As I noted on the thread about the will calling for distribution “according to Islamic Laws and Sharia,” traditional Islamic law appears to call for sons to get double the share that daughters get. I should note, though, that Islamic law is in this respect better for women than is Old Testament law.
Numbers 27:8-11 provides,
Say to the Israelites, “If a man dies and leaves no son, give his inheritance to his daughter. If he has no daughter, give his inheritance to his brothers. If he has no brothers, give his inheritance to his father’s brothers. If his father had no brothers, give his inheritance to the nearest relative in his clan, that he may possess it. This is to have the force of law for the Israelites, as the LORD commanded Moses.”
This has been read as providing that daughters do not inherit at all if there are any living sons (though apparently they are entitled to some support from the estate, and to payment of wedding expenses). As best I can tell, some Orthodox Jews continue to endorse this rule.
Now, as I mentioned in my original post, I think (1) a person should be free to leave his property as he sees fit (subject to the duties to provide for a widow or widower, or for minor children while they are minors), whether he does for religious reasons or not, and (2) courts should generally not enforce provisions that call for the courts to apply religious law, at least in the many situations where the law may well be controversial given different modern religious views (e.g., “distribute my property according to Islamic Laws and Sharia [or Jewish Law]” would not be allowed, though “give my two sons 1/3 each and my two daughters 1/6 each [or give my son everything and my daughters nothing]” would be allowed). I don’t want to rehash these matters here. Also, I think (3) the better rule — the more morally sound rule, and more socially beneficial rule — is for people to treat their sons and daughters equally in such matters (though, as item 1 suggests, I certainly don’t think this should be a legally binding rule).
But here I just want to note that the Koran passages, as traditionally understood, are actually better for daughters than the Old Testament passages, as traditionally understood. To the extent that women are treated better today with regard to inheritance in many Christian and Jewish circles than in many Muslim circles, I think this stems not from the underlying scripture, but from the way that modern Christian and Jewish culture has generally evolved. That may be obvious to many readers, but in my experience many people claim that Islam is inherently worse in various ways than, say, Christianity or Judaism, because the Koran is inherently worse in various ways than the New Testament or the Old Testament or the combination of the two; I’m skeptical about such claims, and I’d be especially skeptical of such an explanation here.
James Madison says:
But how could a court distinguish between disparate gifts because the decedent wants to balance out lifetime gifts (i.e. I paid for your wedding and supported you during the divorce and the criminal case, I estimate it was about $300k total so I want to give your brother $300k more), or because the decedent genuinely does not like child for whatever reason- there are many many good reasons for this.
Even if a court could examine these interests, it does not mean that they should.
May 2, 2011, 6:07 pmChristopher Taylor says:
I think its a mistake to assume that since you have managed to find one portion of the Bible which in your opinion seems to make things worse for daughters than the Koran that there’s no place in the Koran which is worse than the Bible to women.
Just a simple scan of both would prove that absurdly false.
In any case, that scripture was law to deal with disputes, families could leave anything they wanted to anyone they wanted. The only thing that had to stay in the tribe was the land, which was apportioned to the tribes when Israel conquered the promised land. The Koran is how you must always deal with all sorts of inheritance.
May 2, 2011, 6:09 pmGraham says:
The biblical passage above seems ambiguous to me what the initial allocation should be. The quote covers exception handling.
Why isn’t this sort of civil use of a religious law simply a matter for expert witnesses or any other kind of dispute resolution?
If the guy’s will said to divide the estate in accordance with some super-complicated mathematical equation the court would get mathematicians to figure it out. Similarly, if I wrote a book about how to divide your estate in your will and that’s what the guy referred to, the court would read the book. Would it make a difference if I stated my rules came from a religious source?
May 2, 2011, 6:20 pmAndrew L says:
I’m not sure what you intended to demonstrate through the link to the Orthodox Jewish perspective. Maybe I read the link wrong (I’m no expert of course), but it seems that Orthodox Jews (or at least the rabbi who wrote the essay) have worked out a clever way of allowing adherents to allocate their resources how they want (apparently through some mechanism having to do with gift-giving; I don’t exactly understand the subtleties here, but then I’m not an expert on Jewish law).
This doesn’t necessarily invalidate your argument about the Bible, but I think it’s only fair to note that Orthodox Jews have engaged the issue and “solved” it. I don’t know exactly what (if any) implications this has…but as I said, I think it’s worth noting.
May 2, 2011, 6:31 pmDebrah says:
“….in my experience many people claim that Islam is inherently worse in various ways than, say, Christianity or Judaism, because the Koran is inherently worse in various ways……”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It’s certainly worth highlighting elements of Islam and the Koran that may prove more favorable to women and that go against the well-earned stereotypes.
And it might astonish some people to know that there are families today — Christian and Jewish — who still favor the sons over the daughters with regard to who will receive the bulk of an estate.
Especially if there is a self-serving attorney in the family (!)
May 2, 2011, 7:15 pmSeaDrive says:
In the Old Testament, widows are provided for via marriage to male relations according to various rules. A notable example is in the Book of Ruth. There is a convenient synopsis here for those who don’t want to look up the very short and readable original.
Not what we do nowadays, but more humane than letting them starve.
May 2, 2011, 7:39 pmDavid Epstein says:
If a will made a rabbi or an ‘alim, by name, trustee or gave him the power to distribute the estate, presumably that would not run afoul of the First Amendment, just as arbitration by a religious court can be legal.
I vaguely remember from my childhood that my father, a lawyer, got invalidated an agreement by two Jewish spouses requiring them to obtain a “get,” or religious divorce, on first amendment grounds. I’ll see if I can find the case.
May 2, 2011, 7:52 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
There’s a school of thought that it was the veneration of Mary that kind of exploded in the early middle ages, that liberalized Christian views on the value of women and their place in society.
May 2, 2011, 7:56 pmnotaclue says:
The Hebrew Scriptures do treat women in lesser ways than men, but they also treat women as moral agents. In the book of Numbers chapter 30, a woman’s male protector (father, husband) may veto her religious vows, but if he remains silent, or if the woman has no male protector through widowhood or divorce, her vows stand. Thus, while she is not an independent moral agent like a man, she is a moral agent.
I ask this as a serious question: Does the Quran treat women as moral agents or not? If so, to what degree compared to the Hebrew Scriptures?
May 2, 2011, 8:17 pmBruce Hayden says:
Not sure if I buy that. Marian worship/veneration started most of a millennium earlier, and in the earlier Church, there were a number of fairly dynamic women who played large roles in the church, including quite possibly the other Mary. Also, there were a couple of queens/empresses of the early eastern Empire (i.e. in Constantinople) who had major impacts on the course of Christian theology, only surpassed by a handful of the men of their times (Patriarchs of the various major churches of the time).
You may be correct that Marian worship/veneration moved the RC Church back towards a more equitable view of women, but I would suggest that that was as much in response to how extremely patriarchal it had become, probably esp. after marriage was banned for the priesthood.
Finally, I would suggest that probably the biggest reason that women were given significantly lesser status than men until recently is that they very often died in childbirth. Until relatively recently, if a woman had enough children, this was how she would likely die (and this extended in this country into at least the mid 19th Century).
May 2, 2011, 8:20 pmanother anon. says:
“Also, I think (3) the better rule — the more morally sound rule, and more socially beneficial rule — is for people to treat their sons and daughters equally in such matters.”
IMO that can lead to morally unsound results.
For instance, say you have a son and a daughter, one of which never marries, never has any kids and amasses a considerable nest egg.
The other has say four children, maybe even one with special needs, and barely squeaks by.
How would you then divide your estate?
(Reuters) – A middle-income family can expect to spend $291,570 including inflation to raise a child born in 2008 to adulthood, the government estimated on Tuesday, up slightly from the estimate made a year ago.
May 2, 2011, 8:28 pmNigel Kearney says:
Probably the Quran did improve the position of women in the 7th century, both compared to Christianity and compared to other beliefs that were replaced by Islam.
The problem is that Islam really depends completely on the belief that the Quran is the direct, literal and infallible will of God. So Muslim women are stuck with that 7th century status forever. In Christianity there is no general belief that the Bible is the direct, unaltered word of God and must therefore be obeyed to the letter.
May 2, 2011, 8:36 pmBill Poser says:
Another factor to consider is that the biblical law of inheritance no longer applies for most Jews. Under Israeli law, in the absence of specific provision by the testator to the contrary, sons and daughters receive equal shares. The problem with a comparison of Shari’a law and biblical Jewish law is that the former will actually be applied in countries where Muslims attain power whereas the latter is not applied in the country in which Jews are in power.
Traditional Islam resembles early Judaism in many ways, but modern Judaism is quite different from both.
May 2, 2011, 8:43 pmBill Poser says:
Incidentally, if you’re looking for law contemporary to the Qur’an which the Qur’an is no worse than, have a look at the code of Justinian. Although it is justly praised for cleaning up the chaos that Roman Law had devolved into, its provisions regarding women are barbaric.
May 2, 2011, 8:46 pmAndrew L says:
“Marian worship/veneration started most of a millennium earlier, and in the earlier Church”
But it took very different forms over the ages, so you’re basically both wrong. “Marian worship/veneration” is not a static phenomenon. You have to examine it vis-a-vis other sociological phenomena of the time, and vis-a-vis other incarnations of this phenomenon within various strains of Christianity.
As far as influential queens within the Eastern Empire, I’m curious to whom you’re referring. The ones that spring to mind for me are those during the Iconoclastic Controversies, but those queens were remarkable precisely because as females they were much more reliant on male (and in this case ecclesiastical) power brokers. Their “power” was really a feature of their own weakness, which served the ends of the iconophile churchmen.
While Marian veneration doesn’t “start” in the Middle Ages (remember one of the hot-button issues at Chalcedon was Mary as “theotokos”!), it certainly appears as a very distinctive and in some ways self-contained phenomenon during this time. Think holy women, eucharist marriages, etc.
May 2, 2011, 9:16 pmAndrew L says:
And something instructive to bear in mind, by the way, is that according to W. Bynum, 10% of miracle stories from 13-15th centuries Christians areas involve women, whle about 30-50% of fasting stories involve women. Catholic women certainly could attain spiritual fame, but they did so within the sphere to which they had been relegated and could therefore control: the home (hence, fasting). Contrast Catholicism with Catharism, where women could become perfecti, attaining the highest levels of spirituality.
Of course none of this is really instructive at all since comparing the role of women in the various religions involves so much specialized interpretation that it ends up becoming apples and oranges.
May 2, 2011, 9:27 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I didn’t say it started in the early middle ages, I said it exploded.
Queens are viewed and treated differently from ordinary women. I don’t know that women in the 19th century benefited from Queen Victoria’s reign, except that she popularized the use of chloroform during childbirth; there was a school of thought that this was wrong, because women are supposed to suffer the pains of birth, and she pretty well squelched that. Otherwise men were quite able to address her as Your Majesty and still think women ought not be educated or manage their own affairs.
May 2, 2011, 9:33 pmReaderY says:
Professor Volokh, why would you, of all people, raise homophobic objections to people’s private intrafamilial sexual preference practices? I understand you may not find what other people do in the privacy of their own homes to your personal taste, but surely you’re not suggesting that there’s any rational basis for imposing your personal behavioral distastes on others?
Or do you believe that there’s some sort of natural law norms inherent in the vibes of the universe dictating how people should express their affections by way of bequests, that renders people who do so homosexually unnatural, queer, somehow not “better”, and deserving of being put down?
May 2, 2011, 9:38 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
ReaderY, what in the hell are you talking about?
May 2, 2011, 10:00 pmBill Robelen says:
It is important to note that the Mosaic Law did specifically set out the terms of inheritance. Under the Mosaic Law, the estate was split amongst the sons, with the eldest receiving a double portion of the estate. The eldest was to be the spiritual leader of the family, and care for his mother and sisters with the extra portion of the estate. Considering that most women were married, it is hard to say that a woman was treated much worse off. I am not totally familiar with Islamic Law to know all the differences in inheritance.
May 2, 2011, 10:23 pmJohn Burgess says:
It is not at all uncommon for Muslim fathers to make distributions of their wealth to their daughters prior to their own deaths. You don’t find it so much among the poorly educated, but I’d have to say it’s typical for middle class and above. Oddly–at least for some–Muslim fathers aren’t all that different from other fathers in this regard: they love their daughters, even if not quite so much as their sons.
May 2, 2011, 10:27 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
In a culture where girls went straight from their fathers’ homes to their husbands’, and a “loose” woman (not attached to a man) was regarded with suspicion and dread, this kind of inheritance makes sense. In the western world we don’t have this so much anymore, although you still see remnants of it – even women who have lived on their own and supported themselves for years, when they get married, have their fathers give them away.
I read a blog post a few years ago from a girl in Saudi Arabia who had lived for some time in the USA but was back home, and whose YOUNGER BROTHER forbade her the internet just because he could. She was signing off her blog, and her impotent rage was something to see. Some parts of the world still have the women totally dominated by men in their families. People hate giving up power and control and fight it all they can.
May 2, 2011, 10:34 pmSouth Texas Law Prof says:
Eugene,
There are some Old Testament exceptions where daughters got to inherit (see Numbers 26 and Joshua 17). I think it is unnecessary to attribute the modern differences in the treatment of women to the “evolution” of the religions, because this conclusion rests on the fallacious assumption that inheritance laws were representative of each Holy Book’s treatment of women. There are many other passages in the Old and New Testaments giving women certain rights or roles that they lacked in neighboring societies (for example, rights against a husband who falsely accused the wife of immorality), and Occam’s Razor would suggest these as more plausible explanations for the relative elevation of women rather than a quasi-Darwinian theory of religious history.
Also, I think you are overlooking that Old Testament inheritance law pertained primarily to real property and the goal of keeping the original tribal territories intact over time – giving the land to daughters, who would marry and be absorbed into their husband’s family and tribe, would quickly fragment the divinely-revealed tribal and family allotments. The inheritance regime in the Bible had the effect of giving women more options about whom to marry, more choices. We should not impose values derived from our modern context (where fungible assets largely define one’s wealth) onto a system where land inheritance was entangled with official borders of territories. And the nomadic culture from which Islam originated would have focused less on land ownership and more on flocks and herds in its inheritance regime. Just because Americans perceive the Israelite inheritance rules as “unfair” to women does not mean than ancient Israelite women would have perceived the system as unfair at all. The result of giving Israelite women land inheritance would have been that they were forced to marry within their extended family or clan.
May 2, 2011, 10:41 pmrumpelstiltskin says:
20+ posts and nobody has brought up primogeniture?
I mean, who cares what the Old Testament or the Koran says? Neither necessarily determines actual practice by any society claiming to be Jewish, Christian, or Muslim.
May 2, 2011, 11:15 pmJamie says:
Islam is no different. Christians have the Church of Christers and others, who do indeed believe in a literal interpretation of the bible. Islam has hard-liners and liberals, too.
May 2, 2011, 11:43 pmSouth Texas Law Prof says:
@Jamie/@Nigel – Really? All the Christians I know, myself included, believe that about the Bible.
May 3, 2011, 12:12 amyankee says:
I think the difference is mostly semantic. In Islam, the Qur’an is literally the word of God because a divine messenger actually showed up and dictated the thing. In the Christian tradition, the books of the Bible were “divinely inspired” rather than literally dictated, but God was essentially telling the authors to write.
As for “obeyed to the letter,” Christians have spent the past 1900 years thinking of ways to avoid obeying the Bible to the letter. My personal favorite is the elaborate philosophical justifications for jettisoning disfavored Old Testament rules but keeping the ones they like around.
May 3, 2011, 12:46 amBill Robelen says:
@Jamie/@Nigel
May 3, 2011, 12:51 amI would second what South Texas Law Prof says. As a Baptist preacher I am aware that some groups of Christianity do not believe that the Bible is the inspired very Word of God, but the vast majority of those who use the label Christians believe that the Bible is the Word of God given to men. Many may differ slightly in interpretation, but they do believe that it is the Word of God. With that said, very few Christians would state that we must take it strictly literally word for word. Some passages are poetical, and must be understood that way. To truly understand the Bible, one must interpret it in light of other Bible passages, and in light of the society to which it was written.
