The
redactor steps into the role of the author, adapting and reshaping the earliest sources to the point that their origin is forever obscured.
Neoanalysis is at the same time an acknowledgement of and a reaction against the earlier tradition of analytic scholarship that had divided the Iliad and Odyssey into many layers of composition, attributed these layers to successive poets, and regarded the final products as the works of compilers and
redactors.
Considering these facts, many of which are foreign to our modern ears, it seems to me to be very difficult to argue that we are here dealing with an author or
redactor beyond Judaism, someone who would not be interested in belonging to Judaism but would want to distance himself from Judaism.
Arguments from absence are always dubious, as what is left out is determined entirely by the
redactors.
The accounts may have a common origin in the lost history of Cleitarchus,
redactors later condensing the material somewhat differently.
But we'll have to take him at his word that these records belong to Officer Mark Rojas, because the
redactors went a little nuts with the magic marker.
Sister Rose concluded that it was no wonder that the early church fathers and other
redactors would propagandize the myth that the Jews killed Christ (for another interesting take on this, one contemporary film, The Color of the Cross, poses the idea that Christ was an African man who was hated by both Romans and Jews, and was thus removed from the scene by racism).
Apologetics are normally used to argue the truth of Christianity against its
redactors and skeptics.
The most likely explanation, it seems to me, is this: even though the stories took on the function of cultivating freedom from fear as they were circulated among Christian communities, the authors and
redactors of the acta did not have the ideal of apatheia in mind when they participated in the construction of these texts.
Granted,
redactors who initially assembled the various oral tales surrounding David, Saul, and Samuel may have had the political purpose deduced by Ackerman.
Religious motivation for enacting such legislation is described by the
redactors of H119, in a law of 1273:
The
redactors of the book of Joshua anticipated a time when testimony and memory would be all that stood between a people and the extinction of their history.