Robert wrote

Sacred texts were not the locus of revelation, rather the evolving expression of communal identify recounted in historic deeds (whether they actually occurred or not) inspired by both personal & communal experience of all that is holy.

Well put!

Texts, even and perhaps especially sacred texts, were but an invitation to evolve and explore, as the writer, the reader, and his listeners enacted and deepened their communal identity and sought to rise above the mundane.

Exactly. Interpretive texts are a sign of a living innovating tradition. As soon as your “Bible” is safely ensconced between leather covers, inviolable, then you have dogma that must be protected by authority.

You can see this also in the ancient Greek approach to their divine myths, history, and the emulation of Homeric texts.

There is an interesting book on this subject written by French historian/philospher Paul Veyne, entitled Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, translated and published in 1988.

Some people complain when a book is made into a movie, but changes aspects of the story. Makes for pedantic banter over drinks after the show. But I love it when the screenwriter, producers, and actors faithfully explore the depths of the story by making interesting additions and changes that further deepen my appreciation of the original story as well as alternative interpretations of other readers take.

In a real sense adapting a book into a film is an act of translation with some of the same problems as literary translations from one language to another. Just as their are concepts that are difficult to translate from one language to another, there are concepts difficult to translate from print to a visual medium. Some of the worst movies ever made are ones where the author of the book wrote the movie script and thus made the movie completely faithful to the book.