OrenWithAnE says:
This. Of course, the rule that if a woman marries she becomes part of her husband’s tribe (and not him part of hers) is itself not anything to be proud of.
Or marry a man who thus becomes part of her clan.
May 3, 2011, 1:12 amrumpelstiltskin says:
This. Fukuyama’s new book talks about this problem extensively.
The other thing to remember here is that neither Israelites nor Arabs had any conception of property rights like we do. Land was not alienable on an individual basis – it belonged to the kinship group. Trying to bring modern conceptions of property rights into this makes absolutely no sense. Tribal lineages owned property in pre-modern times. Not individuals.
May 3, 2011, 3:14 amAndrew L says:
This is a popular misconception (at least as far as Israelite law is concerned). Although some old-school scholars had proposed for some Ancient Near Eastern societies an evolutionary model whereby private ownership of property followed a stage in history featuring tribal ownership of land, R. Westbrook states unequivocally that, “Private ownership of land existed at all periods [in the Ancient Near East],” noting that “there is no evidence of a legal bar on private landholding” (Ancient Near Eastern Law, 55).
Alienation of property in Mesopotamia took place in the context of the interests of the private owner’s household ONLY in the sense that the right of the seller’s kin to the alienated property was not extinguished except through payment of the property’s full value. Meaning, the kin could later redeem the property for a fee – but there was no bar on alienating property or on the notion of private property.
May 3, 2011, 5:17 ampublic_defender says:
A Muslim friend once defended the half-for-girls rule by explaining that it should be read together with other rules under which a girl and a woman always have a man from whom they can demand financial support. For example, a wife with a job is entitled to keep all the money she earns for herself while demanding that her husband pay for all family expenses, including her expenses.
That’s still problematic, but until a few decades ago, it was more advantageous for women than the system we have in the West.
This also shows the dangers of implementing such a broad command in a will as “follow Islamic law.” What if those daughters now support families? Could you argue that the one half rule no longer applies? I don’t know, and neither would a secular judge.
May 3, 2011, 5:38 amRicardo says:
Jettisoning the Old Testament is not that difficult for Christians. The Old Testament concerns the structure of a particular community of Israelites living in the Eastern Mediterranean at that time. It’s pretty difficult to take some passages out of that context such as the passage about taking slaves exclusively from other nations. Obviously, that cannot be a universal rule!
There were early Christians who did in fact suggest scrapping all the Hebrew parts of the Bible and starting with the Gospels. I suppose that argument lost out because there are simply too many references to the Hebrew Bible scattered throughout the teachings of Jews like Jesus and St. Paul to ignore.
May 3, 2011, 5:42 amMike says:
The original post said: “As best I can tell, some Orthodox Jews continue to endorse this rule.” Not so, as even the article you link to to support the claim says in the section labeled “Contemporary practice.” It helps in understanding that section to know that “machlokes” means dispute or disagreement.
May 3, 2011, 7:00 amkarrde says:
I don’t want to disagree with either of you here, I just want to ask one question.
In my experience, “early Middle Ages” tends to refer to the years between 450 and 1000. I can’t make “a millennium earlier” make sense in that context, since it begins at 550 BC and extends until it touches the life of Christ.
Unless someone missed the word “half” in front of the phrase “a millennium earlier”, and everyone involved assumed it was there.
May 3, 2011, 8:10 amJack says:
Maybe you should take a look at how Sharia Law is practiced in the OIC countries, and then compare it to English Common Law, as both are practiced today.
And then tell me which is more moral.
May 3, 2011, 8:12 amMilwaukee says:
What about that whole “female genital mutilation” thing. I think Judaism and Christianity win on that round. Isn’t there something about the testimony in court of a woman not being equal to the testimony of a man?
My recollection of charity is that we are to particularly pay attention to widows and orphans. Men who can work, but won’t aren’t to be fed. People who need caring for, need to be cared for, but able bodied people aren’t to be living off of others charity.
May 3, 2011, 8:31 amAndrew L says:
There is legislation for taking slaves from other nations, but even more extensive legislation governing slaves taken from within the Israelite community. I’m not sure what passage you’re referring to here.
Early Christianity, to the extent that its literature is for the most part messianic Jewish boilerplate, is ALSO the structure of a particular community of Israelites living in the Eastern Mediterranean (that kept the Law of the OT, as the current scholarly consensus goes).
May 3, 2011, 8:45 amDeb K says:
At the time the Old Testament laws were written down, people lived in family clans within a tribal society. Men were financially responsible for taking care of the women in the clan. The societal structure was completely different from the one we live in today. It is always a mistake to judge ancient cultures by modern standards. The laws of a society must be considered within the context of the time. When context is considered, we find that many biblical laws that seem strange to us today, were very compassionate for their time.
The Bible does consider that there were people that “fell through the cracks” of the general societal structure. That is why there are many passages that deal with the treatment of widows and orphans.
Not to worry though, Jews today usually do not distribute inheritance according to biblical law. In general, in all aspects of life, for better or for worse, we tend to treat our children like princes and princesses.
May 3, 2011, 8:48 amAndrew L says:
In Judaism as well – although for other matters a woman’s testimony has advantages over a man’s (the issue is pretty subtle and complex). One thing to bear in mind is that according to Jewish law (as still practiced by Orthodox Jews today) is that a woman may not serve as a religious judge.
In general this whole “whose is bigger” contest between Islam, Judaism and Christianity is pretty stupid as it’s entirely apples and oranges. Also, each tradition comes with a whole history of interpretation that outsiders have an incredibly difficult time grasping.
I find it highly amusing that every idiot here thinks he/she can just quote a line from the OT/NT/Quran, pretend to understand it, ignore any interpretative traditions, and then pass final judgment on the relevant religion based on that.
May 3, 2011, 8:53 amLaw & Religion | Crossroads Arabia says:
[...] In a follow-up piece, Volokh notes that while Shariah Law appears to be discriminatory on the basis of sex, this isn’t unique in history. Strict Jewish law, he says, is even less charitable when it comes to women’s inheritance. Again, the comments are worth reading. Sex-Based Inheritance Rules, Islamic Law, and the Old Testament [...]
May 3, 2011, 8:58 amGeoff says:
The way I’m reading the Scripture quoted is a protection of the daughter. If the person has no sons, don’t bypass the daughter in terms of inheritance. If there is no daughter, don’t bypass sons you don’t like. Otherwise, give your inheritance to your clan.
The parallelism seems to assume both sons and daughters can get inheritance if both are alive. Just a cursory read.
This seems about protecting people more than who exactly gets what.
May 3, 2011, 9:14 amyankev says:
Exactly correct, Andrew. Instead of saying
it would be more accurate to say that ALL Orthodox Jews believe that this rule is still binding, but recognized Orthodox scholars have long since found ways to leave one’s estate to daughters as well as sons in such a way as not to run afoul of this rule.
I have drafted wills for Orthodox clients that take account of the rules involved. For any lawyer who, like me, is not a rabbi, it is best to get competent rabbinic advice on the subject as needed.
There is an interesting array of articles on this topic at jlaw.com.
May 3, 2011, 9:25 amGiant Frog says:
Basic evolutionary biology ties this into the “sex toy” thread, since both phenomena result from the larger reproductive variance of males, and the fact that the females’ reproduction won’t depend on “parental investment” nearly as much as the males’.
May 3, 2011, 9:28 amLin says:
This post is a bit irrelevant. There is no wide spread effort to insinuate, fully formed, a comprehensive religio-political legal code into western democracies on the part of christians or any other major group, as there is with islam. It’s like looking at a fossil of a trilobite and concluding it’s just as troublesome as the newly hatched velociraptor in the bushes behind you. Three truly moderate muslims, Tarek Fatah, Salim Mansour and Raheel Raza, talked at length on this subject just the other day, and they sounded pretty darn worried:
May 3, 2011, 9:30 amhttp://www.investigativeproject.org/789/report-from-the-northern-front-montreal-redux
yankev says:
Wow. There are a number of Jewish folk customs that are intended to reduce the pains of birth. They have no scientific basis, but they show that Jewish religious tradition does not object to reducing that pain.
I wonder if the same school of thought objected to plows and machines, on the basis that Adam was cursed that he would live by the sweat of his brow. Yet the rabbis tell us that Noach (or Noah as the Greek pagans called him) was so-named (the name is related to agreeable or pleasant) because he invented the plow, which made it easier to raise food from the earth whcih, like Adam, had been cursed, and this invention made mankind’s life more pleasant.
May 3, 2011, 9:33 ampapper says:
Why is it difficult for a court to follow a will that asks to follow the order of inheritance dictated by religious law? So long as one describes the law sufficiently, i.e., as laid out in the old testament. All the court is doing is following the testator’s wishes. So long as the wish is clearly expressed it should be enforced unless it violates some other law. Last I checked, there is no law requiring parents to treat their children equally or to leave something for every child.
May 3, 2011, 9:39 amyankev says:
Andrew, there is a difference between the eved ivri (Israelite slave) , who is more akin to an indentured servant, and the eved canaani (non-Jewish slave), who is more akin to a chattel slave, and who, unlike the eved ivri, can be inherited or sold. Although even the even canaani had more rights than chattel slaves under American, Roman or British law. The laws concerning acquisition, manumission and right of slaves are laid out in Tractate Kiddushin.
May 3, 2011, 9:40 amGov98 says:
I think this stems not from the underlying scripture, but from the way that modern Christian and Jewish culture has generally evolved. That may be obvious to many readers, but in my experience many people claim that Islam is inherently worse in various ways than, say, Christianity or Judaism, because the Koran is inherently worse in various ways than the New Testament or the Old Testament or the combination of the two; I’m skeptical about such claims, and I’d be especially skeptical of such an explanation here.
One thing that I think is completely overlooked, is the reality, that both the Old Testament and the Koran establish a civil law in addition to a private moral code. Christianity in this sense is unique. Within the sphere of Roman government, Christ was clear that civil authorities were to have general authority. Additionally, Paul continues in teaching that submission to the government is key in Christianity, as does Peter. Comparing a civil code established 3500 years ago to one today or one 1300 years ago seems somewhat hard to do. The culture and situations have changed dramatically, primogeniture, which may have been a practical necessity then is not necessary now.
Because the New Testament does not establish a civil code outside of “obey the government wherever you are generally” it allows for culture to develop without so much top down instruction in a society’s legal code. It would seem to be a huge difference, and this is directly related to “the underlying Scripture.”
May 3, 2011, 9:43 amyankev says:
Agreed. In fairness to EV, I think his post was focussed only on the laws of inheritance, though. But certainly his summary of the link about Orthodox Jewish practice was 180 degrees off.
Agreed in spades. I don’t claim to know much about Christianity or Islam. I don’t claim to know much about Judaism either, but I do know that:
May 3, 2011, 9:48 am1. Anything translated from Hebrew or Aramaic originals into English is going to give an incomplete picture.
2. The Oral Torah (including Talmud, medrash, and poskim (decisors)) is more extensive than the written Torah, and the written Torah cannot be understood without seeing what the Oral Torah says.
3. Correllary to #2: If you studied something without consulting Rashi, you have not really studied it. (That sounds better in Yiddish, but it’s true even in English.)
sal says:
Comparison of Islamic and Old Testament law is interesting but Old Testament law is not the moral code for Christians. For Christians, Old Testament law was superceded by the New Covenant of Jesus. The Numbers passage is not applicable to Christian moral code other than for context of shadow and type. The new covenant law of Christ (love your neighbor as yourself, bear one another’s burdens, etc.) is the moral code of Christians, not old covenant law. Weighing Old Testament law against Islamic law is not the direct equivalent of a Christian and Islamic moral code comparison.
May 3, 2011, 9:57 amMike P Wagner says:
Graham, you seem to be the only poster focussed on the issue a hand.
There appears to be a conflict between our desire to allow a person to distribute his or her inheritance as they see fit, and our desire to avoid having American secular courts interpret and/or enforce religious law.
I suspect that the best solution in this case would be for the will itself to specify who will decide what “according to Islamic law and Sharia” actually means. For example, the will could specify particular imans or Muslim councils to decide those issues.
The “expert witness” strategy is appealing, but I believe that it will prove not much of a solution. The issue in religious matters is that it’s very hard to determine who is and is not an expert. Some of the off-topic posts (about the literal interpretation of the Christian Bible) in this thread make it clear that defining who would be an expert witness for the purposes of interpreting Christian law would be a major challenge!
From what I can tell, most Baptists would not accept a Vatican expert’s ruling on matters of Christian doctrine (and vice versa) – they would not accept each other’s expertise. As an outsider, it appears that most discussions of Christian doctrine eventually devolve into “All Christian believe what I believe. Those other guys – who appear to be Christians and call themselves Christians – they are not really Christians.”
I think that there’s a big difference between that an expertise in “secular” matters. For example, I think that most courts would accept formal academic evidence to prove the expertise of a expert witness in mathematics. I also think that two tenured PhDs in mathematics would accept each other as an expert witness, even when they disagreed. I don’t think that one would argue that the other’s disagreement means that the other is not a mathematician.
In short, I don’t think that there is a clear method for determining expertise in religious interpretation that does not involve a selection between religious doctrines.
May 3, 2011, 10:01 amKen Arromdee says:
The word “necessarily” here glosses over a lot. In actual practice, it would not happen in any Jewish or Christian society, but it would happen in many Muslim societies that really do exist today.
May 3, 2011, 10:09 amloki13 says:
Why bother? I mean- just look at all the experts we have on Islam commenting on the threads here every day! All you need is google, right? Milwaukee just told us that “female genital mutilation” is an Islamic thing, so that has to be correct.
Right?
May 3, 2011, 10:15 amRicardo says:
Which particular Israelite community in the Eastern Mediterranean was the intended audience of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans?
I don’t know that anyone ever did a census of the early Christian movement to count how many were Jews (either by blood or faith). The Nazarenes certainly were but I’ve never heard the claim that they were representative of the larger Christian world. Moreover, the text of the New Testament itself suggests that Gentiles were certainly targeted for evangelism.
May 3, 2011, 10:18 amRicardo says:
Israel and India both allow more limited forms of Sharia to be practiced within the confines of family law including those aspects of the law governing property inheritance.
May 3, 2011, 10:33 amreg says:
None of this has anything to do with Christianity. It’s Christianity 101 that Jewish civil law doesn’t apply to Christians, that the purpose of Jewish ceremonial law was to point to and reveal Christ as savior, and, as Christ and the apostles taught in the new testament, moral law is only to love God and neighbor.
Atheists who raise Jewish law in arguments with Christians show they don’t know whatthey are talking about.
May 3, 2011, 10:43 amech says:
Mike Wagner wrote:
This is the crux. In some sense, a secular court choosing which rabbi, imam, priest, preacher, or religious scholar is the appropriate person to settle a religious dispute is an “establishment of religion”. I think this kind of governmental “seal of authority” was covered before on this blog when NY state tried to legislate which group of Orthodox rabbis was to be used to certify food as Kosher. It was ruled unconstitutional. However use of trademarks by these groups of rabbis (for the symbol indicating that the food is Kosher by their rules) and legal enforcement of the trademark is not unconstitutional since the trademark law is viewpoint neutral.
May 3, 2011, 10:46 amOrenWithAnE says:
Eugene has consistently reminded us that there is one. Write in your will “I would like to distribute my possessions according to Jewish law as arbitrated by (and according to the procedures of) Bet Din such-and-such.”
May 3, 2011, 10:49 amLin says:
Loki said: ““Milwaukee said “female genital mutilation” is an Islamic thing, so that has to be correct. Right?”
It’s an “islamic thing” for the Shafii school – obligatory, in fact.
Richardo said: “Israel and India both allow more limited forms of Sharia”
Do you know how the Muslim Per. Board arose in India? Muslims threatened the state en mass because a civil court ordered a muslim man to pay maintenance to his 62 year old wife.(Shah Bano case).
