I'm not sure why the bolded is problematic. Is there some contradiction between thinking that Jesus is literally the divine messiah and claiming the stories are metaphorical?
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It's probably worth making the general argument underlying your view more explicit (and I would guess starvingwriter's as well) here. See if this seems acceptable as a formulation of it.

1) The Bible is the divinely inspired word of God for our use.
2) In order for us to use the Bible, we have to be able to justifiably distinguish when God means for us to follow the literal meaning and when He means for us to follow the metaphorical meaning of a particular verse/passage/book.
3) To justifiably distinguish requires some kind of objective criterion.
4) Author's intention is the only acceptable objective criterion.
5) Thus, in order for us to use the Bible we must accept the author's intention as the meaning that we are supposed to follow.

Here I would say that (2), (3), and (4) are false and so the argument fails.

So then in what sense is it a problem for them?

-starvingwriter82, when you say that Jesus' genealogy is incorrect are you referring to the difference in book of Matthew and Luke?

starvingwriter, it's not so much that the genealogies may not be complete, but the Messiah was supposed to be from a specific line. If we find out that Jesus was from Persia say, then that would be problematic. He could still be the Messiah, but you could no longer rely on the scriptures that address who he is to support this claim.

I don't see this as a problem, except what you mean by "use" under (2). One could use the bible to read, interpret, and learn from at their leisure, in which case there is no problem.

If, on the other hand, you mean to derive truth from, then that's another thing.

I don't think one can claim the absolute truth, i.e., the literal divinity of Christ and the implications of this on a literal heaven and hell, if one is not willing to accept everything as true, because there is no reason why heaven and hell could also not be figurative. This really only applies to a very small percentage of people, I'm not trying to criticize people taking things as figurative as they believe to be correct, just those that want to insist on what is literal despite their own bias.

It depends on what the discrepancy is. If you erased Abraham entirely, I would see that as a problem. If however, we discover that Jesus' first miracle was actually healing someone, not turning water into wine, that wouldn't necessarily disrupt everything.

Essentially I don't think we're even talking about the same thing here. You took issue with my post on the divinity of scripture and why that is (or should, anyway) be important to mainstream Christianity, but I'm having trouble seeing how what you posted connects to that idea. It feels like you're taking issue with things I didn't say, and I'm trying to get the conversation back to something fruitful or interesting, rather than just.... confusing.

In the specific case of The Bible, Christians tend to draw its authority from the idea that it is, in fact, divinely inspired. If it isn't, then the whole idea of unchanging morality from a perfect source (which is one of the issues brought up ITT) is moot.

Something could be divinely inspired and still be figurative in nature, it has been said that the bible could still stand even if completely metaphorical. That's not a view I take, but there's nothing logically wrong with it.

Perhaps an approach would be to treat authors as divinely inspired, rather than texts themselves.

Treating the text itself as being inspired leads to this idea that there must be the one single, true, transcendent, and immutable interpretation, which I think has little to do with how Christians over the centuries have actually read the Bible. See for example the vast history of writings that give "spiritual" interpretations to texts, like Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses.

If authors are inspired instead, it is also much easier to recognize that they are still also human, and to remember that the Bible is a collection of texts written centuries apart by people with vastly differing experiences of the world, audiences, and purposes, that they aren't infallible as people or as authors, even while contributing something beautiful and true and deep to our understanding. I think this is a much more natural way to view inspiration, easier to reconcile with our own lives, and even with the Bible's own teaching about what it is to be human and to know God.

Think of biblical characters like Moses, David, Jonah, Job, Peter, Paul. They are not perfectly transparent and passive transmitters of some Divine Inspiration, right? They make lots of mistakes, have their own quirks, inject their own personalities. David is probably the best example. If that is the pattern, it makes more sense to treat "inspired" texts as also being marked by the humanity of their authors then as if they were dictated by the hand of God.

This distinction (in principle) doesn't really say that much. Since people in the past have viewed the texts themselves as divinely inspired without having to believe that there's a single correct way to interpret it, I don't think it's a problem of thinking the text as divinely inspired.

I think the problem is really just a form anti-intellectualism within some areas of Christianity.

I thought you were arguing that if the Bible isn't 100% infallible then it won't work as a authority or revelation from from God. Was that not your claim?

I was disagreeing by arguing that 100% infallibility is not a requirement for Scripture to fulfill its theological and religious functions.

I guess answering properly would depend on whether or not it was possible to determine which parts were divinely inspired, and which were not. If you could, then there's no real issue. If you can't, then Christianity would lose a lot of ground.

At least the fundamentalist and traditional sects of Christianity, including Catholicism, most protestant denominations, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and others operate on the premise that the Bible is authoritative because it is infallible, and it is infallible because it is divinely inspired.

If you take the view that The Bible is a neat little book of suggestions (or a similar liberal view that would get you lynched by fundamentalist protestants) I can see how the divinity of the Bible would matter a lot less.

If you take the view that the Bible is divinely inspired but also full of errors your view may be much more flexible, but that's an extreme fringe view/take on Christianity that would give the average churchgoer a stroke.

The Catholic formulation of inerrancy (from wikipedia)

It seems to leave at least a little wiggle room.

Here's how catholic.com addresses the question:

It seems to me that more conservative Catholics might be loathe to sum all that up as "divinely inspired but also full of errors" but their formulation leaves a bit of room for it at least.

Within Eastern Orthodoxy, you see a similar kind of loathing to introduce the word "error", but it's similar in that

- There is no doctrine of sola scriptura, the church is the authority, not the text. This is sometimes justified in terms of the Church existing prior to the written books of the Bible, that the Bible is the written expression of the living faith of the Church

- there is a nuanced take on what the Bible is authoritative about, rather than saying that it's inerrant in every conceivable fashion. For example in this interview on Ancient Faith radio:

I think they could probably lady up a bit and admit some of these things are in fact "errors", they just think it's beside the point

Even among Protestants, in the more liberal churches I don't think criticism of biblical inerrantism as a doctrine, or at least criticisms of more extreme forms of the doctrine, are really completely fringe. Google isn't being very cooperative in terms of finding definitive statements, but I find articles discussing "mainline protestant" opposition to the doctrine of inerrancy.

It does seem to be the case that the official doctrinal statements of a lot of even those churches dance around the issue in the same way the orthodox guy did, so there is that. It's definitely a defensive posture. I do think in any case that you are wrong in thinking the reaction of an average southern evangelical protestant is representative of Christianity to the point where opposition amounts to an "extreme fringe"