does the JDBC driver offer a similar property to the ODBC Text As LongVarchar?

In the Postgres ODBC driver you can confirm Data Type Options:Text as LongVarChar = True and set Max properties for Varchar and LongVarChar.

I did not see if the JDBC driver is providing similar options in the recent 9.x drivers.

As-is, Postgres likes to describe the precision on character expressions as text 2147483647 which may make sense if the business data was to be a CLOB. But an application that is using the precision for other purposes will dislike the value. Hence, with ODBC you could change the way data was described/returned.