fire and ice. There are those who see God in His revealed nature: Moses at the burning bush. And then there are those who have spoken to God directly and those who have seen him in his hidden-ness -- Moses ascended to this level at the very height of his vocation.

So of all great writings, certainly they are great because the author has discerned somewhat of the divine (even should he deny the divine altogether). However, different people at different times have discerned somewhat more or somewhat less. And what is true of individuals is certainly true of nations. Hence Israel is a nation of prophets, but the Canaanites are scarcely more than barbarians in comparison (but not necessarily in fact).

But even those who ascend to the highest level of prophecy are still subject to human fallibility.

So Jesus certainly must have attained somewhat to God. However, it is unquestionable that he did not attain to the rung of Moses. And furthermore, I cannot for myself take the Christian scriptures any more seriously than I might take the writings of any religion that did not produce prophets [though I am forced to take it more seriously than I might take Thucydides (though not Plato)] because they verily base their arguments on a supposed revelation that is indisputably recorded after the fact and may or may not be the speech of a man who himself was certainly not a prophet. This is not to say there is nothing of interest in them, or that there is nothing to learn from them -- for Jesus did, I think, have an important insight into the failures of the Jewish faith at the time of his preaching -- or perhaps a foresight into potential failures, as these practices he decries were in fact reforms and much needed at that. So we learn from him that one must not take the revelation of fallible men so seriously that a vision of justice obstructs actual justice. But contrarily, Jesus himself professed faith, and very likely for personal reasons, in the doctrine of a messiah, which is just as much of a mistake as is the law. Surely the prophets believed they saw in the mind of God an actual historical event embodied in a person when what they perceived was the redemption and love awaiting the pious. Or otherwise, they spoke rightly, and the messiah did come, but he was not who any of us might think -- the messiah was, in fact, King Cyrus of the Persians, who did deliver the Jews back into Israel and thus inaugurated the Second Temple Period. More likely it is some mixture of these two, for certain prophecies are unfulfilled in the second view, and so these visions are caught up in the first, and we might perhaps say that the prophets were thinking politically in terms of what ought to have been taken religiously -- that is, they were so spiritually fervent that it seemed to them that the return to Israel could in no way be separated from the personal redemption of all the Israelites who attended upon it.

And I must agree with Erasmus concerning the fate of the virtuous heathens.

However, this does not much clarify or defend why one would read poetry, philosophy, and history for any reason beyond personal edification, because of all things we cannot say that they are related to God. And if someone professes to be atheistic and writes atheistic philosophy, perhaps we are not so justified in saying there is something of God in his writings. But there still must be some reason to read them -- if they are beautiful, they refine our sensitivity to beauty; if they are witty, they refine our wit; if they are concise and perfect in expression, they certainly refine our expression -- tools that the author himself did not apply in the service of God, but which we might ourselves. And if they, using blunt hammers and pickaxes, tried to hack away at such a magisterial edifice, we should all the more be able to repair, shine, and polish the beauty of truth after sharpening our own blades on these learned monuments of everything that is in the world ugly and false.