Revelation is graced insight into experience. The scholar is the ghost writer of faith, not its hero. The further example of the commission that on its own and with discussion found the policy modifiable, because they were unaware of the tradition and history surrounding the original ruling. The vitality of a community depends upon the continuing viability of its tradition. When we inquire about God we are also inquiring about other parts of our lives and experience, not just the historical tradition.
Human experience is both the starting point and the ending point of the circle of interpretation.
Because we bring a different set of questions the same data gives us different information. The need for positive cases of ethical evolution to see better how negative ones work or at least to give us some sort of comparison. The question is whether the pertinence of the Jesus story for our present agenda has to be filtered through some other language and its frame of reference. Prompting faith in God is the real agenda of biblical text, and it is probably wrong to assume that the meaning of any of them is directly political.