Thank you, Lothar, for bringing up such good questions. I feel very much for you in your nocturnal encounters with those kind of doubts and questions.
Sobernost has pretty much said it all, for me, but, in addition, I’d answer your question about Jesus by pointing first of all to Hosea. The writer of 2 Kings suggests that God actively wanted Jehu to bring destruction to the house of Ahab. The writer of Hosea suggests that God desired no such thing. Compare 2 Kings 10:29-31 with Hosea 1:4, "Then the LORD said to Hosea, “Call him Jezreel, because I will soon punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of Israel”.
The above example makes explicit what is obvious to everyone: the Bible has a conversation - an argument! - with itself. It’s Jewish, after all (2 Jews, 3 opinions - so the old Jewish joke goes). You wish it wasn’t all so messy and awkward? Me too. Human involvement tends to do that. What a messy, broken thing the human heart is, and yet this is the fragile organ through which God must try and speak.
The Hebrew Bible is a collection of traditions in which a great conversation, argument, wrestling takes place over what constitutes the most fundamental truth about God and what it means to follow God. The argument continued well into the second-temple/first century period. Marcus Borg argues that a pretty core fissure in rabbinic Judaism at the time of the Lord’s earthly ministry was about whether the Divine nature was most fully ‘imaged’ by holiness ( a certain kind of ‘holiness code’) or mercy. Luke explicitly has Jesus taking His stand on the Mercy-Compassion arc (Sobornost). “therefore BE merciful, as your Father in Heaven IS merciful” "Luke 6:36.
So it’s not so much a question about whether or not Jesus endorsed the ancient Hebrew legal and prophet traditions in their most literalistic entirety, but how He interpreted those traditions, and where He thought their centre of gravity lay. All the evidence points in one direction.
His explicit words - LOVE your enemies, the Law says, but I say to you -blessed are the merciful - place Him in the Mercy-Hosea tradition.
And His actions speak even louder. Jesus’ actions are everything. Where do we find Jesus? In a manger, at the home of people the law pronounces ‘unclean’, touching, healing, restoring people. His position on violence? -the incarnate God is the victim of religiously sanctioned violence. This. Speaks. Volumes.
Re how much did the Incarnate One ‘know’ about things-stuff in his humanity: We’ll all come to our own views on this. I’d just add that, for Catholic Orthodoxy at least (pace Hebert McCabe) it would be perfectly compatible to believe that Jesus is truly God and Man and one, and to guess that, in his humanity - and He really was human, not just playing at it - His understanding would have been kenotically limited by the culture, wisdom and science of that time. In His humanity, He may have believed that the earth was flat, that the sun orbits the world, and all sorts of other erroneous things. And He may not have. The point is, if we believe He really did empty Himself, and take on the weakness and limitations of becoming embodied in time and place, then teasing out the cultural wrapping from the applicable-to-all-times truth in the gospels is a valid and faithful exercise.
Pax, Jess
Thanks!