May 3, 2011, 10:54 amrichard40 says:
There are 2 key differences between Christianity and Islam:
1. Most of the harsh passeges in Christianity are contained in the old testament, while the friendler ones are in the new, but the new takes precedence. In Islam, most of the harsher passeges are in text that takes precedence ofer the friendlier passeges.
2. Christianity is moderated by enlightenment ideas, like the value and freedom of individuals, freedom of expression, and seperation of church and state. Islam has no like tradition.
Thus, while you can find very harsh passeges in both the Christian old testament, and the Koran, the key difference is in Christianity, those harsh, outdated, old testament passeges are usually ignored, while in Islam, similar harsh passeges in the Koran, are NOT ignored.
May 3, 2011, 10:56 amMike Hickerson says:
Don’t forget that the book of Numbers and the Koran were given/written/written down/compiled (depending on your theology) many centuries apart. There’s at least a 1,000 year difference in their ages and perhaps as much as 1,500 years. That part of the world went through a lot of changes during that time period: just politically, that time frame includes the rise AND fall of Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires. As legal documents addressing inheritance practices, they are dealing with vastly different cultural situations that have vastly different assumptions and problems. Even if you believe that their teachings should be applied without much alteration to contemporary issues, you have to pay attention to the cultural context in which they were written.
Further, the Koran presumes that one is already more-or-less familiar with the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
May 3, 2011, 11:00 amSarcastro says:
Wow, richard40 is strong! Such a broad brush must be heavy!
May 3, 2011, 11:02 amCJColucci says:
Why is it difficult for a court to follow a will that asks to follow the order of inheritance dictated by religious law? So long as one describes the law sufficiently, i.e., as laid out in the old testament. All the court is doing is following the testator’s wishes. So long as the wish is clearly expressed it should be enforced unless it violates some other law.
You can write a will that says “Do x, y, and z,” regardless of whether x, y, and z come from some religious code (or the testator’s possibly defective understanding of a religious code), the law of France, or one’s own imagination. Where the problem comes in is not when you specify what is to be done, for example, sonny gets a 1/2 share and the two daughters each get a 1/4 share, but when you incorporate by reference what some other body of secuklar or religious law says ought to be done without specifying the desired results. If a will incorporates some other secular law by reference (assuming it doesn’t violate domestic public policy), a secular court will try its best to determine the content of that other secular law and apply it. Nobody seems to think it inappropriate for a New York court to figure out the law of Wisconsin or France if a will makes it relevant. But the dominant understanding is that secular courts should not similarly try to determine for itself what religious law requires, even if it would enforce a provision specifying a result that happened to track what religious law requires.
May 3, 2011, 11:13 amloki13 says:
So- it’s just an Islamic thing? There are no Christians, for example, in Africa, that practice it? Can you point me, with your wonderful google powers, to the section of the Qur’an that mandates it? And when you say required- do you mean that all Shafii practice it, or do many, or most, allow for dispensation?
Is it cultural, or religious?
PS- I love roiger’s defense of Chritianity; with Christianity, we’ve learned to ignore our religion (moderated by enlightenment ideals); not so much with Islam…
May 3, 2011, 11:17 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
My uneducated guess is that it’s a cultural thing. People are good at rationalizing why they have to do what they want to do, and religion is a great way to rationalize stuff. But if it is Islamic, that doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be spillover into non-Muslim communities that exist in proximity to large, well-established Muslim communities. That wouldn’t really prove that the custom isn’t Islamic.
May 3, 2011, 11:24 amMike P Wagner says:
Isn’t that precisely what I said? :)
Me
May 3, 2011, 11:28 amOrenWithAnE says:
This might be difficult if you want to distribute the estate according to a principle that requires taking into account changing circumstances.
For instance, in Judaism, if you have daughters you might write that each should get an equal share — which is correct for the time being. If, in the intervening time between writing the will and kicking the bucket, one of those daughters has a son, he inherits the whole shebang and your distribution will be incorrect. So there’s a good reason to incorporate religious law by reference not by value (sorry, bad programming analogy).
May 3, 2011, 11:29 amloki13 says:
I tend to be Socratic, which doesn’t work too well in this format. Your first guess is right- it’s a cultural thing. There is religion, and there is culture. A lot of religion is used to justify culture. Nothing in the Qur’an commands (or forbids) female circumcision/genital mutilation. But Islam is a wonderful way of imposing cultural dictates. There is nothing in the Qur’an that dictates the Burqua, yet the cultural (and bedouin) imperative has become intermixed with Islam.
May 3, 2011, 11:33 amOrenWithAnE says:
I guess. I don’t like the “selection of doctrines” framework that you were talking about. Individuals don’t chose between doctrines, they chose between specific earthly authorities (some, perhaps, that hew to doctrines).
I could just as well imagine someone who is displeased with the organized authorities in his religion but wanting to follow its precepts leaving doctrine out of the interpretation at all and delegating it to a layman (or multiple laymen).
It’s a subtle point, but there is a difference between ‘principles of XX law’ and ‘doctrines of XX law’.
May 3, 2011, 11:36 amWhaddona More says:
Perhaps you need to know more people. Jamie was kind enough to mention an entire denomination. Or are you going to play the No True Scotsman fallacy?
May 3, 2011, 11:42 amyankee says:
Except that the distinction between “civil” and “moral” turns out to oh-so-conveniently track whatever practices the speaker is trying to justify or condemn at the moment. Leviticus 17 is civil, but Leviticus 18 is moral, except Leviticus 18:19, which is now OK (albeit messy). Mandatory polygamy was civil, but proscriptions on polygamy are moral.
May 3, 2011, 11:43 amyankee says:
Also, many of us don’t consider “that was then, this is now” to be much of a defense to charges that (for example) your religion mandates the slaughter of an entire community if anybody there converts to another religion.
May 3, 2011, 11:51 amreg says:
Yankee, applying love your neighbor to the real world inevitably is a difficult task, that often depends on culture. If I’m a woman in the middle east, I will cover my head to avoid offense. But don’t have to in China. Bigamy may or may note moral in different circumstances. The old testament is evidence of and can be helpful in determining what love requires, but blindly applying it is pharisaical,and a very common target of Christs condemnation.
Some things are always wrong, lust, hate, theft, jealousy, etc. But Christianity, usually, is more about preaching forgiveness and grace than applying rules.
May 3, 2011, 11:55 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
To further my point, here is Paul in 1 Cor. 11.
If I were to answer Paul directly, I would tell him I don’t see that “the very nature of things” tells me that men should have short hair, and women, long. Hair grows equally on both sexes. Both sexes have clothing to cover us. We tend to see things we’re used to seeing as the way they ought to be, and that doesn’t necessarily follow.
The part about “if anyone wants to be contentious, this is what the churches do” tells me he actually isn’t claiming divine authority for this, but spells out that it is only cultural. There are Christian churches in which girls and women don’t cut their hair. I reckon it’s up to the individual to determine how to approach these things.
In my theology, when Jesus said that the first law is to love God and the second to love your neighbor, and that’s pretty much it, that points to the things we need to focus on. When a literalist gets to the treatment of women, he has to ask himself if loving God requires him to treat women in such a way that he is not loving to us – if we resent, for instance, having second-class status, which many of us do. Which points out the importance of separating religious requirements from culture. If you’re doing something that your neighbor, male or female, resents, you should only continue to do it for some compelling reason; you should stop if you can.
May 3, 2011, 11:55 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Also, what reg said.
May 3, 2011, 11:57 amRichard Riley says:
The laws of intestate succession in all US states and DC, as far as I know, treat sons and daughters equally. So the laws reflect Eugene’s option 3. Of course people can direct that their property be distributed differently at death.
I assume any other treatment under the laws of intestate succession, where the state mandates how property is distributed, would be an Equal Protection violation under “intermediate scrutiny.” Not sure that would ever have been litigated, since I think the laws have been that way since modern Equal Protection analysis has existed. And based on this post and comments, some disparate treatment of sons vs. daughters could be an Establishment Clause violation too.
May 3, 2011, 11:58 amMike P Wagner says:
This fallacy looks to me the foundation of religious divisions (both Christian and Jewish). Heck, when I grew up, 100% of the Christians I knew believed in the infallibility of the Pope! But that might be because I grew up in a Roman Catholic neighborhood, and attended a parochial school. It was very clear that people who didn’t believe what we believe were not Christians, they were heretics.
I didn’t know that this fallacy had a name – and a colorful story.
Thanks,
Mike
May 3, 2011, 12:01 pmreg says:
That was then, this is now is explicitly what Jesus, son of God, and his Apostles taught. Or, more accurately, this is how you understood it then, this is what God intended, and I am fulfilling the law in your behalf so whoever trusts me won’t be judged.
The old testament condemnatioms on the Canaanite tribes were specific to those particular groups, and Gods own specific judgment, not general commands to go kill unbelievers. God doesn’t need me to defend him, but those condemnations are consistent with his judgment on all who trust and rely on themselves instead of on God.
May 3, 2011, 12:09 pmDebrah says:
Wow. Such a bleak and daunting set of circumstances.
It’s difficult to fathom that “birthing babies” presented such a confining and all-consuming definition of the lives of women.
Even more astonishing is that such a climate existed only a century ago.
Thank heavens for the two A’s: autonomy and abortion!
May 3, 2011, 12:33 pmKen Arromdee says:
You didn’t ask if it was “just” an Islamic thing, you asked if it was an Islamic thing. If an Islamic thing means “something which at least one Islamic group considers to be religiously mandated”, then the answer is “yes”.
I may add that I doubt it’s possible to determine whether a religion “really” demands something. Religion is what believers say it is; if they say that their religion demands something, then their version of the religion does.
(And before you ask things like “what if someone claims to follow the Pope but doesn’t agree with birth control”, I’d answer that their religion contradicts itself.)
May 3, 2011, 1:05 pmBarnacle Bill says:
I would think that the problem of determining who decides the doctrine of a given religious tradition, as it applies to inheritance, would be the testator. Get the testator’s rabbi/pastor/imam/whatever to sort it out. Not just anybody associated with any old sect within the tradition, but the recognized leader of the particular local religious community with which the testator had voluntarily affiliated. That avoids the problem of the court having to sort it out without having to invalidate the will (which I’d assume would lead to the estate being handled as for an intestate deceased, clearly not the intent of the testator ).
May 3, 2011, 1:10 pmArthur Kirkland says:
That is a worthy aspiration. Let’s hope we witness it someday.
May 3, 2011, 1:17 pmloki13 says:
So, because some Christians in Africa claim female circumcision is mandated by religion, female circumcision is a Christian thing. Because it is a rite of a minority jewish group in Africa, it is a Jewish thing.
Good to know.
[You know, perhaps it's just a cultural thing. But that might be too, um, nuanced.]
May 3, 2011, 1:30 pmsal says:
Good point. The distinction between civil, ceremonial and moral laws in order to determine which are still in effect for Christians and which are not has always fallen short of the mark, as you illustrate. All of Mosaic law was moral so attempts at distinction fail on that basis alone. Moreover, there is no need for the exercise because the Mosaic law was replaced in toto by the law of Christ. That was the purpose of the Mosaic law – to teach that man was incapable of keeping the law and thus needed salvation. James wrote, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.” If Christ was not the total solution, then there is no basis for Christianity. And if any of the Mosaic law is still in effect for Christians, then either Christ failed or there is a misunderstanding of what he accomplished.
May 3, 2011, 1:38 pmjgreene says:
The choice is NOT Islamic Law versus Old Testament Law. The choice is Sharia Law versus secular law in the United States or any other non-Islamic democratic nation.
May 3, 2011, 2:08 pmKen Arromdee says:
Technically those would also be religious things, but it would be misleading to mention them when talking about the religions as broader groups because they’re extreme minorities who have no influence whatsoever.
And if you have a better definition for when something is part of a religion, I’d be glad to hear it.
May 3, 2011, 2:09 pmJeff the Baptist says:
Exactly. Under Leviticus 25, they land which was “sold” was really just leased until the next year of jubilee. At the jubilee, it was returned to the tribe. The lease could be traded and sold, but ultimately the land returned to the family/tribe every 49/50 years.
May 3, 2011, 2:14 pmloki13 says:
I don’t. But I find the following things laughable, in order of increasing hilarity-
1. People explaining to others what their own religion commands.
2. People explaining to others why X group of their own religion is wrong about their religion.
3. People of X religion explaining what Y religion believes.
4. Best of all, people who have almost no knowledge of Y religion suddenly becoming experts in it, and telling everyone what it really is.
I don’t know what “true Christianity” and “true Islam” is. I can make some informed judgments about some of the beliefs of some believers based upon my observations of their texts, and the actual practices of people I know and places I have lived.
But if Christians can’t agree on what Christianity means (I still love the post above where someone posited the great advantage of Christianity is that most of it is ignored), isn’t a bit rich for you to lecture others on what Islam really is?
To take the female genital mutilation example- there is absolutely nothing in the Qur’an about it. There are some Sunni sects that believe in a mild form of it for cultural reasons (I personally don’t think there is such a thing as a mild form of it, but whatever), and try to place that on Islam. Of course, they are now suddenly reasoning away from it (dispensation from something that was never there to begin with :) ), since it’s not in the text. Kinda like how Christianity reasoned away from usury laws. And so on.
Personally, I think the whole religion thing is bogus, and you just end up with incredibly convoluted reasons for explaining why you need to have sex through a hole in a sheet. But one person’s bogus rationalizations is another person’s moral foundation. And I am amazed at how many scholars of Islam have suddenly popped up! Praise be Google!
May 3, 2011, 2:25 pmSeaDrive says:
And antisepsis.
May 3, 2011, 2:33 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Okay, so which of those 4 hilarities does this following commentary of yours fall under:
May 3, 2011, 2:51 pmloki13 says:
None. That’s a truthful description of what’s in the Qur’an and a practice. Whether they are right or wrong from the “true Islam” point of view isn’t for me to know, just like maybe when we die, we’ll all find out that David Koresh was right about raping little girls and that was real Christianity.
Is it okay with you if I say that there is no specific command in the New Testament to rape little girls, and I wouldn’t place that on Christianity? Just checking.
May 3, 2011, 3:00 pmyankev says:
Why is it okay to say that I bequeath to my son Joe 1/2 as much as his brothers because I don’t like his choice of friends, his hobbies or his choice of neckties (oaky, I’m dating myself — make that graphic tee shirts) but not okay to say that I’m bequeathing him less because my religion so dictates?
May 3, 2011, 3:03 pmyankev says:
I don’t think anyone says it was; EV did, however, mistake it for contemporary Jewish practice, and has been set straight by a number of commenters who pointed out that he inaccurately summarized the Orthodox Jewish source that he linked to.
May 3, 2011, 3:06 pmyankev says:
I must have missed that one. What is your source that Jewish law made polygamy mandatory rather than optional, and if it was mandatory, how was Rabbeinu Gershom able to prohibit it for Ashkenaz Jewry?
May 3, 2011, 3:16 pmyankev says:
The pharasees (who were the precursors of today’s normative Orthodox Judaism, thank you) did not apply the “Old Testament” literally or blindly, but applied it through the viewpoint of the Oral Torah and rabbinic regulation. The caricature of pharasaism in the “New Testament” and the various unsavory connotations of pharisee, like the denigrating use of “Talmudic”, are one of the more charming methods by which Christians showed their love for their Jewish neighbors who had not shown themselves sufficiently enlightened to abandon Judaism for Christianity.
May 3, 2011, 3:20 pmyankev says:
Wrong. It returned to the seller if he was still alive, and to his heirs (who would be members of the same tribe as he was) if he was not alive. A small but important difference.
May 3, 2011, 3:24 pmyankev says:
Not sure whether you mean explaining what the speaker’s own religion commands or what the listener’s own religion commands. I assume the former, given that this is in increasing order of hilarity. (I.e., if EV questioned what Sharia law and l’havdil Orthodox Jewish law require, why are we talking about Christianity?)
