What should we do with Jesus?

Question

A recent focus for those of us who want to see this site continue to grow has been on cleaning up our tags. We want to make sure that each tag means something on the questions it's applied to.

Recently we had the god tag destroyed. It was not a useful tag, and it has been replaced with more specific tags, or removed entirely. The next tag we'd like to target is the jesus.

The problems with these tags aren't entirely the fault of the tag, but they are very general and we'd like to add more specific tags to questions when we can. We should be able to look at the tag and know to some degree of accuracy what the question is about.

What exactly is a question tagged jesus, about? I have no idea, it's currently on 242 questions and I'm not convinced it adds much to very many of them.

There are several different categories of questions that can currently (and correctly) be tagged jesus.

• Questions about the life of Jesus
• Questions about his saving work
• Questions about the messiah prophesies
• Questions about etymology
• Questions about the teachings of Jesus
• Questions related to theology about Jesus

The goal here is to have our tags mean something, and right now I don't feel like the jesus tag is adding anything to the questions it's on. If you have additional questions types that should be here, please add them or comment about them if you can't edit.

Answer 1

I'm convinced that the only questions in this list that should be tagged jesus are the ones about the life of Jesus. And these could easily be retagged to jesus-of-nazareth. We can move the other questions to better tags.

• jesus-of-nazareth or if we keep jesus these should be the only questions it remains on
• soteriology
• messiah possibly along with prophecy or christology
• etymology although it's very possible most of these should move to BH
• should be broken out to parables and commands or something. Possible use for [tag:christology
• christology

I'm open to other solutions, whatever we do, this will be a fairly long process as it's not a tag we can just burn and move on (like god was). There isn't a cut and dried replacement here either, although I have a feeling christology could be substituted in a number of places.

Answer 2

Based on waxeagle's answer and the comments below it, and taking into account new tags that have been created since then, let me make the following proposal:

• Create life-of-jesus, for questions related to Jesus's life on earth – events, activities, ministries, and so forth.
  • Existing tag historical-jesus, currently for questions related to the "ordinary" aspects of Jesus's life, would be a subset of life-of-jesus. Its focus would be on (1) aspects of Jesus's life not discussed in the gospels and (2) critical/modernist approaches to understanding aspects of Jesus's life that are discussed in the gospels.
  • Other related tags, like tomb-of-jesus, birth-of-jesus, passion-of-jesus, words-of-jesus, and name-of-jesus, could often been seen as subsets of life-of-jesus, and used in conjunction with it.
• Use christology for all questions primarily focused on the theology of the Christ – that is, the person, nature, and roles of Jesus Christ.
  • This includes subjects such as the personality, states, offices (prophet, priest, king), and works (atonement, intercession) of Christ.
  • Where there is clear overlap between christology and life-of-jesus, such as in some questions on Christ's state of humiliation, then use both tags.
  • Existing tags like atonement, session-of-christ, and messiah could often be seen as subsets of christology. As such they could be used in conjunction with each other.
• Use soteriology for all questions primarily focused on the application of Christ's work to people. There will be overlap between this and christology in some questions, but soteriology focuses on the salvation of people, while christology focuses on the one who makes salvation possible.
• Make jesus a synonym of life-of-jesus
  • This is a practical measure: the point of making these distinctions is to eliminate a meta-ish tag (jesus) and do something with the questions currently associated with it.
  • Based on a cursory analysis of the questions in jesus, I think it makes the most sense to point it at life-of-jesus – so many of our questions with this tag focus on specific events, teachings, activities, and aspects of Jesus's life on earth.
  • Of course, many questions (such as many jesus questions with tags trinity, nature-of-god, christology, etc.) would require follow-up tag edits, and the effort required will be significant.

As waxeagle argues, the point of this effort is to end up with tags that "mean something," and what I've laid out here seems to me like the cleanest approach to preventing jesus from continuing to be used as a catch-all for a wide variety of very loosely related topics.

Answer 3

The problem I have with re-tagging in general is that we are going to have to be very, very vigilant about it. As interested as we are, I suspect the average person is just thinking "What's the minimum I can do here to post?" Frankly, if I see a question tagged "Jesus" and "God" or "Bible" (especially when they are asking about Moses!) I already know where the user is coming from.

As such, there are always going to be several silly, useless tags – Jesus, God, Bible – I've got them all :). Re-tagging will be an ongoing process. "God" help the poor soul who wanders into eschatology, soteriology, or christology. (When I see those tags, I know I'm dealing with a JonEricson or DanODay!)

So, in my mind, the only question is, what purpose does re-tagging solve? And there are only two that I can think of:

1. For people only interested in a subset of questions (e.g. "I don't care about 'Traditions,' just stuff from the Bible!"), they are going to subscribe to the "Bible" tag and nothing else.

2. For people like me who keep scouring the site looking for something to answer, the tags might lead them to other questions. But really, do I scour the huge tags? Nope -just the esoteric tags that lead me down an interesting path. (e.g. "Hymns")

In the second case, then, retagging is of no benefit. In the first, for people who subscribe, I would argue that having a few broad tags is what people really want here. As such, getting rid of the "problem tags" may actually be less helpful to our users.

I'm not passionate about this, but I think it is worth at least making the case for "God," "Jesus," and the "Bible." :)