I thoroughly enjoyed this analysis, and the historical and hermeneutic scholarship you bring to it. But you may have overlooked what Charles Freeman suggests in his book “The Closing of the Western Mind:” that one motive for the rise of Christian literalism was that Constantine co-opted the Christian movement by making it the official state religion; but this necessitated resolving the violent ideological disputes between rival Christian factions (at the Council of Nicaea) by awarding tax breaks and privileged status only to the winning faction, whose ideology became “orthodoxy” enabling the brutal suppression of all rival interpretations of the story of Jesus.