Thank you.
I do not believe that it is essential to the Christian faith to view the entire OT in a strictly historic sense, and in fact doing so can cause some problems.
No it's not essential. Without the Gospels and the NT, there is no Christianity. One could argue that whatever needed to be known of the Old Testament was quoted by the Apostles in the New Testament.
Lewis opined that as the Hebrews were God's chosen people, so their mythology was God's chosen mythology
Not everything Hebrews did was God's choice, or else He wouldn't have discarded the Old Covenant and given a New One. The other issues is what is meant by God's chosen? I was at a Passover Seder few years back, invited by a Jewish teacher friend of mine, and the rabbi who was there said "Jews are God's chosen people." To which a few younger individuals present approved loudly.
The rabbi looked at them and then said "the privilege of being chosen was to do work." In order words God wanted the Jews to proclaim the God of Abraham to the world (remember "Salvation is from the Jews"), and they took it as some private club membership privilege.
But there is a difference between this and the claim that "It was the Church guided by the Holy Spirit that destroyed what God wanted destroyed!"
In my faith, the Holy Spirit is the Lord, the Giver of Life, not the taker of life. God is the source of life and not the source of death. God is a Maker not a destroyer. He is a giver, not a taker. Love gives and doesn't ask for anything in return.
The latter is driven by a claim of infallibility, much like the rigid historic inerrancy that the Reformed tend to attribute to the OT
What about the infallibility of the NT?
Either way, it is nothing more than an excuse that makes God the author of sin
Mankind has justified a lot of sin in the name of God, and that is wrong. But they get the idea from the Old Testament.
For hundreds of years the Jews commited the Torah to memory.. It was considered an offense to God to write it down(gods words). Even now many Jews dont like to write Gods name.. Hebrew kids were expected to and committed to memorize some of it.. and were tested when they were 13 years of age.. Christians could have and did in some cases do the same.. Still do in China.. where there are millions of christians and the bible is more or less contraband..
What about it? Is it important that every "i" is dotted and every "t" crossed? The important thing is, as +John Chrysostom said:
But if there be anything touching times or places, which they have related differently, this nothing injures the truth of what they have said. And these things too, so far as God shall enable us, we will endeavor, as we proceed, to point out; requiring you, together with what we have mentioned, to observe, that in the chief heads, those which constitute our life and furnish out our doctrine, nowhere is any of them found to have disagreed, no not ever so little.
But what are these points? Such as follow: That God became man, that He wrought miracles, that He was crucified, that He was buried, that He rose again, that He ascended, that He will judge, that He hath given commandments tending to salvation, that He hath brought in a law not contrary to the Old Testament, that He is a Son, that He is only-begotten, that He is a true Son, that He is of the same substance with the Father, and as many things as are like these; for touching these we shall find that there is in them a full agreement.
The point is that all this actually happened, at a very specific time and place in actual history. You referenced the Creed about the Holy Spirit, the "Lord, the Giver of Life," and that same Creed attests to this specific historical reality with the words "under Pontius Pilate." It happened. "I believe..."
Now, if you really care about dotting every "i" and crossing every "t", +Augustine attempted to do just that.