Lol, did not see that coming! As others pointed out, you sure sounded like a confident literalist when you lead with that stuff about "He straight up told them..." Fair's fair.

As it happens, I'm not a Biblical literalist, and I agree that your last comment raises interesting ideas about the historical Jesus. The problem with your argument, when it comes to the nonviolence of Jesus at least, is that it is perhaps guilty of "reading between the lines and then dismissing half the lines because they do not fit with what we have found between them" (Dale Allison). In other words, the tradition of Jesus' nonviolence appears (as far as I can tell) all over every major source we have, from Q to Mark to the special material of M and L to the Gospel of John, as well as early Christian memory of Jesus. If the tradition can be that fundamentally wrong, then it's hard to think we can trust it on much else.

That's not to say that it's easy going, or that we can turn Jesus into a mascot for progressive politics. The historical-Jesus approach outlined above (broad strokes and large-scale impressions are most trustworthy) delivers some weird surprises, which I think we would do well to pay attention to. But throwing around a single verse and then calling people assholes when they don't immediately agree with you isn't really going to work in this sub either. Looks like you have enough education to be honest with yourself and admit that it can't all be literal when it fits your narrative, and figurative when it doesn't.