[QUOTE=Terrifel]
That may be an obstructively selective reading of the man’s overall career. By those standards, the coherent message of *Huckleberry Finn * is, “If you’re a guy trying to pass yourself off as a girl, catch falling objects with your skirt rather than with your knees.” Sure, it’s good advice; but it’s not the only thing the book has to say.
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And my point is, you said that the bible “presents a reasonably coherent picture” of Jesus, so I provide an episode that is entirely inconsistent with his ‘turn the other cheek’ presentation. Looking back, you did say “most”, but if you’re allowed to ignore the parts you don’t like, anyone and anything is reasonably consistent.
I’ll agree that it seems that most people nowadays have a similar opinion of WWJD, but this opinion is just one of may possible selective reads from the source material.
[QUOTE=Terrifel]
Presumably if one is a Christian, one already believes that Jesus is a better source of insight. The OP believes that it is possible to receive spiritual guidance from Jesus directly, but that it is also possible to fool oneself in this regard. I’m suggesting that in such situations, the problem is perhaps not much different than how we judge the character of other people-- even fictional ones. We can say that Captain Picard wouldn’t initiate a first contact by setting his phaser to kill-- if he did, that would mean that he was being mind-controlled or had been replaced by an evil doppleganger or whatever.
Even if Jesus is really a perfect source of insight, that still doesn’t grant his followers any guarantee of certainty, so long as they themselves can be decieved. The only way around that obstacle would be a state of perfect self-knowledge, but then there’d be no guarantee that you aren’t deceiving yourself about that either.
The only other option is to consult the accounts of Jesus in the Scriptures, since that’s the only source of information we have about him. This would be true even if Jesus were just as fictional as George Washington.
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Of course Christians have decided that their interpretaion of the texts involving the Jesus character; as you noted this can be somewhat safely presumed, what with them being Christians and all. Which does sort of deflate my question as it can be sidestepped with “well, Christians don’t think he’s fictionalized”.
And yes, the word is fictionalized, not fictional. George Washington was (presumably) not fictional, but several exaggerated and downright apocryphal stories have developed about him; I’ve even heard that one or two of them were circulating while he was still alive. And this was in a day of decent recordkeeping, and he was merely a president. The tales about Jesus were written many years after his death by people who never knew Jesus as a man, but rather percieved him as a godlike figure; one can safely assume that the writers would have played up his godliness and nobility to the hilt, and have included every myth and rumor that they’d ever heard about him, since they’d believe those myths and rumors to be true. Even if these scribes were perfectly honest and sincere in their work, I’d expect their writings to resemble the actual Jesus about as much as the tales about Santa Claus resemble the actual Saint Nicholas.
My question, if I had stated it better, should have been more along the lines of “Supposing you have a christain who recognizes that the bible was not typed in english personally by God’s hands, that recognizes the non-literality of the tales of the Bible and Jesus; how does that Christian account for the fact that the tales about him are probably about as factual as the tales of Hercules? Do they still maintain a belief in the words that were put into his mouth? Or do they not even ackowledge the question?”
