I do think this question about how human Jesus was should also be asked in regard to the Bible. I think we both agree that the Scriptures are God-breathed, but there may be a difference as to how we view the Bible as inspired and to what extent. (I’m a newcomer and thus unfamiliar with where you stand on most issues, although you’ve already made an impact on me with your definition of “post-evangelical.”)

While I believe that the Bible is a reliable testimony to the work of God in the lives of men, I don’t desire to ascribe to the Scriptures what it was never intended to be, i.e., a textbook of infallible science and antediluvian history. The more I’ve dug into what the Bible meant to its original hearers and/or readers, the more I’ve drifted away from mechanical inspiration and “total inerrancy.” I’ve also begun to see the Bible as “incarnational,” that is, Christ-like: fully divine yet fully human. (Yes, I’ve read Peter Enns’ work.)

While Christ possessed a fallible physical body (subject to the passage of time, hunger, pain, death, etc.) and limited intellect (there are a number of instances of this related in the Gospels that people have mentioned above), He also possessed a Spirit-filled will as a result of His divine nature and origin. I’m even inclined to recognize that Jesus (and Paul) as well possessed mistaken concepts of the cosmos and science, influenced heavily by his (their) Jewish heritage and Platonic philosophy. But that’s nothing to worry about. Indeed, it’s a natural expectation.

Like Christ, the Bible possesses purely human qualities (ancient scientific concepts and etiological history), yet the Spirit also speaks through the fallible vessel it is to impart divine theological truths, which are infallible. Cannot Truth (with a capital “T”) be imparted through fallible vessels? Was Paul or Peter equally inspired in everything they said and did? The book of Acts and Paul’s letters (e.g., 1 Corinthians’ discussion of marriage) would declare otherwise. So why should the Bible be any different?

We go through life every day, taking in information from non-divine sources that we deem reliable (or unreliable) to various degrees. We trust things in which, theologically speaking, we should have no business placing our trust, but we do; to do otherwise would be to cease living. (That is to say, we routinely trust and rely on demonstrably errant and fallible things and people.) As mature Christians, you and I have learned to adopt a continuously prayerful attitude, always listening to the whisper of the Spirit, and taking comfort that He is ultimately in charge. But is that whisper always the Spirit’s? Jeremiah 17:9 states, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” There is something to be recognized here: Sometimes, we misinterpret our own guidance for that of the Spirit’s. Therefore, are we not fallible vessels through whom the infallible Spirit speaks, both to others and ourselves, and which, at times, can be desperately wrong?

So, where does that leave me? With a fallible book imparting infallible theological truths. My faith is all the more deeper and richer for recognizing this, and my faith is also more flexible, able to bend like a reed amidst life’s intellectual challenges. If anything, I could say that I have more faith than most. I don’t trust in the Bible because the Bible tells me to. I trust the Bible as a reliable source of moral guidance (2 Tim 3:16-17) because I’ve had an encounter with the living Christ. His Spirit led me from the brink of eternal death into eternal life, and to dismiss the Bible as theologically unreliable would be to quench the message which the Spirit continues to speak thousands of years after they were first written. Just because the Bible contains, from a modern scientific and historical perspective, inaccuracies, it does not mean that truth cannot be imparted through it, and infallible truth at that! The Bible IS alive, even within my paradigm.

For instance, my daughter of 2 will sneak into the pantry, take a stack of graham crackers, hide behind the closet door and quietly eat them. All the marks of a sin! Theft, deceit, obstruction of justice, contempt for authority.

Not much different than Eve’s apple, if you ask me.

Peter got 3,000 converts at once; Jesus barely held on to 11. Peter was healing people with his shadow, and Paul was healing people with handkerchiefs. Paul preached the gospel to kings and the emperor, whereas Jesus never left the Middle East till He ascended.

As to whether that stuff happens nowadays, of course it does. I can’t help it if you haven’t heard the testimonies. I understand being skeptical of some of them, ’cause sometimes charismatics can be naive and gullible. But not all of them are, and not every miracle story is an urban legend.

But we can’t do what he could do, we can’t do anything close to what he did. No one has! I know Jesus said that we would do greater things that he, but this has never happened. I don’t like to call Jesus wrong, but it seems pretty obvious to me that his prophecy didn’t come true.