May 3, 2011, 3:27 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Yankev, the only times the Pharisees show up in the NT is when some who were contemporaries of Jesus did unattractive things like complain because he healed people on the Sabbath. The problem wasn’t their attempt to follow the law, the problem was that they put legalism ahead of the spirit of the law. He called them “whited sepulchres” – pretty on the outside, dead on the inside. For those of us Christians who think for five minutes, it’s pretty clear that it’s not orthodox Jewry that’s being maligned here, it’s hyperfocusing on rules to the detriment of acting like a godly person. Any of us could fall prey to that. God knows various Christian groups have over the centuries.
May 3, 2011, 3:31 pmloki13 says:
You have it right. That’s a personal thing that I keep under wraps. I actually find it instructive and informative, and I am respectful. But there’s a (very) small bit of hilarity for me because they’re always internally consistent variations of, “That’s the way it is, because that’s the way it is.”
I appreciate your erudite explanations of your faith, BTW.
May 3, 2011, 3:35 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Also:
1 – I am leaving Joe 1/2 the amount I am leaving Fred because I don’t like Joe. Not very nice, but legally cool.
2 – I am leaving Joe 1/2 the amount I am leaving Fred because my religion demands it. Again, legally cool.
3 – I want the court to figure out how my religion requires me to bequeath my assets.
I, and some others, see a difference between 3 and the first two.
May 3, 2011, 3:43 pmKen Arromdee says:
I’m not claiming that these sects really are Islam and the others aren’t. I’m claiming that they’re *all* Islam and that I have no reason to decide that one is true and the others aren’t. So the sect whose version of Islam teaches FGM is just as Islamic as the rest.
May 3, 2011, 3:43 pmCJColucci says:
I was just about to say, in response to yankev, what Laura(southernxyl)has already said.
May 3, 2011, 3:52 pmloki13 says:
So by your standards, we can cherrypick the practices of any and all Christian groups to determine what Christianity is?
So a splinter Mormon group practices polygamy, therefore Christianity is polygamous? The Catholics believes in papal infallibility, therefore Christians do? And snake handlers? And the African churches that practice FGM?
Heck, there is an established jewish sect in Africa that practices FGM- why don’t you lecture yankev about Judaism? I’ll get some popcorn.
Or do you save your expertise for Islam?
May 3, 2011, 3:53 pmSeaDrive says:
Being a Christian, I only know the Old Testament from hearing the New. See Matthew 23:
That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 24 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him.
May 3, 2011, 3:53 pmstyrgwillidar says:
It shouldn’t be up to a court to decide how the deceased interpreted their own religion. That should be the decedent’s resposibility in their will. No reference to religion should be allowed, the will should simply state what is to be done in clear terms, up to the person writing it to make it conform to their personal religious beliefs if that is their desire/intention.
May 3, 2011, 4:03 pmJay says:
“are actually better for daughters than the Old Testament passages, as traditionally understood”
As Mr. Yankev explained, one cannot understand the intent of the laws in the “Old Testament” without the Talmud and explanations of what is actually going on. As far as “endorsing the rule” the rule is final, but the Torah also allows people to make contracts, including contracts to give shares to daughters.
Even without any additional stipulations, Jewish law requires the estate of the deceased to support the widow and children. Each daughter is entitled to a 10% share as dowry. The Talmud notes that if this depletes the estate then the sons must go door to door and beg, as it would not be appropriate for the daughters to be forced to do so.
There is a serious problem having secular courts interpret and enforce religious laws. Judges are not and should not be clergy. An orthodox Jew should consult a rabbis when he/she writes a will to avoid this problem.
May 3, 2011, 4:19 pmThe deceased Mohamedian in question would have been wise to consult his local religious authority when writing his will.
Milhouse says:
Nope. If the daughter is still alive, her son gets nothing; if she’s deceased, he inherits her share, together with his aunts. What would change matters is if the testator had a son after the will was made; in that case the son would get everything, and the daughters’ maintenance would become a charge against the estate.
May 3, 2011, 5:14 pmKen Arromdee says:
There’s a difference between “Christianity is polygamous” and “polygamy is Christian”. The latter doesn’t assert that there is a single true Christianity.
May 3, 2011, 5:20 pmyankev says:
The Talmud makes the same observation. The problem is that the pharisees does not mean only those pharisees who show up in the NT, just as Jew does not mean only those Jews who loaned money at interest during the middle ages (the reasons, morality and utility of their doing so is way of thread). Historically the pharisees (perushim in Hebrew) historically were the rabbis, but their name have become synonomous with someone who hyperfocuses on rules to the detriment of acting like a godly person. It’s a usage that most knowledgable observant Jews cringe when they hear pharisee used in the sense of a self righteous obsessive hypocrite. This usage should have gone the way of Jewish interest, but for some reason it is still considered acceptable in polite company, in part because most Christians don’t realize that however the term is used in common parlance, the literal meaning is one who believes in normative Orthodox Judaism.
Then again, at UW in the late 60s early 70′s, I met plenty of kids from Wisconsin who could not understand why their Jewish friends got so bent out of shape when anyone used the expression Jewing him down.
May 3, 2011, 5:32 pmyankev says:
Yeah, so do I. That’s like why several others have suggested, I agree that 3 be written to say “as determined by [insert name of clergyman or religious body empowered to make the determination].” (Technically, isn’t that a special power of appointment?) But others have suggested that doing so — or even doing #2 — would run afoul of constitutional restrictions or that it would or should violate equal rights legislation.
May 3, 2011, 5:35 pmTed says:
Oh, ok. I understand now. So polygamy is Christian. But Islam is not polygamous. Cool. Glad you cleared that up.
May 3, 2011, 5:39 pmyankev says:
Then WADR you are getting an incomplete picture. Not to mention what I said earlier about the Oral Torah.
There is? Can you document that for me? It sure ain’t the Morroccan Jews.
It’s hard to reconcile that requirment with Judaism’s laws against bodily mutilation and with Judaism’s requirement that a husband sexually satisfy his wife.
May 3, 2011, 5:42 pmyankev says:
Strongly agree
Strongly agree.
Even more strongly disagree
May 3, 2011, 5:44 pmjeannebodine says:
Why does Professor Volokh feel the need to be so disingenuous on this topic? And repeatedly?
And why does the good Professor constantly (and erroneously) throw up the “Jews are almost as bad” straw man card in relation to Islamic law?
May 3, 2011, 5:59 pmloki13 says:
Ethiopian Jews.
Agree completely. Just another example of culture infiltrating religion. Why this cultural observance must be performed, and performed by another Jewish woman, has no bearing on how Judaism is practiced by most people. But cultural influences tend to infiltrate religion, like FGM in Christianity, and Islam, and, heck, just think of Christmas. :)
May 3, 2011, 6:04 pmTed says:
Where’s Travers when you need him. I always considered religion an artifact of culture, not something separate from it? Can culture really “infiltrate” religion? I have always considered religion itself a product of culture.
May 3, 2011, 6:38 pmyankev says:
Thanks. I did not know that. It’s worth noting that the Ethiopian Jews were completely cut off (no pun intended) from the Oral Law during their centuries of isolation. Among other things this led to differences in their laws of marriage and divorce, casting doubt on their status as Jews. This has led to some interesting and OT controversy about whether to require formal conversion on their part. Requiring conversion is counterintuitively the lenient position, as it creates a way for them to marry into the Jewish community whereas if they were not converts there would be a host of problems associated with marrying them.
The pertinent issue though is that FGM is AFAIK completely prohibited by Jewish law, rather than permitted (let alone required) by some minority interpretation of Jewish law. A deviant opinion by the Ethiopian community would be no more relevant than the opinion of e.g. the Karaites.
May 3, 2011, 7:00 pmAndrew L says:
It is precisely Paul’s contribution to the nascent Jesus movement that he attempted to provide a philosophical justification for incorporating gentiles as equal members within the early movement along with Jews. But scholarship on early Christianity of the last 10 years has articulated in quite extensive terms how difficult it is to determine the timing (or even the extent) of Paul’s success. Part of this has been the devastating scholarly challenge to the “Parting of the Ways” model.
As for whom Paul was addressing: it’s unclear how best to characterize Diaspora Jews and their communal hangers-on (which also included many gentiles – the Godfearers – well into late antiquity, even when Christianity had long been ascendant!). At least in the 1st century until 70 AD, Diaspora Jews were in many respects oriented towards the Temple – sending funds in place of the imperial tax, etc. So yes, the Jews of Rome may in some respects be part of that “Israelite community in the Eastern Mediterranean.”
When it comes to the (methodologically dubious) category of “Jewish Christianity,” scholars now overwhelmingly recognize the difficulty – even as late as the 4th century (at least in the Roman Empire – outside it is another story entirely!) – of mapping the spectrum of Jesus followers (at what point does it even become appropriate to speak of Christianity as a separate “religion” – itself a loaded term – from Judaism?). We certainly have lots of evidence for Pauline Christianity, but we also have lots of evidence for anti-Pauline Christianity. The bottom line is that there is too much that we don’t know.
In any event, virtually all specialists agree that in the 1st century it is entirely inappropriate to speak of “Christians” as distinct from “Jews.”
You’re throwing around terms willy nilly that we need to be careful about. What is “evangelism”? Is this the process depicted by the NT? Does the NT depict “conversion” from one “religion” to another? A methodologically sound reading of the NT within the matrix of early Judaism leaves us with a resounding “no.”
Indeed, the gentiles initially approached in the NT are Godfearers. And Jews would continue to accept Godfearers until well into late antiquity.
All in all, the impulse to simply assume a supersessionist narrative of a universalistic (Catholic) Christianity born whole in the year 0, sweeping a dried-up, parochial Judaism off the stage of history is simply wrong. It is not supported by the textual evidence, and is simply triumphalistic ignorance. Christianity too has a specific historical context, and its genesis as an “-ism” unto itself was the result of a long and complex process that did not occur the same way in any two places.
May 3, 2011, 7:19 pmAndrew L says:
Umm…except that virtually all scholarship of the last century on early Judaism and early Christianity, and most acutely in the last two decades, recognizes that this is not at all what Jesus attempts to do in the NT.
And for all your talk of “love thy neighbor” as a strictly Christian value, the fact remains that this line is actually just borrowed, as far as I know, from the OT (Leviticus 19:17-18, “Do not hate your brother in your heart…Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”).
Meanwhile, back in Christianity: Christendom is drenched in the blood of countless people throughout the ages (including most especially Jews) who would be quite surprised to learn that harshness and violence is actually a province of Judaism and the OT, rather than Christianity and the NT.
Christianity has made important progress (in some cases) atoning for its bloodthirsty history. But inasmuch as this process came several centuries too late for most of its victims, I’m sure Christians can find it in their hearts to cut their perceived Islamic adversaries a break.
May 3, 2011, 7:32 pmOrenWithAnE says:
Yeah, sorry, left out an important detail. The point is that intervening events between the drafting of a will and the testator’s passing make it preferably to encode religious law by reference rather than merely spelling out results.
May 3, 2011, 7:41 pmAndrew L says:
That’s not what they complain about. Just saying. I find most Christians have reading comprehension problems when it comes to OT/NT.
In any event, the picture of the Pharisees in the NT is highly prejudicial and has no presumption of historical accuracy. It is simply one of several early witnesses to the Pharisaic sect.
Of course, the NT’s ugly portrayal of the Pharisees has led to a great deal of prejudice and persecution, especially against Jews, throughout the centuries. The Christian adversos Iudaios tradition is general is one of the most pernicious expressions of bigotry in late antiquity and into the middle ages.
May 3, 2011, 7:41 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Mark 3
Luke 13
May 3, 2011, 8:17 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Should add that I am copy-and-pasting from biblegateway.com.
May 3, 2011, 8:19 pmBarb says:
Given the ancient, world-wide treatment of women as mere property, including the daughter as no. 3 in line for the family fortune (after the eldest and after his brothers) maybe wasn’t so bad –especially if she married a successful man and would have security of her own from him. The men were responsible for their wives and children –they needed to be benefited by their fathers. The wife’s husband would benefit her.
This scripture cited doesn’t say whether or not the younger brothers inherit along with the oldest son. I suspect that all the offspring were to be cared for –her by a husband and a dowry reserved for marriage — and the boys by working for their fathers and earning their way –but I think the oldest got Dad’s biggest portion as primary heir. The story of Jacob and Esau and the birthright says their father was tricked into giving the birthright (oldest child status) to the younger twin son –because God preferred him to his redneck brother.
This scripture EV cited goes back much farther than the Koran in its origins –and yet, Judeo-Christianity continues to be more “evolved” and enlightened than Islam (by my impression of it.)
In the Jewish history, the woman was “subjugated to man” by the curse after the Fall. This is just one of many curses that Christ’s coming, and the church’s establishment, work to eliminate. We resist the curses wrought by sin –curses of death, disease, pestilence, difficulty in man’s labor, difficulty in women’s birth labor –and the subjugation of women –and all with New Testament blessing about the Golden Rule, compassion, love, generosity, mercy, etc.
Judeo-Christianity’s superiority over Islam is not so much about “evolution” or change in the Judeo-Christian faith, as it is STUDY of the OT and the NT Scriptures.
Jesus does much for women –in saying Mary can sit at his feet and learn along with the men –even though her sister says she belongs in the kitchen with her.
He talks to a woman who has had 7 men and isn’t married to her current one –talking to her at the public well was not PC for His day. They have a philosophical conversation and she invites him to her neighborhood to teach–and he goes.
He tells the men who want to stone the adulteress that they can only do so if they are without sin–and in His presence, they know they are not –and so He tells the women her accusers are gone and she is not under His condemnation –and “Now, go and sin no more.”
St. Paul says a few things to confirm women as inferior, but He ALSO wrote “There is neither Jew nor Greek (Gentile), slave nor free, male nor female; all are one in Christ” –which implies equality in God’s sight and thus in the church–and ultimately in society. While Paul said that HE believed women should keep silent in the churches because Eve was the first to be deceived by Satan, he sort of ameliorated this by saying elsewhere that the Holy spirit would be bestowed upon women and men –who would both prophesy (tell forth) the Word of God to the people. He also taught “mutual submission” of believers to one another.
And while He said that man is the head of the home as Christ is head of the church, He also said that men are to love their wives as Christ loved the church–willing to die for them –and that the wife and husband belong to each other –that her body is his and vice versa. He said wives are to respect and obey their husbands –of course this is ameliorated by the command to love one’s wife sacrificially, unselfishly –and the teaching of Christians to submit mutually to one another, “in honor preferring one another.” Obedience isn’t an issue for wives whose husbands are loving them sacrificially and unselfishly.
Of course, the Golden Rule equalizes all of us: Do to others as you would have them do unto you. Thus, no slavery. No subjugation of each other.
Nevertheless, there are ROLES in marriage that don’t have to be rigid but do have to do with decision-making and helping kids develop sexual identity. There is an attractiveness in a marriage where the woman lets the man wear the pants and she surrenders no femininity while still being her own person, equal to her husband.
Woman was created as man’s “helpmeet suitable.” So she rightly has an advisory capacity in their union –and He would wisely cede some decision-making to her –in areas where she is gifted for leadership. A husband who lords over his wife is no hero; a wife who nags and henpecks her husband is unhappy and unappealing to all –and to the children. A well-ordered home is a blessing to all its members and a testimony to the world — where love of God and family rule –where the fruits of the Spirit are practiced (love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, kindness, self-control.)
And finally, the equality of persons is made clear through scripture about salvation for all who believe –and the Holy Spirit’s bestowal on all believers who ask.
The liberation of slaves and women from world-wide subjugation, however, is not the first objective of scripture; salvation is. Liberation from sin and death is the first objective in Christian scripture.
Out of the proliferation of Judeo-Christian Bibles have come improvements in human rights and equality around the world –and in the west first –where the Bible was a common text –even in our public schools. Where the US Capitol building has paintings of Christianity’s role –where Thomas Jefferson allegedly even got the Marine Band to do the music for a weekly church service he attended in the capitol building.
