Let's try explaining this with a story (vaguely true but with liberties to make a point):

My aunt has always been a cat person. One of her cats in particular was infamous for coughing up hairballs all over the house. In fact, over a lifetime, the total size of the hairballs exceeded the size of the cat itself!

Some people collected as much hair as they could, showing it off. Some people acted like they had never seen the cat, but if you looked at their clothes, you could easily find cat hair. As for me, I had no interest in cat hair. Whenever I wanted, I could just open the photo album and look at the pictures of the cat (I was in many of the photos). Sometimes the photo was blurry or overexposed, but you could still easily tell what it was a picture of (especially when personal memories were added). But of course I was looking forward more to actually visiting her so I could pet the cat again.

This ad-hoc parable covers: 1. superficial Christians, 2. secular society, 3. Christians and the Bible, and 4. what Christians are looking forward to.

One thing that is commonly misunderstood is that the Bible is somehow supposed to persuade people to become a Christian. It isn't. It's for those who already believe, and are determined to order their lives around their belief, their creed (I was aware of that Latin word already). The short, memorizable "creeds" are suitable for an illiterate audience to memorize and proclaim, but in this era of widespread literacy, why would any one of us settle for less?

Intellectually I can acknowledge it, but it just doesn't "make sense" to me that people wouldn't choose to look at pictures of Cat. (If you do want to try, I recommend spending a month or three browsing Matthew 5-7 - some of the most accessible and practical chapters, whether someone has no Christian background or a lifetime of it. Remember, this is meant to be applied; think about what that would look like.)

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As for other things you said ...

> James bible for a reason—not because it's a good translation

The KJV isn't actually that bad, even though it has its weaknesses (especially in the OT where scholarship has advanced since) and biases (but since the biases weren't aimed at a modern audience, they tend to miss) and outdated language (but this is almost always obvious). But as someone who regularly does read the Greek, it's actually better than many modern translations (the NIV in particular is infamous for making stuff up out of thin air, like one of those photo filters that covers your face with a dog. And no, it's usually not a manuscript difference. One passage that almost everyone gets wrong is Luke 22:31-32.) If you read the translators' preface they were explicitly aware of the effect they would have.

> As I'm sure you're very aware, first century christianity would be nearly unrecognizable to basically any denomination today and is likely very different even from the fourth century when the canons were gathered and the roman state adopted the religion forming the roman church,

I don't dispute the first half of this at all. As for the latter ... whenever people blame the Catholics for curating the Bible, I must ask - why did they leave so many verses in that explicitly criticized what they're doing? (there are about 4 that any child who is exposed to the Bible can point out immediately)

> understanding of biblical Greek you do, and presumably neither of us know Aramaic or Ge'ez... which is fine, because neither do most christians.)

It's not like I have any formal training - you learn what you practice. I just picked it up after a couple hundred times looking up words in a Strong's Concordance. Hebrew is admittedly harder (I refuse to call it "Aramaic" for the same reason I refuse to listen to people who say "nobody spoke English after ~1066, we're actually speaking a Norman variety of French"), but the oldest OT we have is actually the LXX (Septuagint, in Greek), and that's fairly accessible if you look for it (the main problem being random words that don't have Strong's numbers, and thus are much harder to search for).

> I'm just saying I don't see why gnosticism is any more "problematic" than any other interpretation.

Because I don't want a cat, I want this cat. And if the cat hair is a completely different color there's no point in even looking at it. I utterly reject the idea that any cat will do.