[Macalaure]

I start to get the feeling we're all talking past each other.

Originally Posted by Mansun

More to the truth is that some characters do have a Christ-like aura about them, so one may be entitled to question whether Tolkien was heavily influenced by characters in the Bible in is works.

What exactly do you mean by 'Christ-like aura'. I can't do much with this term.
As many have stated, Tolkien was a Christian and thus of course not only influenced by the characters of the bible, but by the bible itself and its mediated values and ethics (not that these are unambiguous). Surely you can find traces of it in LotR and Silmarillion. The question is: are these traces intentional refers to the bible or just came about because their writer was a faithful Christian? Given Tolkien's dislike for allegory, I think we can rule this out.

Of all the Good free folk in Middle-Earth, Elrond to my mind represents Good better than anyone else (save Gandalf the White perhaps).

Just a few more examples as to why I think of Elrond as a Christ-like figure. He is a master of healing, & has command of nature in his valley. One might almost say, he can perform miracles to an extent. He is also a true symbol for Good in Middle-Earth, lord of the elves.

Whether Elrond or Gandalf are the best representatives for Good in the LotR is debatable, but okay.
But I don't think that being a symbol for Good alone qualifies for making a character Christ-like. Though I don't believe in him, Jesus to me represents a very specific kind of good: the Redeemer, mainly. This is a quality I don't see in Elrond at all, and only to a very small extend in Mithrandir (Frodo comes closest, to me). Many of the good characters in LotR have one or the other similarity to Jesus (Legolas did walk on water on Caradhras, didn't he? ), naturally, because the idea of Good that Tolkien had based itself on his Christian belief. But a copy of Jesus, or any other bible character, does not exist in the book.

I for one believe that were it not for his experiences of the World Wars, as well as his interest in Christianity, the LOTR would not have been as it is today. It is possible that he may just have ended up with a longer but comparable tale to The Hobbit.

Your first statement is self-evident, of course. But the second, well, that is a big may in there. I guess that by 'comparable to The Hobbit' you mean: worse. This is pretty unanswerable. It would have been different, of course. Who can say for sure it wouldn't have been better?

Likening characters & past events to the LOTR is all about opinions, where often there is no definitive answer. If there was, then there would be no point in most threads on this website existing. Most of Tolkien's work appears to show ambiguity in order to stimulate interest.

I resolutely disagree. An endless exchange of opinions without goal is pointless and boring, in my mind. There might not be a definitive answer, but that shouldn't keep us from searching for one. We can at least always discard opinions which are faulty.
(I'm not suggesting yours in this thread is by this)