The idea that the sacrifice of a living creature was required to appease God for one's sins has been around a lot longer than Christianity has.

Jesus had better figures of speech to put sin in context when he spoke of the speck in the eye versus a 4 x 2 in the eye, a gnat versus a camel.

Living under law is like going to jail, it is human slavery to "the elemental spirits" etc. The irony is the "new law" of Christianity became more enslaving than the "old law" of Judaism

There are other "rules of the road," or criteria that sholars try to follow in arriving at their conclusions. The process is not dissimilar to trying a case in a Law Court - judges are expect to know the rules of evidence that have to be adhered to, otherwise an appeal Court will find it is a mis-trial. This is called "proceedural fairness" and "natural justice." So the Seminar scholars spelled out some rules of historical evidence, and then applied them.

We are told that God wishes to remain hidden. But the creation of order out of chaos is not about hiding but about profound revelation. This greatest of all miracles is evident right at the beginning of all things. Only infinite intelligence can order or organize out of chaos. It is such a blatantly public display right at the start of the cosmos (which means order). Nothing of hiding here.

There are plainly different accounts of Jesus in the NT and different theologies of Jesus, especially in the Jewish church as distinct from the Gentile church. If you find this hard to accept, just go and get any good book on these two movements and see that despite the attempt of Paul and others, the two movements developed entirely different religions and went their own way in history. That’s why among all the Fathers of the Early Church, from Ignatius to Augustine, there is not one Jewish believer among them and in all the great Councils of the Early Church that drew up the catholic (small "c") creeds, there was not a person from the Jewish church represented. Why not?: because right from the beginning (as admitted by Dunn) the Jewish church did not subscribe to the tenets of the Creed. The brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church did not teach blood atonement, virgin birth, or the Godhood of his brother.

“That is what authentic unconditional points to. No prerequisite payment of any sort. No condition of any kind. Just forgive. Just love the enemy. Just give generously. Endlessly. Freely. No conditions set to be met first. No debts to be paid first. No apologies or repentance first. This is what the sayings of the historical Jesus point to.”

Hence the continued historical movement away from pagan mythology toward something more in tune with reality as we now know it

"One day I woke up and found that everything was different—nothing spectacular or having to do with time travel and such things. I simply woke up in the same year and day on which I went to bed, but many things were different.

To me, the soul of science is observation, and specifically the recognition of consistency of observations across time, and by any other careful observers. But observation is only the beginning.