Happy Epiphany to you, as well!

I remember reading some commentary many years ago to the effect that if Jesus were alive today, he would likely not even be a "Christian" as it exists today...

I appreciate your perspective, and your sharing of it.

Perhaps the "truth" — however we might define that — is simply a multiple times more complex than our human minds are capable of understanding, and the whole idea of "not beholding God" is less about respect than about the possibility that our heads would simply explode from trying to understand the sheer complexity of what we were looking at...

I'm no religious scholar, but I would suspect that it all began as an attempt by early humans to "explain the unexplainable."