Former Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong, a proponent of Christianity, on the literal interpretation of the Bible by Christian scholars.

‘Over the last two hundred years, the Bible has become the subject of new and critical scholarship ... . It has been Christian scholars whose study has led them to challenge creeds, relativize doctrines and dismiss dogmas. At first this critical thinking was confined to the Christian academy, but it finally broke into public awareness in 1834 with the publication of ...’ (Preface xi)

... clergy ... seem to join a conspiracy of silence to suppress this knowledge when they become pastors, fearful that if that average pew-sitter learned the content of the real debate, his or her faith would be destroyed---and with it, more importantly, his or her support for institutional Christianity.’
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‘No matter how deeply I loved the church, both its creeds and liturgies made assumptions I could no longer make.’ (Preface xii)
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‘The choices before the Christian world are clear to me. We can pretend that there is no problem with the continued use of the literalized, sated and inoperative language of our faith, changing nothing, and the result will be that Christianity will die. The other choice is that we can develop a whole new way of seeing Jesus and conceptualizing God that will lay the groundwork for a radical reformation of what we call Christianity.’ (Preface xiii)
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‘Traditional Christians dedicated to the dying patterns of the past will, I am sure, find this book to be difficult and, from their perspective, negative. New truth always offends the security systems that have operated in the world of yesterday.’ (Preface xiv)

From Spong’s book, ‘Jesus For the NonReligous.’

It is no surprise that many others have also questioned the literalness of the Bible.
The flawed literal interpretations have been openly discussed since ➙➙➙ the 1800s ↵↵↵ by Christian scholars!!!