User talk:Java7837/Archive Jun 2007

"Jesus Christ" to "Jesus of Nazareth"

You seem to be changing a lot of instances of Jesus Christ to Jesus of Nazareth with the comment "removing pov". In many cases I agree that the encyclopedically neutral thing is to refer to Jesus with a term that does not imply a claim about whether he was Christ or not. However, there are several places where I think you're a bit too quick. In particular, in sentences that explicitly describe a religious dogma held by certain, it is not inherently POV to use the same phrasing as those who subscribe to the dogma would. For example, a reference to "the second coming of Jesus Christ" becomes nonsense when rewritten to "the second coming of Jesus of Nazareth". The idea of expecting a second coming at all depends on the idea of Jesus holding the office (so-to-say) of Christ, so it is not an accurate rendering of the dogma to describe it as a second coming of Jesus-whether-or-not-he-was-or-is-Christ. I'm not asking you to stop changing "Christ" to "of Nazareth" in sentences that make sense irrespective of the metaphysical status of Jesus, but I don't think this change is appropriate in sentences whose subject is not so much the historical Jesus as the religious concept of the resurrected-and-still-somehow-existing-Son-of-God. Especially in cases where the statement is clearly attributed as a description of a religious view rather than an encyclopedic truth in its own right. –Henning Makholm 22:35, 13 May 2007 (UTC)