See http://thebarbwire.blogspot.com/2011/04/capitol-building-as-church-amazing.html
May 3, 2011, 8:56 pmBarb says:
Good question. We could divide all assets equally among our 4 –though the two single ones are probably also the least wealthy–but their expenses are fewer since they don’t have children. There is something to be said for benefiting those who give us grandchildren but they are the wealthiest on their own. Of course, we give to their grandchildren –and maybe we’ll be able to help them with college, etc.
In the meantime, we tend to give to each according to their needs at any given time. If one is buying a house, we help –we have helped with cars. We gave two expensive weddings (which I don’t believe in.) We want them to all live in homes they like and would help them attain that goal if we are able when they buy. Some of them cost us more to educate than others, taking an extra year to finish, etc.
There is no sibling rivalry. It’s shame the way some heirs fight over small potatoes –or large. I think the best thing to do is divide the inheritance among the 4 kids equally, and spend unequally in the meantime according to need –but time will tell.
I also think that the care-givers who do the most for us –because they have the time or proximity–should get more –perhaps before the will –as time goes along.
When one child prospers via marriage or their own giftedness and determination and hard work , how much did we enable their good fortune? Did they just get better genes –or did we invest more in them as our firstborn?
Our goal is to just help them all as much as we can for now –and give them some things ahead of time –and eliminate any reasons for jealousy in so far as we are able.
May 3, 2011, 9:44 pmAndrew L says:
Laura,
I suppose you’ve found “Pharisees” in those narratives where no one else has?
It’s actually ironic that these sorts of NT narratives are cited (especially by religious Christians) as evidence for Jesus’ rejection of the law (or adherence to the “spirit” of the law), when in fact he is simply engaging in standard Jewish legal argumentation (including a fortiori pointing, a staple of the rabbinic tradition (kal ve-homer)) that is not only well within the bounds of Jewish law, but actually puts him ON THE SAME SIDE as the Rabbis (who claimed descent from the Pharisees) and against those like the sectarians of the Dead Sea Scrolls, who, incidentally, had rules both prohibiting saving an animal on the Sabbath, and healing a human on the Sabbath.
Your examples are not only wrong, then, but self-defeating.
May 3, 2011, 9:47 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Mark 2, leading up to Mark 3:
Clearly “they” are Pharisees.
Your second paragraph is very nice, but it doesn’t comport with the Pharisees then leaving to go make plans to have Jesus killed.
I can’t help it that the text is not to your liking, Andrew. It is what it is.
May 3, 2011, 9:56 pmBarb says:
Condemnation of Jews as “Christ-killers” really was “unchristian” of Christians. Most people didn’t have the Bible in those early days of Jewish persecution. Even Jesus said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” –referring to all who had a role in his death–the Romans and the Jews –and all of us for our sin. You can’t read Christ’s teachings about loving neighbor, brother and enemy and conclude you can hate the Jews.
Besides, Jesus was Jewish and all HIs disciples and most of the early church were Jews. So Christianity is the Messianic faction within Judaism. It was unique among the factions by allowing ANYONE to join by mere faith in Christ. Messianic Jews today call themselves “completed Jews,” and Christians believe they are ingrafted into the family tree of God’s family –His chosen people. Jesus extended the “chosen people” status to the whole human race –to anyone who would repent of sin and believe in Him.
We have long supported “Jews for Jesus, ” a ministry we really like–and their music. Moishe Rosen was the founder. Before that, there was a ministry called “Jewish Evangelism.” The NT says to preach the Gospel, first to the Jews and then the Gentiles. There are other Christian Jews who call themselves “Messianic Jews,” for believing in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.
As for rabbis as descendents of Pharisees? Jesus was called, Rabbi –or teacher. Not sure of your point here.
The Pharisees were harshly confronted by Jesus and vice versa. There were some rabbinical laws from which Jesus released His followers. Saying “The Sabbath was made for man –and not man for the Sabbath.” He challenged the Pharisees about their hypocrisy just as we challenge ourselves in the church about the same thing. We don’t want to be “whited sepulchres filled with dead man’s bones.” We don’t want to be proud of public prayers –and looking down at a widow for giving her widow’s mite as offering. We don’t want to be arrogant.
And some of the Pharisees and others were so accused. But it was both Jewish leadership and Roman gov’t and masses of people –and our sins –that necessitated Christ’s death on the cross. God planned it. Jesus predicted it and prayed to His father to be spared. But the sacrifice of the perfect lamb for the atonement of sins had evolved out of Jewish religion/tradition–and John the Baptist said of Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” In the OT, Isaiah 53 predicts a death that fits that of Christ’s. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%2053&version=NIV
May 3, 2011, 10:15 pmBill Robelen says:
@ Andrew L
Your mention of the bloodthirsty history of Christianity is frought with a misunderstanding of history. Christianity does have a bloody history. It is well recorded by many journalists of that day, including non-believers that for about the first three hundred years it was dangerous to be a Christian. Of the eleven faithful disciples, only one died a natural death. John survived being boiled alive in oil. The others were all killed for the crime of preaching the gospel. There was indeed some violence in history of Christianity, by one sect of Christianity. The sect that sprung up around Rome in the 400′s. Many will point to the Crusades as evidence of the violence of Christians, yet they were more a political move than anything else. The Catholic Church recognized the threat of radical Islam, indeed it had only been a few hundred years prior that Islam had marched through much of Europe, only to be stopped by Charles Martel. When a group of radical Muslims beseiged Constantinople and closed off the Holy Lands, the Catholic Church declared the Crusades as a means to stop them. Were atrocities committed? Yes, by both sides. Many of those who fought in the Crusades did so for money or popularity.
If you want an example of the violence of the early church, then observe the behavior of the missionaries sent to the Frankish tribes. These missionaries carried money to buy slaves from the Franks in order to set them free. That is how violent they were.
In response to your remarks about the Pharisees, Jesus did have some choice things to say to them. The Pharisees had created a unique legal system that added many rules to the Jewish Law. Some of these rules defeated the message of the law. Jesus called them out on those. He gave the example that the Mosaic Law required children to care for their parents when they got old. The Pharisees had created an exception to this in that they would claim that all their money had been dedicated to God. They would still use this money for their own ends, but because they had dedicated it to God, they would say that they had no money to take care of their parents. It was this behavior that Jesus addressed when he called them white washed sepulchers, pretty on the outside, filled with corruption on the inside.
May 3, 2011, 10:18 pmAndrew L says:
I see you’re not familiar with the basics of text criticism. Well here’s a perfect example of a narrative that scholars correctly contend has been (poorly) stitched together. Note the incongruity of the mention of Pharisees where they did not appear in the actual story (nor could they, since the Pharisaic-rabbinic position on healing on the Sabbath is virtually identical to that espoused in that particular passage). This is simply another attempt by the NT authors to implicate the well-known enemy, the Pharisees, in mischief – even though the idea is completely nonsensical from an historical point of view.
I can’t help it that the text is just shoddily written, Laura. It is what it is.
Right. And what exactly does this have to do with healing on the Sabbath?
May 3, 2011, 10:29 pmAndrew L says:
Yep, those Christians were just like us weren’t they?
Forgive the Jews massacred in cold blood by mobs led by fanatical Christian preachers like Peter the Hermit, or the Jews of the Rhineland murdered during widespread Christian pogroms during the Crusades, or the many men, women and children – Jew and Muslim alike – also massacred in cold blood by Crusaders conquering Jerusalem during the First Crusade for not sharing your view that Christian Crusaders were merely heroic liberators who only occasionally got a bit out of hand.
May 3, 2011, 10:35 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Andrew, let me turn around your tone and try it on you and see how you like it.
The word “them” is a pronoun. When you have a pronoun, you look at what came right before it to tell you what the pronoun is a stand-in for. This is called the antecedent.
Mark 3 starts like this:
Since Mark 3 starts with “them” you have to look at the end of Mark 2 to see who “them” is. What do we find there? Space aliens? Patagonians? Why, no – it’s Pharisees! And look what they’re doing! They’re bitching about Jesus’s non-observance of the Sabbath by picking grain to eat! Then look at the continuity from the end of Mark 2 to the beginning of Mark 3 – they are looking to see whether Jesus will heal that man on the Sabbath – why? To congratulate him? No, to accuse him! Clearly it is the same “they” we saw at the end of the previous chapter.
Now do you want to try again, without the condescension? Because I find this wearying and unpleasant. But take your time. I’m going to bed and will not be back before tomorrow.
May 3, 2011, 10:40 pmnona says:
the quote from the hebrew bible is mislabeled in your post – it is numbers 27 (not 11 – the link is correct) [EV says: Thanks, fixed it!]
what interests me is that you seemingly ignore the context – where the daughters of a specific man who died in the wilderness w/ no sons and five daughters approach moses and the elders, and the text relates that god agrees w/ the woman’s claim and god therefore instructs moses about modifying or applying the law in line the women’s arguments.
[EV says: I'm just quoting the material that has been interpreted as mandating that sons (if any) inherit instead of daughters. Whatever the context, it hasn't affected the inheritance rule as it has been understood by traditional Orthodox Jewish law, at least based on the sources that I've seen.]
Thus there seems to be an underlying attitude of respect for women’s intelligence and judgement, going back to the very text you cite as similar to the koran.
May 3, 2011, 10:50 pmare there similar tales in the koran, of mohammed listening to women and modifying his stance to agree w/ them?
Andrew L says:
Actually the available evidence (scant as it is) suggests the opposite: the Pharisees were the group that maintained the ancient traditions of the Jewish masses. Martin Goodman, in fact, argues quite persuasively that the Pharisees were actually the party most faithful to the widespread practice of Second Temple period Jews. In his view, the Pharisees didn’t create anything (let alone anything like a “unique legal system that added…”), they maintained the traditional interpretative tradition of Jewish law.
Realize that the sole evidence for this claim is the NT, which has a pernicious bias against the Pharisees. In fact, the NT far oversimplifies matters in both characterizing the issue as whether or not one tries to cheat his parents (this is obviously absurd), and in attributing one view to “the Pharisees,” when in fact the Pharisaic rabbis debate this very issue in the Tosefta Hullin (2.24), with one decisor adopting a position that actually corresponds to what we have in the NT.
The point is that pretty much nothing that the NT says about the Pharisees can be taken at face value.
May 3, 2011, 10:51 pmRicardo says:
What if the text is wrong? Ancient historians have raised very strong doubts about the accuracy of Matthew’s account of the crucifixion of Jesus (which is heavily prejudicial against Judaism, at least in the King James translation). Crucifixion was the Roman punishment for sedition and Pontius Pilot was probably a blood-thirsty dictator. Yet Matthew portrays him almost as a wilting flower who caves into the demands of the Passover crowds to have Jesus crucified for blasphemy while personally believing he is innocent of sedition. Something doesn’t add up there.
Matthew also accuses the Pharisees of bribing the guards stationed at Jesus’ tomb to say the tomb was raided by Jesus’ followers while they slept. The original Jewish conspiracy theory, one might say.
May 3, 2011, 10:51 pmyankev says:
Jewish law distinguished well before then between Godfearers and Jews, and had well-established conversion procedures for Godfearers who wanted to become Jews. These procedures predate Christianity. Jews believe that these procedures go back to Sinai. They are in any event documented in pre-Christian rabbinic literature, including the Mishnah and the Medrash.
May 3, 2011, 11:06 pmAndrew L says:
*Sigh*
You don’t read Greek do you? Palestinian Aramaic? I thought not.
If you did, of course, you would realize that “synagoge,” “be kenishta” (or equivalent terms) are frequently assumed to act in the plural (the idea being that they are a place for people to congregate, as the Aramaic indicates). Thus, “them” is the conventional way of describing “the synagogue” (i.e. the people in it). Is it your position that only Pharisees attended synagogues, or maybe that Pharisees had their own synagogues? If so, you would find zero supporting evidence, and you would be entirely alone among commentators. But please be my guest.
I know, I know, it’s hard to pull off my “tone” when you don’t know what you’re talking about…
May 3, 2011, 11:07 pmyankev says:
FOr Pharisees (Read followers of Rabbinic Judaism), these guys were profoundly ignorant of Jewish law, which permits healing by spiritual means on the Sabbath. I am not very familiar with the NT, but this is not the only misrepresentation of Judaism that it contains. I nearly fell over laughing when a Christian missionary told me how that certain man entered Jerusalem near Passover time when all the people were waiving palm branches and shoudting hosanna (that’s actually Hosheana, which in Hebrew means please save us) to G-d in the highest (In Hebrew, that would be — to G-d, the Most High). Maybe Succos — the holy day when we Jews are commanded to wave palm branches — came about 7 months early that year so as to coincide with Passover.
Or maybe the authors of the Gospels knew very little about the Jewish religion and could count on the fact that their intended audience would know even less.
May 3, 2011, 11:12 pmyankev says:
ROFL. Red all over, as I recall.
May 3, 2011, 11:15 pmyankev says:
May his name be blotted out.
May 3, 2011, 11:17 pmyet another anon says:
Laura – “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” is a statement of the rabbis – i.e. of the very pharisees whose views Jesus is supposedly rejecting! Thus in the naarative you quote it is completely unclear whether Jesus is justifying his actions by pointing out that the pharisees agree w/ him or quoting the pharisees only to apply their statement differently than they did – what argues for the former is that it’s also completely unclear what Jesus is supposed to have done wrong.
IMO whatever actually happened or didn’t happen, it’s fairly clear that by the time the gospels were written, the authors were quite ignorant of Jewish law and society and so probably got a lot of details wrong or were hazy on them. They may have incorrectly cited a story where Jesus’ behavior is conventional according to the norms of his society as illustrating his departure from those norms, or they may be correct that he was departing from those norms and missed some crucial detail in the naarative. But something seems to be missing from the tale.
Taking your analysis at face value, I wish to ask you – suppose someone suffers from a chronic condition that causes them no immediate pain and either isn’t dangerous or puts them in no immediate danger. for example, they are blind from birth or have a shriveled hand. There’s a doctor who allegedly can cure them, but the doctor has office hours only monday to friday. The person suffering from the condition hears about this miracle-worker doctor on saturday. My question is: Is it reasonable for the prospective patient to insist on seeing the doctor on saturday, or can and should he wait until normal office hours monday morning for an appointment. Most of us take for granted that we reach doctors after hours and on weekends for emergencies – if we are in pain, if there is some danger or worsening of the condition etc. when there is no urgency, we wait till office hours. So why is it different for the sabbath? what’s the urgency? Mind you, as I wrote above, I am unsure what Jesus is supposed to have done wrong. But the story, as interpreted by many christians throughout the ages, strikes me as the underlying reason observant jews still have a meaningful Sabbath while sunday rest has gone by the wayside. If there are no objective rules for what you do and don’t do on sabbath, that’s the end of the sabbath. The jewish rule is: if you are feeling unwell, or in pain, the rules of sabbath are relaxed. for any situation in any way dangerous, you violate the sabbath immediately. something that causes you no distress and poses no danger – why would you not wait till Sunday? What would Jesus have done wrong had he told the man with the shriveled arm to come sit down at the sabbath meal and waited till after the sabbath to heal him assuming he actually violated the sabbath? “the sabbath is made for man” – again, a statement of the Pharisees! – assumes there is a Sabbath…
May 3, 2011, 11:19 pmyankev says:
No argument from me. I am perfectly prepared to accept that the NT tells blatant, obvious and provable lies about what the Pharisees taught, did and believed.
May 3, 2011, 11:20 pmAndrew L says:
The earliest example of rabbinic literature is was redacted in the early 3rd century. It is certainly unclear what can be reliably dated earlier. Historians do NOT regard any rabbinic compilations as pre-Christian. In fact, even if you accept the historicity of all Mishnaic attributions, you really only have a tiny percentage of Tannaim that predate Christianity. Some are concurrent with the development of Christianity and the majority post-date the beginning of Christianity (as portrayed in the NT at least).
True. But Jews apparently did not insist that they convert in order to attend the synagogue. In fact, some well known Godfearers simultaneously maintained their roles as pagan religious authorities! And the epigraphic evidence is quite clear that Godfearers could remain Godfearers and still be honored in synagogue inscriptions (well into late antiquity).
May 3, 2011, 11:30 pmAndrew L says:
Laura,
I realize I’m belaboring the obvious here, but since you apparently are not familiar with the languages you’re attempting to analyze, I will point out that later Aramaic literature is replete with examples of pronouns without explicit antecedents – it’s one of its most common features – especially in the context of public spaces. Hence, “ikla rav huna bereih de-rav natan le-vei rav nahman bar yizhaq; ve-ameru leih…” (Rabbi Huna son of Rabbi Nathan visited Rabbi Nahman son of Yizhaq’s house; THEY said to him…). “They” refers to whomever was in the house.
May 3, 2011, 11:41 pmRicardo says:
Ouch. That’s an excellent point. John 12:13 does indeed specify that the people greeting the return of Jesus cut down palm branches. Matthew doesn’t specify what type of tree the branches came from and I haven’t checked the other books. Yet John is also quite explicit (in chapter 13) that Jesus’ last days took place during Passover time.
May 3, 2011, 11:59 pmReaderY says:
We distinguish between “commercial” conduct, where gender based preferences are classified as “discrimination”, and “private” conduct, where they aren’t.
Private intrafamilial bequests, particularly when motivated by religion, are private matters rather than commercial ones. If the “discrimination” metaphor doesn’t apply to private intrafamilial behavior, it doesn’t apply here.
Moreover, the behavior would seem to be genetically compelled. Jews have certain genetic correlations, and Orthodox Jews have them more so, which doubtless is what also causes them to intermarry less. It’s well established that when a private behavior is correlated with a genetic characteristic, then we conclude the genes cause the behavior. We simply don’t consider the possibiliity that causation may be the other way around, even though in other situations it’s considered reasonable to think that distinctive sexual/reproductive behavior (like not intermarrying) may tend to result in genetic characteristics different from the generalpopulation (i.e the behavior might cause the genes).
Since genes would seem to be causing the behavior according to the rules of causal inference that seem to be generally accepted in these situations, it’s simply unjust and unfair to disparage it.
May 4, 2011, 12:52 amLurker says:
Here, it would be very beneficial to separate different types of religion in the sociological sense. First, protestant Christians, relying very heavily on the Bible, tend not to remember that oral or written tradition plays a very great role in many forms Christianity (e.g. Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy). Similarly, Jews have their oral Torah in addition to the Law and the Prophets and Islam has various types of secondary sources of religious law.
Even more importantly, a religious scholar sees his religion very differently from an uneducated layman. For a layman, many practices which are not really part of the religion in the scholarly sense are cornerstones of the layman’s religion.
For example, in the late 19th century Finland, certain Christian groups considered the wearing of beards by men and the wearing of scarves by women essential forms of Christian behaviour. Nowadays, same practices would be considered typically foreign customs that have more to do with Islam than Christianity.
May 4, 2011, 1:57 amloki13 says:
I should clarify-
But first, I am always happy when someone breaks out the Aramaic, and have really enjoyed the recent conversation!
I was trying to take a shortcut with my words. Of course religion *as practiced* is a product of culture. From my point of view, all religion is a product of culture (but I can respect those who believe their religion is divinely inspired etc.).
A different way to phrase it is to say that many religions have a text (or texts). How those texts get interpreted have very much to do with the culture. In addition, religion is often used to justify cultural norms that have nothing to do with what is in the text, and those norms become part of the practice of the religion. See Lurker’s comment about Finland in the 19th Century.
May 4, 2011, 7:49 amOrenWithAnE says:
No presumption, naturally, but some of the depictions (although, as noted earlier, Mark is not among them) do accord with other sources from that period (Tacitus, Josephus).
May 4, 2011, 8:32 amBarb says:
Seems to me –that human nature is such –that synagogue leaders would indeed want to protect their turf –from any itinerant, extremely popular, miracle-working preacher from Galilee (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” they wondered.) Are all your rabbis so exemplary today (like all Catholic priests and all prosperity preachers and pentecostal healers) that you assume the leaders in Jesus’ day were all exemplary, God-fearing Jews? Do you really believe there were no hypocrites among the Pharisees such that Jesus would take them on as a group–considering they apparently found him to be an upstart magician and threat to their authority and the respect of the people?
As for Palm Sunday –Jesus’ entry like royalty into Jerusalem –no one claims the people came out to wave the palms out of their historical tradition of a day for doing so –but because they heard that Jesus was coming –and many assumed He had the power to “save us” from Roman rule and restore the glory of the reigns of Solomon and David.
I’ve heard before that a donkey was a humble choice, a sign of Christ’s humility –but more recently, scholars have said the donkey as transportation was a sign of royalty out of Jewish tradition. (I can’t imagine –but that’s what I heard.) Jesus, of course, chose the mode of transportation, knowing where his disciples could get a donkey for “the master” to ride.
The Pharisees became synonymous with hypocrites in the New Testament –because some of them were –and they had, apparently, as Laura points out, LONG imposed burdensome regulations on people –and lack of mercy in their judgments — (stoning for adultery) –and some of that came from OT scripture –yes, EV is right that there are some hard-to-defend things in Hebrew scriptures just as in the Koran. What he doesn’t note is that CHRISTIANITY applied as taught by Jewish Jesus, Paul, Peter and John and the other Jewish Gospel writers –is the enlightener for all faiths –including secular humanism –for western civ in general. The “evolution” of Judeo-Christian enlightenment comes mostly, first of all, from Christian scripture (The Gospel of Jewish Jesus) preached by protestants who affected England and America first of all.
Jewish Messiah Jesus came to say, that self-righteous, legalistic, uncompassionate, sinful hypocrites claiming to be good –of any era or group, are damaging to all the true God-fearers the world over.
May 4, 2011, 9:18 amBarb says:
PS to my statement:
Granted, the above was not His primary message. As He said He didn’t come to condemn anyone –because we all stand condemned to death already. He came to deliver us all from condemnation, offering us a free gift of eternal salvation , life after death in a place He said He would prepare for us –some believe it is the re-born, perfected earth itself.
To claim a free gift, you have to open it. “Seek and you will find. Ask and you will receive. Knock and the door will be opened for you.” It is faith in Christ that opens the door. “Behold I stand at the door and knock –if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter in and dine/fellowship with Him.”
“By faith are you saved and not of works, lest any man should boast.”
May 4, 2011, 9:34 amyankev says:
We still don’t. We just don’t count them as part of the quorum or permit them to fullfill obligations for others (as by leading the prayers). Nor do we permit them to marry into the Jewish community without converting. As far as I know, none of these rules have changed since pre-Christian times.
May 4, 2011, 9:34 amAndrew L says:
Tacitus does not mention the Pharisees as far as I am aware. Citation?
As far as Josephus is concerned: on the contrary! Part of the methodological conundrum when it comes to assessing the place of the Pharisees in Second Temple Judaism is that the NT evidence does not accord very well with Josephus. The common strain seems to be their knowledge of Jewish texts, but that’s about it. A close and philologically sound reading of the two sources depictions of the Pharisaic view of the afterlife shows that even here, the NT and Josephus differ.
May 4, 2011, 9:38 amyankev says:
It’s not uncommon in Hebrew literature either. This is part of the challenge of studying (or learning, as we call it) Gemorah (the Aramaic portions of the Talmud), Mishnah (the earlier Hebrew portions) or even or even Tanakh (scripture)
May 4, 2011, 9:39 amBarb says:
A related issue: In the early church, the Jewish Christians led by Peter thought they should not fellowship at the same food table as the Gentile believers in Christ –according to their historical tradition. Paul and Peter discussed this. The early Christians were still practicing Jews. So the issue came up: do converts to Christ need to be circumcised? Are the dietary laws still valid? Can Jews eat with Gentiles in the faith? Peter had a vision about the unclean foods. In his vision, God showed him that what God has cleansed, the Jewish Christians should not consider “unclean.” And this applied to Gentiles also, no longer being “unclean” just because they weren’t Jews.
and so Paul concludes, “There is no difference between Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male or female –we are all one in Christ.”
There it is –the seed of the western ideal of equality of persons.
May 4, 2011, 9:44 amyankev says:
No, and I don’t believe that there are no criminals and no sexual promiscuity among certain population groups in America. But I would object to anyone using the names of any ethnic group as a synomymn for criminality or sexual immorality. Yet people think nothing of saying Pharisee — which undipsutably means those who followed what is today (and was then) normative rabbinic Orthodox Judaism — as a synonmymn for self-righteous hypoctire. I find that offensive and so would many Orthodox Jews, as well as many non-Orthodox Jews who are familiar with who and what the Pharisees were.
May 4, 2011, 9:47 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Well, apparently you actually can’t stop. This commonly is a sign of an unhappy person. I’m sorry about that and will stop the snark from my end.
To put this entire wretched thing into context:
Reg used the word “pharisaical”. I personally would not have used that word b/c I know Jews reasonably don’t like it, but I’m not Reg. Yankev did object to its use, saying that it gives a negative connotation to rabbis. I told Yankev that the only place we non-Jews run across Pharisees is in the NT where they were reported to do things like object to healing on the Sabbath, and thus “pharisaical” to us isn’t a bad statement about Jews, but about excessive legalism.
This point stands, regardless of whether I’ve studied Greek, Aramaic, or anything else. What I know or don’t know is irrelevant. The point is that any reasonable person reading in a continuous narrative that
1 – the Pharisees objected to Jesus’s disciples picking grain and eating on the Sabbath
2 – an unspecified “they” looked to see if he was going to heal a man on the Sabbath, looking to accuse him
3 – the Pharisees went out and made plans to kill him
would think that the “they” in 2 refers to Pharisees. We aren’t talking about scholars here, we are talking about Joe Blow non-jew using the term “pharisaical”. I don’t know how my not studying Greek would change any of this, except that it gives you a chance to sigh over my ignorance, which as I say is not the sign of a happy person.
…
Yankev, I know that healing people on the Sabbath shouldn’t be a problem. May I point out to you that you said that the Talmud talks about not being overly legalistic. It wouldn’t make sense that the Talmud would do that if no Jew ever was overly legalistic. If you want to say that there never have been a group of rabbis from the dawn of time who would have a problem with Jesus healing on the Sabbath, fine, but I don’t think that’s consistent with human nature as I have observed it. We just had “yet another anon” here asking how come Jesus couldn’t have done his healing on another day.
May 4, 2011, 9:52 amAndrew L says:
Again, I’m not sure what your evidence is for practice in pre-Christian times.
The rest of your comment may indeed be the case, but I would preach caution in your formulation. After all, the epigraphic evidence – what happened in practice – makes clear that Godfearers were essentially equal members of synagogues along with ethnic Jews (although it is unclear what exactly this entailed). Indeed, as we now know, some synagogues styled themselves, or were referred to by members (both Jewish and Godfearer) as, for example, “Synagogue of the Jews and Godfearers.”
As strange as it may seem from the modern day ritual/liturgical context, there is nothing barring a Godfearer (or any gentile) from praying and reading the Bible in a synagogue. We do not know enough about what went on in the synagogues of antiquity (ritually or liturgically), but even if we assume that – at least by a certain date – synagogues were governed by the rabbinic guidelines in the Mishnah, Tosefta, Yerushalmi, Bavli, et al., all that would indicate is that a Godfearer, as you noted, could not perform keri’at ha-Torah or count for a quorum, or other such things. But in every other respect they could – and, as far as the evidence goes, they were! – equal members of the synagogue well into late antiquity (the 4th or perhaps even the 5th century AD, depending on when scholars date the Aphrodisias inscription). Long after Paul!
May 4, 2011, 9:54 amAndrew L says:
Actually the “western ideal” of equality of persons is in Genesis (“in the image of God he created them [i.e. the ancestors of all humanity]).
Within that framework, that different guidelines apply to different people has nothing to do with equality or inequality. Indeed, many strands of Christianity have embraced this principle. The Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches do not ordain women to the sacramental priesthood, because such – they reason – is prohibited by the NT. 1 Timothy 2:11-15 is a popular citation in this regard (among others).
May 4, 2011, 10:01 amRob R says:
I suppose I would agree that the Quaran then treats women better than the old testament in that regard, and yet I completely disagree that the Muslim scriptures as a whole are better than the Christian Scriptures for women (or anyone for that matter) (all due respect here to the Jews who just recognize the old, but I have to word it this way because of where I’m going with this). The Quaran was plunked down in its entirety to be followed then and forever more. Not so with the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. The Christian scriptures are all about a relationship between God and his people, and the key thing here is that this is NOT A STATIC relationship. Scripture took people where they were at an moved them forward. You see the old testament (and new) doesn’t just alter seek to outright alter society merely by proscription but also through trajectories. For example, prosititution is not illegal in the old testament though it is frowned upon (in the new, it is prohibited as a sin). In both books, polygamy and slavery are not frowned upon, but they are undermined.
The Christian scriptures don’t just always lay everything out black and white to be followed to a T. They set the stage for improvement and that is why it is so much more concievable that a Judeo-Christian culture does indeed treat women better than men than an Islamic culture even though what is explicit from the scripture may seem the other way around on the surface. In the new testament, you get further undermining of the male dominated world. It is still undermining, but the new testament is clear that women are as valuable as men. Even though property laws aren’t changed (because the New Testament isn’t concerned with distributing property but encouraging free generosity and sharing out of love… however they are done away with as Paul said, we uphold the law (we look to it for understanding) but we are not under the law) the value of women is made equal to that in men (in the new covenant there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free). Women are given roles via gifting. And in that, they take on roles that would traditionally be reserved for men. The story of Mary and Martha demonstrate this. Martha thought (literally) that the place for women was in the kitchen while Mary wanted to learn from Jesus. Jesus said that Mary choose the better thing here. The subtlety here that we can miss is that Mary is allowed to be a disciple (and later in Paul, we see that some women were deaconnesses). And then in the narrative, the first to preach the completion of the gospel were women, that is they were the first to proclaim the resurrection of Jesus.
You still get some statements that are viewed as anti-women in the New Testament, for example from 1st Tim 11-15. which states that women should be quiet, not lead men and that they are gullible as Eve was. This is one of those vs. that is greatly enlightened by looking at the subtle yet very important effects of the cultural context. First, Paul is saying that yes, women should learn (generally men were educated far and not women). Second, he wasn’t saying that women should be bossy (I found a scholar who argued this was the sense). For women’s new found educational emphasis, we didn’t want the pendulum to swing all the way to the other side which did indeed happen in some of the greek goddess cults for example. The reference to Adam and Eve wasn’t necessarily simply indicating that women were gullible, but rather, this could be another example of the incomplete way in which people of the age referred to scripture(they didn’t have it organized in chapter and vs), and the lesson that is being reffered to here isn’t that women are gullible but rather that women should learn from themselves (already explicitly mentioned before) because as rabbi’s of the time had taught, Adam, the man was a bad teacher. The final comment about women being saved by birth suggests that by following this advice, women would reach the completeness of their role in motherhood (the term salvation is used in a variety of ways, and this certainly is not suggesting that women would escape eternal judgment by being mothers).
So even an alleged anti-woman passage really undermines the subjugation of women when viewed in it’s original context.
May 4, 2011, 10:03 amBarb says:
Re: Jesus saying, “The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.
He often quoted God’s Word. I’m sure He’d also quote rabbinical teachings when they point up the error of his Pharisaical critics.
He was a scholar of the Word and called “Rabbi-teacher.” He taught or discussed theology with his elders at the age of 12 in the synagogues. As He said, He was “going about my father’s business” –when His parents had to search for Him and found Him teaching.
He was questioned by Pharisees wanting to trip Him up and expose Him as a fraud. He always had a good answer, did He not?
Yes, the Pharisees are among the self-righteous, proud villains in the Gospel accounts –and it isn’t ALL the Jews who are the villains, considering that ALL the characters are Jewish except for Pilate and the Roman (Gentile) soldiers who actually carried out the whippings and the crucifixions.
And the Pharisees aren’t the only ones to be at the end of Christ’s pointing finger. We are ALL challenged to avoid the same accusation –of being whited sepulchres, clean on the outside but dead men walking on the inside.
He actually said we are ALL dead men walking–condemned –and so He atoned for our sins and rose from the grave to cancel the power of sin and death’s victory in the grave. “Because I live, you shall live also.”
Moreover, we are ALL condemned to die as it is. Jesus offers the escape hatch and His resurrection proves that He can do it for us.
May 4, 2011, 10:11 amAndrew L says:
And as I have demonstrated quite clearly, the NT does not actually say this. All you need to do is acknowledge your mistake. Shouldn’t be so difficult!
Agreed.
Any reasonable person would know that to attempt to determine what a “reasonable” reading of a passage is in a language that that reasonable person does not even pretend to understand is a futile endeavor. That reasonable person would then remove foot from mouth.
I do not question that the NT as we have it says the words that it says. I do question your ability to understand those words (given that you do not read Greek, nor are you familiar with Aramaic, which was a major spoken language of the day, and may – according to many scholars – underlie the Greek text of the NT). I also question your naive assumption that even if they meant what you think they meant (which they don’t) that these words are to be taken at face value in light of the numerous reasons scholars have provided demonstrating otherwise.
To reiterate: 1) The story itself does not mention Pharisees, 2) There is not evidence that the Pharisees believed that one should not heal people on the Sabbath, 3) There is evidence that other groups who OPPOSED the Pharisees believed that one should not heal people on the Sabbath (or save animals on the Sabbath), 4) The NT is in general biased against the Pharisees, whom it tries to attack as much as possible even when such is not pertinent, and this explains the awkward reference to the Pharisees shoddily appended to the end of the story.
I do not buy your dichotomy – heavily colored by your ingrained Christian biases – between “overly legalistic” and ‘faith,’ ‘spirit of the law,’ etc. Christians over the centuries have carefully cultivated the dichotomy between the spiritual church and carnal Israel, but from the perspective of first century Judaism – and indeed, from the perspective of Jesus in the NT (really all Jesus followers essentially until Paul’s day) – this is a nonsensical dichotomy. From their perspective, there is no such thing as “faith” that requires humanity to violate its sworn responsibility to God. This is the opposite of faith. For early Judaism – and indeed the earliest “Christians” – the idea that one could claim to follow God while failing to honor with the utmost respect his explicit commands would be absurd. Who is man to define “faith” and “goodness” on his own, when God has already done it for you? Within this context, the notion of Jesus objecting to “excessive legalism” is not only wrong, but incoherent.
Indeed, the overwhelming trend amongst NT scholars and early Judaism scholars today is to recognize that Jesus had absolutely no intent to remove the law. Even the biased presentations of the NT Gospels (with the possible exception of the latest gospel, John) yield the conclusion that Jesus was hardly outside the mainstream of “common Judaism.” To actually deny the law would have been absurd to him – he merely argued with others over the correct legal interpretations.
May 4, 2011, 10:25 amAndrew L says:
Actually over 70% (maybe more, if I recall) of the Gemara – the Bavli anyway – is in Hebrew. As a general rule, in the Bavli, attributed statements are usually in Hebrew, and the stamma di-Gemara (the anonymous layer) is usually in Aramaic. Other than that, agreed! :-)
May 4, 2011, 10:31 amBarb says:
I can understand the position that while we are all of equal value in God’s sight, we do not all have equal/or the same roles. I accept, e.g., the headship of man in the home. We also don’t all have equality in gifts. The sad thing to see is when the gifted, wise woman has to be subjugated to the un-gifted, unwise man –just because she’s female. We believe the seeds for lifting that subjugation, even in some roles, is lifted by the whole of the NT –such as when Paul concedes that women will receive the Holy Spirit and also “tell forth the Word” –without re-mentioning that she can only teach women. Rob R brought up a good point that the women are the first to see the risen Christ and spread that Gospel (good news) to the men who were dispirited and missed the sight.
I think Paul’s letter to Timothy needs to be remembered as a letter to Timothy —He said, “I don’t allow women to teach, etc.” “because she was the one deceived by Satan.” IN fact, Adam was likewise deceived and tempted 2nd-hand. His culpability is just as great –and God punishes man and womankind equally. HOwever, as pointed out before, Christ, through His teachings, gives us license to resist the curses of death, pain in work, pain in birth labor, pestilence, disease and why not also, the subjugation of women.
Yes, the seed of equality of persons IS in the creation of man and woman to become one flesh in the image of God. But it wasn’t equal that Hebrews were the Chosen People of God –His family. That was just the beginning of what God would do through the Jews –through Christ. Some have blamed differences and inequalities on various curses –like blaming the plight of persons of color and slave status on the curse of Ham or Cain –whose descendants were cursed in the OT. We get the equality of all persons more implicitly (and explicitly) from the New Testament and the Golden Rule –and Paul’s statement on oneness in Christ.
Yes, Christ’s teachings are derivative from Jewish heritage –however He takes license out of the “eye for an eye” application of justice when He says to love and pray for the enemy and those who persecute us. Both the OT and the NT encourage compassion–but I think it is clearer and more pervasive throughout the NT. We have a lot of OT examples where justice was harsh –rather than merciful. And that’s not to say that God didn’t exact or dictate harsh judgment at times in history, even today.
Using Christ as scapegoat for all of our sins was indeed a harsh judgment for Christ –but gets us out of eternal death and Hell if we have faith in what He did.
Maybe all our natural disasters of late are warnings from God Himself –to get on our knees and be “God-fearers” –get our house in order, because we are on the road to damnation in Hell as it is by our unbelief and extreme, willful sinning. Calling evil good and good evil –as in the marriage and sexuality debate. Our inter-personal dealings are lousy with shacking up, divorce, unwed parenting with multiple partners, polygamy, pedophilia in the church, sex slavery and prostitution, graft and greed galore. Corruption abounds.
May 4, 2011, 11:05 amyankev says:
This does not seem strange to me in the least and is not that different from modern day practice, accept that voting rights are not typically afforded to non-Jews. But most present day Orthodox synagogues would find nothing strange about a non-Jew praying or learning in a synagogue subject to the limits that you described.
May 4, 2011, 11:10 amyankev says:
No evidence other than Jewish tradition, which we believe to be authorative and which claims roots in pre-Christian times, but which you tell me historians do not accept as evidence for anything pre-3rd century CE. So from a historian’s perspective, it seems I have none.
May 4, 2011, 11:12 amyankev says:
Hear, hear. To someone with antinomian perspective, any emphasis on law is an overemphasis.
To anyone with any knowledge of Jewish law, the supposed dichotomy between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law is absurd. The Pharisees (our Sages of blessed memory, not the caricatures who show up in the NT) pointed out again and again that one has to have intent and devotion when fullfilling the law; that means that one who has not fullfilled the spirit of the law has by definition not fullfilled the letter of the law either.
May 4, 2011, 11:19 amyankev says:
He says that if someone injures you, you should not seek monetary compensation by legal action? That’s what “eye for an eye” (literally “eye under an eye”) means — not taking revenge or disfiguring people.
May 4, 2011, 11:22 amyankev says:
Or as in calling self-defense murder.
May 4, 2011, 11:23 amAndrew L says:
What I hope that all of the foregoing has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt is that attempting to “compare” the different religions by some objective criteria is a fool’s errand. Each religious tradition has its own set of interpretative traditions that outsiders clearly have a very difficult time relating to, and in any event, nobody is using the same yardstick for what equals “better.”
May 4, 2011, 11:29 amBarb says:
The translators of the Bible certainly have attempted fidelity to the oldest available manuscripts and the meanings of the original languages. So to tell an English reader that he can’t understand the bible if he doesn’t know the originals is to deny the credibility of the scholars –who didn’t necessarily all believe the Book, you know. If the translators were willing to deceive, to protect Christian orthodoxy, or to take out contradictory, difficult-to-understand passages, they would have done it –but they apparently did not, because there are challenges to orthodoxy and difficult passages for our enlightened views about God. There are things in the Bible some of us wish were not there –like the letter to Timothy on women –and the passage where God reportedly says he would’ve given Solomon even MORE concubines, if only….(whatever, I don’t recall the rest.)
I think the Bible we have is protected against revisionism –”warts and all.”
I think I agree with that. Just as devout ministers today “preach” and challenge the people to live up to the Word –and point out their insincerity –their hypocrisies, their lack of compassion, their nasty attitude toward Him who was sent by God as Messiah, Savior, and Lord.
However, Jesus does remove the yoke of the law –by sending the Holy Spirit –that the Law would be written on our hearts and minds –and not something to break over our carnal backs. We are saved by GRACE and FAITH and not our own righteousness -not by the LAW –for we fail at keeping it by God’s holy standard. So He has given us a relationship with Him through His omnipresent Holy Spirit –so that we might be saved inspite of our failures –and have some power over our sin nature through the indwelling Christ.
May 4, 2011, 11:30 amBarb says:
Yes.
May 4, 2011, 11:35 amBarb says:
Can’t agree with your statement. There is so much better stuff in the Judeo-Christian Bible and a much better impact on culture –by the Bible –compared to the Koran. There have been problems all the way–but you will never see Islam enlighten culture the way Judeo-Christianity has brought civilization to the western world in our views of civil rights and decency. The more we fall away from faith in the Bible, the more decadent and deviant we become.
May 4, 2011, 11:39 amloki13 says:
Not necessarily. But a translation is always just that- a translation. Which involves choices on the part of the translator. How do you translate words that have no clear modern equivalent? How do you choose to translate rhymes? Do you go for the spirit of the work, or the literal words? And so on.
The KJV, for example, butchered a lot of the translation. But some people prefer it for its “Old Timey” sound.
I’ve always thought that if I was going to base my entire belief system on a book, I’d want to read the original. But YMMV.
May 4, 2011, 11:39 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
I haven’t made a mistake, Andrew.
May 4, 2011, 11:41 amBarb says:
That’s why TEAMS of translators do the work. Most of the versions and translations are so similar in basic meaning, that it doesn’t matter which one you read to get the gist of the stories and teachings. I believe they learned some things about words with no modern equivalents from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Translators have been able to get the gist of things, such that there really is no excuse for confusion or ignorance as to meaning. And no excuse to, say, take out all the teachings on sexuality, divorce, marriage, etc. It’s also very clear who Christ claimed to be, what His mission was, and that the early disciples and early church were transformed by His resurrection –willing to be martyred for certain knowledge of His death, resurrection and salvation because of it.
May 4, 2011, 11:46 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
If you’re through grilling me, though, maybe you’ll explain where the concept of “pharasaical” meaning overly legalistic comes from, if not where I said. That would have the advantage of actually addressing my point.
May 4, 2011, 11:47 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
I’d like to ask Yankev a question, if I may.
I see the terms “rabbi”, “rabbinical”, and “orthodox” all the time. I never see the terms “Pharisee” or “pharisaical” except in connection with the NT or as Reg used it, which points back to the way Pharisees are descibed in the NT. To see those latter terms in contemporary use, not connected to the NT at all, where would I look?
May 4, 2011, 11:55 amBarb says:
Yes, I know. Although, some of the middle-easterners still practice that kind of justice physically.
But Jesus says, “You have heard it said of old, eye for an eye….but I give you a new command –that you return good for evil.”
So while eye for an eye remains in the Law as a standard of fairness,justice (as in our death penalty for heinous murders)–JEsus is telling the people of the Kingdom of God/the Kingdom of Heaven –that they are to be better than just –be merciful. This may be more about personal revenge than for state laws and penalties.
Even a place in the OT, God says, “I desire from you mercy, not sacrifice.”
Jesus’ audience was the Jewish nation first of all. And out of them came the Early Church. The Officials were threatened by Him and cynical. The common man –like the thief on the cross–believed in Him and His Kingdom. All who saw Him resurrected empowered the Early Christian Church. It could well be called “The church of the Jewish Messiah” –or The Church of Immanuel which means “God with us.”
May 4, 2011, 11:58 amor “The Church of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” –for Christ’s Church is certainly an extension of Judaism before Christ.
Andrew L says:
Later Christian misinterpretation stimulated by their ever evolving inferiority complex vis-a-vis the Jewish community Christians either had or were beginning to abandon. (And while we’re on the topic, please note that the phenomenon of Jewish Christianity, however we define the groups that came under this rubric, remained potent and potentially quite widespread well into the 4th century AD).
May 4, 2011, 12:05 pmyankev says:
Not all of them, my friend — not all of them.
May 4, 2011, 12:05 pmloki13 says:
Sure. Read Beowulf. I am pretty positive that if you read, inter alia, Heaney’s and Raffel’s translations you will get the gist of the story. But they are very different. And I would go so far as to say they have very different meanings, because they were translating with different goals in mind.
Translation is a tricky thing. Again, if I was going to base my eternal soul on following the Tao Te Ching, I might want to pick up some ancient Chinese. Just ‘cuz.
May 4, 2011, 12:05 pmyankev says:
Truly.
May 4, 2011, 12:06 pmBarb says:
We agree, Laura. I said something similar somewhere above!
May 4, 2011, 12:07 pmAndrew L says:
Evidence for Pharisees: 1) Josephus, 2) NT, 3) Possibly rabbinic material in the Mishnah (and perhaps Tosefta, Jerusalem Talmud and Babylonian Talmud.
May 4, 2011, 12:07 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Well, we have on one hand plain text describing Pharisees as being overly legalistic, and we have on the other hand mind-reading because that’s the only way you could know that people you’ve never met have an inferiority complex.
I think this is an agree-to-disagree situation. So I’ll let you explain to me once again what an idiot I am, and will not respond further.
Still would be interested if Yankev would answer my question.
May 4, 2011, 12:13 pmloki13 says:
And to use one common example, do you think there is an Armageddon, or that there will be a battle at the Mountain of Meggido? Were there unicorns, or aurochs? Is the Book of Revelation in the Bible because of divine inspiration, or bureaucratic inertia? And on…
For such a personal matter, you’re putting a lot of faith in these teams of experts- which is totally cool! It’s okay to look at the broad picture- after all, the devil is in the details. :)
May 4, 2011, 12:14 pmyankev says:
Then it was a team of translators who translated “young girl” to mean “virgin” — a connotation that the Hebrew word almah does not and did not have.
May 4, 2011, 12:59 pmAndrew L says:
Actually we have on the one hand a biased, apocalyptic Jewish document in the NT on the one hand, and on the other hand we have everything written by Josephus and the rabbinic evidence on the other hand. Of course, you might argue that Josephus and the rabbis are themselves biased in favor of the Pharisees. While this may indeed be true, the bias doesn’t cut the same way the NT bias does, in the sense that while the NT sees its enemy as the Pharisees, Josephus and the rabbis are almost entirely unconcerned with the Jesus and his followers. In fact, for Josephus, Jesus is just another one of the dime-a-dozen messianic figures that he documents popping up in the first century (The Egyptian, Theudas, etc.).
As for the rabbis, while it was popular a generation ago to view the “Birkat Haminim” as directed against Christians, this view has come under serious attack and the trend is much the other way at this point (see R. Kimmelman’s influential study on the topic). If you go through the early rabbinic materials, you’ll barely see any references to Christianity, and the ones that exist are for the most part always more implicit than explicit.
You’re completely out of your depth here Laura and you’re only making yourself look sillier by keeping at this. Indeed, not only is the NT not the only evidence for the Pharisees, but it’s actually the piece of evidence that actually conflicts with much else that we know about them.
May 4, 2011, 1:02 pmyankev says:
Many Jews seldom use the term because we prefer Hebrew to Greek (Shabbos rather than Sabbath, Avraham not Abraham, etc.) And, of course, the unsavory connotation the term has acquired due to millennia of Christian teaching of contempt. But mostly because today the term is less relevant — the Sadducees are long gone, and what were the Pharisees are simply today’s Orthodox Jews.
If you are looking in rabbinic literature, however (Mishnah, Gemarah, etc.) you will find the term in Hebrew, which is p’rushim (cing. p’rush) — those who stay separate.
May 4, 2011, 1:05 pmyankev says:
Is there a Gehinnom, or a valley of Hinnom?
May 4, 2011, 1:08 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Okay, Yankev, thanks. One wonders how many non-Jews read Greek, (other than Greek folks, of course), and of those, how many read it for contemporary Jewish writings as opposed to studying the NT or other older works or writings not associated with Judaism. In the general course of things, the NT is the only place where non-Jews and non-Greek scholars are going to run across the term.
You can find offense in the term if you want, of course, and as stated, I don’t use it because I don’t want to offend anyone. But if a non-Jew of today wanted to say bad things about orthodox Jews they’d be more likely to say “orthodox Jews” than “Pharisees”.
May 4, 2011, 1:43 pmBarb says:
but the important things are clear in the narratives. That Jesus died, resurrected, promised salvation to believers in Him, challenged us with Matt. 25 on acts of charity, challenged us to be one man with one woman and not to divorce, taught the importance of the Golden Rule, forgiveness and humility, unselfishness, compassion for the least of these our brethren –importance of our children. And He promised to return.
Yes, the devil enjoys the details about which we make controversy –but we are still called to love, forgive, have faith in Christ as God’s Messiah and our Savior, and to be open to God’s Holy Spirit transforming our minds and lives.
I am not a student of end-times prophecy because that book is particularly fascinating but hard to be dogmatic about, IMO. I don’t care so much about when Christ will return ushering in a new age –I just want to get into the door of that glorious eternity –and I have inner assurance that I am saved because I believe in Him –and I believe the Bible is true in saying He is “the way, the truth and the life –and no one enters the kingdom (or knows the Father) except through Me.”
May 4, 2011, 1:56 pmloki13 says:
Heh. It can get hot there!
May 4, 2011, 1:56 pmBarb says:
In any case, the meaning of “young girl” is clearly “virgin” in the following passage, judging by the final question Mary asks of Gabriel:
“How will this be, since I am a young girl?” just doesn’t make sense in the context here, does it?
May 4, 2011, 2:02 pmyankev says:
I did not say that people used the term with deliberate intent to offend. I said that the actual Pharisees (as opposed to how they are depicted in the NT) were those who represented normative rabbinic Orthodox Judiasm. People who use the term to mean hypocrite do not realize that what they are saying is Jew (or at least Jew who did not accept Christianity).
I grant that offense is not meant. But one means to be offensive when they say “Talmudic” to mean a niggling obsession with meaningless detail. Or when they say “Jew him down” to mean aggressively and unreasonably negotiate a grossly reduced price. I had a college roommate (briefly) from rural Wisconsin who saw nothing wrong with talking about “cooning watermelons” to mean stealing them from a farmer’s field, using an old perjorative for African American persons of color.
I’m not real fond of’retard’ as an insult, either.
Even though no offense is meant, all of these usages are inherently offensive to anyone who knows what the term means in its non-perjorative sense. The only difference is that the first one (and perhaps the second) is so ingrained in Christian culture that most people do not recognize how offensive it is.
May 4, 2011, 2:06 pmyankev says:
Yes, but in the verse in Isaiah that many missionaries point to as prophesying that event.
Also, by the time of Joseph and Mary, most Jews spoke Aramaic as their every day language. The more educated upper classes also spoke Greek. Hebrew was by and large reserved for prayer and study. See for example the Mishna in the first chapter of Yoma, which discusses which books were read to the high priest to keep him from dozing Yom Kippur night. If he was learned, they would read from various books of scripture in Hebrew. If he was not learned (the Romans sold the office to the highest bidder, which meant that unqualified high presist were not uncommon under Roman rule), they would read from Daniel, Chronicles and a few others that I do not recall at the moment, but all of them were written late in the exile and are largely in Aramaic.
May 4, 2011, 2:13 pmyankev says:
Sorry; meant to write
May 4, 2011, 2:14 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
I agree with “Jew him down” and have crawled all over a coworker who used that term.
“But I didn’t mean anything bad by it!”
“But it’s bad.”
“But I didn’t mean anything bad!”
“But it is bad.”
I had to do it publicly because she said it in the presence of a black coworker who immdiately got a look on her face, as if wondering what that person said about black folks behind her back (and she’d have been right to wonder) and I didn’t want the black coworker to think that that sort of thing was tolerated. Would otherwise have spoken to her privately and just brought to her attention exactly what she was saying and that she needed to think it through. I try not to assume that people are deliberate a-holes unless they take a lot of trouble to prove it to me.
Have never heard “Talmudic” used that way.
May 4, 2011, 2:20 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
OK, I see your update about “Talmudic”. I thought I’d really missed something.
May 4, 2011, 2:21 pmyankev says:
A good philosophy. I think I have made it clear that I am not saying that the usage of Pharisaic or Pharisee is deliberately offensive. It is offensive nonetheless, but I don’t foresee it ending any time soon.
May 4, 2011, 3:23 pmCJColucci says:
Barb: Do you really believe there were no hypocrites among the Pharisees
No, and I don’t believe that there are no criminals and no sexual promiscuity among certain population groups in America. But I would object to anyone using the names of any ethnic group as a synomymn for criminality or sexual immorality. Yet people think nothing of saying Pharisee — which undipsutably means those who followed what is today (and was then) normative rabbinic Orthodox Judaism — as a synonmymn for self-righteous hypoctire. I find that offensive and so would many Orthodox Jews, as well as many non-Orthodox Jews who are familiar with who and what the Pharisees were. yankev
May 4, 2011, 3:34 pmI think descendants of the Vandals might have similar objections.
Barb says:
In fact, Yankev, I suspect Moishe’s name is written in “The Lamb’s Book of Life!” (which is of course God’s master computer of the universe –wherein our sins are recorded until we repent and believe in the Messiah –at which time our sins are blotted out! to be remembered against us nevermore! Deleted and no longer on the celestial hard drive!
May 4, 2011, 10:37 pmBarb says:
specifically?
The NT is no one “document” –but many by several different authors. I particularly recommend the following as an ancient work attributed to the physician Luke, written after Jesus’ death (and resurrection.) It reads like history–not fiction. These are real people and I think the event sounds authentic. what do you think? Notice, the speaker to the Jews is bringing up their history and tying in the story of JEsus:
May 5, 2011, 10:44 amBarb says:
Peter and John Before the Sanhedrin Acts 4:
May 5, 2011, 10:50 amyankev says:
Among others, the translators of the KJV who rendered “almah” (young girl) in Isaiah as “virgin” in order to support the virgin birth stories in the NT by supposedly showing them to be prophesied in Jewish scripture. There is nothing in Jewish scripture or tradition AFAIK that says that the birth or conception of the Messiah (may he come soon) will be by means of a virgin mother or a non-human father.
May 5, 2011, 11:46 amyankev says:
Exactly. The more ignorant one is of Jewish law, the more vulnerable one is to believing distortions or misrepresentations of it. That’s one reason that your donees at Jews for j target people who know little or nothing about Judaism, and have so little success among Jews who do. And that’s why Peter and his friends believed whatever twaddle they were fed about what the laws of Moses permit, require or forbid, and what the Pharisees supposedly added or changed. Knowledgable Jews of their day, like knowledgable Jews of today, were harder to fool.
May 5, 2011, 11:52 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
Wonder if they drew from the Septuagint as a resource.
May 5, 2011, 1:00 pmMike Hickerson says:
Yes, though they drew more from the New Testament writers’ use of the Septuagint. The Septuagint – a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures written by Jewish scholars around 200 BC – translated “almah” as “parthenos” (“virgin”). It’s hard to argue that Jewish scholars in 200 BC would have had a pro-Christian bias in translating this word.
May 5, 2011, 2:29 pmyankev says:
That’s interesting. I will have to stop attributing that error to the KJV translators.
I knew that the 70 scholars (source of the word Septuagint, as you know) deliberately introduced certain changes from the original Hebrew, apart from the inevitable inaccuracies inherent in translating from one language to another. The most notable deliberate change was changing the first few words from B’raishis bora Elokhim” because th eHebrew syntax, literally “At the beginning created G-d” might mislead the pagan Greeks to think that there was a being called “At the beginning” who pre-dated G-d, just as in the Greek mythology, the Titans predated the gods of Olympus and, if I recall, there was another race that preceded the Titans. They also translated the word for hare to “long eared one” because King Ptolemy’s wife was named Hare in Greek, and they did not want to be accused of ridiculing royalty by listing her name among the unclean animals. But I did not know that they were the source of the parthenos error.
One more example, I suppose,of why our Chazal (our Sages of blessed memory, from whose ranks the 70 translators were taken) tell us that on the day the Septuagint was finished, the earth shook for miles as a sign of Divine displeasure that Ptolemy had demanded the translation, and why there are pious Jews who fast every year on the anniversary of its completion.
May 6, 2011, 9:46 amMike Hickerson says:
I’m not sure that I would call this translation an error or a deliberate change for theological reasons. I’m no Hebrew scholar, though I did take 2 years of it in graduate school. According to my Brown-Driver-Briggs, “almah” means “young woman” with the interesting modifier “(ripe sexually; maid or newly married).” It’s the same word used to refer to Rebekah in Gen. 24:43 before she marries Isaac, when I assume that she was a virgin (or, at least, that the writer wants us to assume that). I wouldn’t call the Septuagint translation an enormous stretch. And however you want to translate it, the original Hebrew word “almah” could easily have applied to Mary, who after all was engaged to Joseph at the time of Jesus’ birth.
May 6, 2011, 11:02 amLaura(southernxyl) says:
There was a time in the history of the English language when “virgin” meant an unmarried woman. This was back when it was unthinkable that an unmarried woman would have had sex. Not useful for theological purposes, just muddying the water.
A lot of people now don’t realize that “maid” once specifically meant “virgin” b/c the other meaning is “young woman”, usually unmarried; see “bridesmaid” and “maid of honor” v. “matron of honor”.
May 6, 2011, 12:29 pmyankev says:
Hmm, I’ll have to chcek my Alcalay when I get home. In the pasuk you cite, Eliezer is recounting to Rivkah’s family what happened at the well. In 24:14, when praying for success in his mission, he says “If I say to a naarah” — the fem. form of naar, a boy, youth or adolescent. In Jewish law, a girl is a naarah until the age of 12 years and one day or the beginning of puberty.
When Rivka first appears, in 24:16, the text calls her naarah who was attractive, and says she was a besulah (virgin — always used in the sense of a female who has never had sexual intercourse) and no man had intimate knowlege of her. Rashi explains the seeming redundancy by saying she was a virgin “in that place” and that “no man had known her intimately in another place, because the daughters of [that particular society of -- you are familiar with the heh ha-yedia] pagans preserved their virginity carefully but behaved with abandon as to intimacy in another place.”
The word used for place – makom- is often used as a euphemisim in Talmud and rabbinic literature for certain parts of the body, referred to respectively as ‘that place’ and ‘another place’ meaning the place of excretion.
May 6, 2011, 12:35 pmBarb says:
What a serendipity for mankind –that the Messiah would be born of Divine seed! The Holy Spirit came upon her –With God all things are possible. Christ is believed by His disciples to be God in the flesh –for He said, “You have seen me, you have seen the Father.” “I am the Good Shepherd who cares for the sheep.” The Messiah is both the sacrificial “lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” and “the Good Shepherd” of the 23rd Psalm. He is both sheep and shepherd, man and God, human and divine, Son of Man and Son of God.
May 6, 2011, 2:28 pmBarb says:
I hope you are not, as Jesus said, “straining at gnats while swallowing camels!”
May 6, 2011, 3:17 pmBarb says:
Well, seems to me, 5000 Jews were persuaded to believe in one day –not because of arguments or ignorance on Jewish laws and traditions–but because of the eloquence of the unlearned Jewish fishermen speaking in the power of the Spirit–and the fact that a 40 year old man known to be lame from birth was healed “in the name of Jesus” — and not even the authorities could dispute the healing.
JEsus was believed by many because of His healings –the kind you can’t fake –10 lepers healed and the blind. Of course, anyone who saw Him resurrected was emboldened to believe and proclaim it! Hallelujah! Immanuel! God with us!
May 6, 2011, 4:23 pmyankev says:
to equally unlearned ignorami who were fertile targets for misinformation about what Judaism teaches. Not unlike the people that
May 9, 2011, 11:58 amIndians for CusterJews for J targets today.Barb says:
I’m surprised, Yankev, that you wouldn’t acknowledge the possibility that Jewish leaders who objected to the miracles of Jesus and in this case, Peter and John’s healing in JEsus’ name, could be just like Christian or Catholic or political leaders in any era: arrogant, uncompassionate, legalistic, and fearful of any threat to their positions of respect and authority.
I’ve seen some terribly arrogant Christian church leaders –(none were pastors –all the pastors I have known in my experience growing up in evangelical churches were godly men. I was the granddaughter and granddaughter-in-law of 2 joyful, loving, righteous ministers –but I have seen very judgmental, proud lay leaders in Christendom –and heard of ministers who led double lives (the high profile ones in news reports and the Catholic priests.)
Jesus challenged these hypocritical types of religious leaders and laymen–he was a devout, observant Jew. He claimed to be the one of Isaiah 53 –the sacrificial lamb for the world.
I don’t think Christianity would have gotten off the ground, if it were not for the miracles, the resurrection, and the fishermen and Saul/Paul who were transformed by Christ into bold missionaries themselves –willing to face crucifixion.
It just isn’t the same as Mormonism that grew on polygamy and taught extra-biblical blasphemies like Jesus and Satan as brother sons of God –and that we shall be gods. It isn’t the same as Islam which says Jesus was a prophet who ascended into Heaven without dying –without the Passover function of atonement for our sins. They hope to have after-life (I guess) through observing the pillars of Islam –like marching around their sacred box in Mecca.
Christianity is “completed Judaism” “Messianic Judaism” which claims the Messiah has come and atoned for the sins of the world through His death like a Passover lamb–at Passover, Christianity says Christ resurrected to promise resurrection to all who would receive it as a free gift by faith in Jesus. Christianity has been the light and civilizer of the western world –and it is an extension of Judaism–founded on Judaism. Your history is MY history. I study Abraham and Sarah, JAcob and Esau, Joseph and Moses, Ruth and Boaz, Noah and the flood, Jonah and the Whale, the Psalms, the Prophets, David and Solomon, Saul and Jonathan, same as you do.
We have hope in the resurrection of the dead because Jesus arose and said, “Because I live, you shall live also. In my father’s house are many mansions –if it were not so, I would tell you. I go to prepare a place for you that where I am, you may be also.”
He is Shepherd of 23rd Psalm –and the lamb of God of Isiah 53 who was wounded for our transgressions –He is Son of God and Son of man. He is Divine –and human–fully. The Only Savior by whose name we can be saved. He was a Jew who died for Jews and Gentiles –that we might all become one in Him. We who believe are called the Bride of Christ –the Church. We are to celebrate some day, the “wedding supper of the Lamb” –when Christ’s bride is established in Eternity –starting now and continuing after death and Judgment Day. A place where Jesus said there will be “no more tears, no more death, no more sorrow.”
Equality of persons is demonstrated most In Christ’s atonement for all who believe –and Paul’s statement that we are “neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female –in Christ Jesus we are all one.” Atonement and Heaven for all repentant believers, the Holy Spirit for all who seek Him–the Golden Rule teaching –Christianity teaches that we are equal in the sight of God –and are to love our neighbors as ourselves. The most challenging teaching ever –along with endless forgiveness of each other — “70 x7.”
May 10, 2011, 11:19 amBarb says:
A thought on sexuality pertaining to Christ’s atonement and Heaven:
If I recall correctly, Jesus also said there is no gender in Heaven –no giving in marriage.
Therefore, I do think that gender confusion and homosexuality and transgendering –while not God’s will –while sinful –it’s not that gender is so all important. It isn’t that He won’t save someone who has on-going gender identity and orientation problems.
It’s that we are to accept the bodies He gave us and live accordingly –and not be our own gods claiming He has put us in the wrong bodies. