God willed His own son to suffer to make restitution for all mankind

Why should I believe that?

How could it not be possible when God willed His own son to suffer to make restitution for all mankind? Although painful and generally not desired by most, the person suffering is great in the eyes of God. Because of their great love for God He "allows " those closest to Him to suffer as He did. Thus we have saints and often times stigmatist. Look at the children of Fatima. Even at their tender ages Mary asked if they would be willing to suffer for "the world". They suffered greatly before they died. In the next world we will see not as man sees but as God sees. Until then we remain in darkness.

Spoken like a true liberal who pretends to be Catholic all the while rationalizing why they are pro choice .

Thank you, Valence. This really gets to the heart of the issue. And, I think it is one of the major reasons the modern world has moved past the Catholic worldview.

The book Lazarus recommended was Jesus and the Last Supper, and the review in America is of Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist. So they are two different books. But for another extremely critical review of the latter book, see the First Things review titled Confecting Evidence. The one book by Pitre I have read (which was discussed here about eight months ago was The Case for Jesus, and based on that book and the reviews I have found of his other books, I do not regard him as a biblical scholar whose works are with reading.

This review, again from a Catholic, is a bit worse:

It is a strange thing to see because he is insistent on profound literalness in some of his readings when it suits his argument, while at the same time appealing to typological or allegorical readings when that is a more successful path for him. He ignores evidence from the New Testament that does not fit with his tightly drawn schema while importing evidence from Jewish texts that were composed or edited some five centuries after Jesus’ life to support his reconstruction (see pages 19-21 for his discussion of these texts). Indeed, the lasting impression one has of the book is not that God is doing, and has done, something new in Christ Jesus, but simply recapitulated all that was already there and waiting to be “unlocked” in the Old Testament.

http://americamagazine.org/content/good-word/brant-pitres-jesus-and-jewish-roots-eucharist-1

I consider consistency to be a very important, and difficult part of intellectual rigor. Confirmation bias is a powerful force, and it is considered a virtue among intellectuals to keep it at a minimum, and even point out weaknesses of the theory. When it comes to the Bible, pretty much any theory will have some evidence to support it, and some that doesn't.
I don't mean to be excessively critical here, but I have pretty high standards for what I read, and I usually gravitate towards philosophy and science these days. I'm thinking about trying a couple of Kant's works next. Thanks for the suggestions though :)

Edit to add: The article has more specific and direct objections below...quoting too much seemed inappropriate.

FWIW Pitre's "Jesus and the Last Supper" seems somewhat at odds with other Catholic accounts of the Eurcharist, according to this review

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2011/02/review-jesus-and-the-jewish-roots-of-the-eucharist/

Exactly what are you disputing in my comments to Phil that you call "outdated". I was also assuming the historicity of the gospels when I responded to him. If you are reacting to the apocalyptic prophet hypothesis, I'm not completely convinced, but I can certainly defend the idea using nothing but the Bible itself. Apocalyptic strands of Christianity are particularly popular here in the U.S., and they have plenty of scripture to back them up. Seventh day adventists seem to be a bit obsessed with the apocalypse, and Catholics certainly believe in the parousia, which is a toned down and somewhat ambiguous version of the same.

John famously termed his sense of godforsakenness the “dark night of the soul”, a phrase that is commonly applied to all such episodes within the Christian tradition.

I don't believe John of the Cross was referring to godforsakenness in Dark Night of the Soul.

The Stanzas:

1. On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings—oh, happy chance!—
I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest.

2. In darkness and secure, By the secret ladder, disguised—oh, happy chance!—
In darkness and in concealment, My house being now at rest.

3. In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.

4. This light guided me More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me— A place where none appeared....

He was free from earthly desire.

The "based on what" part of your comment is really a very big answer, and we find different approaches amongst the different writers. A lot of this seems to flow from newer and, some would say, better understanding of what the very early Christian community (of a few years after the death of Jesus) practiced and believed. Pitre's "Jesus and the Last Supper" gives a good example of different strands of evidence being woven together to arrive at these at once fresh and yet traditional approaches and views.

"By its very nature, historical interpretation can never take us beyond hypotheses. After all, none of us was there when it happened; only physical science can repeat events in the laboratory. It is becoming apparent that any interpretation that is detached from the life of the Church and from her historical experiences remains non-obligatory and cannot rise above the literary genre of a hypothesis, which has to reckon with the possibility of being rendered obsolete at any time, just like any other ephemeral saying."

I agree that any historical interpretation is a hypothesis...in fact any interpretation period (regardless of the subject) takes on the form of hypothesis or theory. Nothing can really be proven 100% outside of a formal system like math because new evidence could always invalidate the hypothesis. I don't see any reason to think the Church has some advantage here, however, it's hypothesis and theories are vulnerable in the same way. Dogma prevents the assimilation of new evidence and thus becomes quite problematic epistemologically. What if Muhammad was telling the truth about Jesus that he was an important prophet but not God himself? Does Christianity have any method to take any new revelation seriously? As far as I can tell, it is designed to reject any revelation outside of it's walls, which seems problematic, theologically speaking, but that's a different subject than history, or course. I say all that to note that there seems to be an assumption that theology is not presenting hypotheses in the same way history/science/philosophy is, and I don't see the slightest reason to accept that. Perhaps you do.

History must reflect history accurately. In the case of the NT this is critical. Here recent work on the role of eyewitnesses, the actual beliefs of the early Christian community and of course the big one, the Resurrection, all show how the historical method just probably got a lot of it wrong.

History attempts to reconstruct the past, but it never actually is the past, it's just our best inference based on the available information. This new work proposes to reconstruct the past better than historical method, but based on what? What gives these people confidence that the historical method got it wrong? It seems there is a good bit of confidence, but I'm not seeing exactly what warrants it yet, though it certainly could be warranted.

This happens because the hermeneutics of faith is missing: profane philosophical hermeneutics is affirmed instead, which deny the possibility of the entrance and presence of the divine in history. . . . When exegesis is not theological, Scripture cannot be the soul of theology, and vice versa; when theology is not essentially Scriptural interpretation within the Church, then this theology no longer has a foundation. Therefore, for the life and mission of the Church, for the future of faith, it is absolutely necessary to overcome this dualism between exegesis and theology. Biblical theology and systematic theology are two dimensions of one reality, which we call theology."

I think this gets at how much our background philosophy affects our interpretation of events and history. I know my philosophy does, and the historical method is based on a consensus among historians of various faiths/philosophies, so if one religion/philosophy is true, the method might run into problems because it includes less accurate views. That's a big "if", of course. My list of philosophical disagreements with Christianity is pretty large, and entirely separate, but related topic.