Is the bible left or right?

[mordant]

I would actually posit that magic book isn't vague, regardless of peoples need to make it so in order to justify their own predispositions -by- magic book.

The kind of jesus you find is not at all open to whatever you want to see, rather, on an orderly progression as to how the authors chose to convey his character in relation to divinity.  In the transition between the synoptics, and from the synoptics to john, jesus becomes increasingly divine and, thus, increasingly authoritarian.  Hippy and buddy jesus movements rarely quote from john, and not for no reason.

I don't disagree really, but the vagueness I speak of is in the different versions of Jesus (or whatever) that is presented in the total canon. You are correct, the gospel of John is not a favorite urtext for Buddy Jesus, but it's part of the package deal, and you seldom see Christian sects rejecting parts of the Bible wholesale. Rather, they de-emphasize the inconvenient bits and perhaps interpret them liberally or metaphorically. There is a tiny crackpot sect that rejects the NT except for Paul and others who basically do the inverse, questioning the canonicity of Paul. But for the most part, Christians everywhere find the Bible as a whole to be "no problemo" for their particular dogma of choice.

It is this diversity that tells me that the Bible, as a whole, is self-inconsistent, and easy to interpret however you want. Maybe "vague" is the wrong word for that, but I don't think it's an entirely unfair characterization.

And then there are the controversies around, e.g., Calvinism vs arminianism. It is impossible for there to be free will or no free will at the same time, yet you can find proof-texts for both and argue violently about it for centuries. If that's not vague, what is?