I don't think that "literal" interpretation at the time of Jesus, was the same as the literal interpretation of modern-day fundamentalists.

It never pays to second guess how people felt 2,000 years ago. Their understanding of the observable Cosmos was very different to our own and their myths had arisen in direct response to this - the myth of God, for example, which derives from the illusion of a Geocentric universe coupled with the Patriarchal supremacy of a species more concerned with fabricating answers than asking questions simply because it hasn't yet acquired the nous or technology to do so.

We can look back and see how we invented God and trace the evolution of religious 'thinking' over the last 10,000 years and more (though the Abrahamic God is a relatively new kid on the block). We can despair that humanity's brilliance as storytellers goes hand in hand with our capacity for believing our own hype and massacring those who disagree with us. This is the church's true foundation!

Religion is the measure of the capacity for Mythological Literalism that persists into our own time as a quite frightful anachronism. If it it like this now I shudder to think what it was like back then, especially for a man who believed himself to be the son of a non existent (though to him very literal) God to the extent he was prepared to accept death on a cross. To Jesus, the likes of Jonah and Job would have been veritable role models; not just stories, but literal truths enshrined by a sacred scripture that was the very word of a very God.