What is the religious defense of this Jesus Christ quote?

[Vicki Q]

And please educate me, is NTW the JW version?

NTW is NTWright; at the beginning of the post I acknowledged that I was stealing his argument.

Maybe we need to return to bibles only printed in Latin.

Latin? No- those were bad translations. Bibles in the original Ancient Hebrew/Greek, please.

I find it eye opening that the 'word of god' can't stand on it's own for the average educated reader. Could it be that is no longer impactful/applicable until someone ads their own slant? Why was it included (or not removed) if it was a local letter for local people that no longer exist?

As I'm sure you've worked out by now, I'm not a fundi, which means I get to use genre. Bear* with me.

We know that there was no historical Prodigal Son, yet Jesus used an 'untrue' story to illustrate the need for Israel to come to His party. He can steal an unhistorical story from Egypt knocking around the Middle East for a long time  (this) and give it a dramatic twist as a trailer to His resurrection (Lazarus and Dives).

Given God's demonstrable liking for this style of education, it follows that the bears* story can also be a parable illustrating that attacking God ends badly.

The downside to not being a fundi is that I have to manage complexity. Like we do with Maths, Languages, Physics...  

So, in what is a broken world with many things that don't work as they perhaps should, I'll have to continue to work with RATS



All the best.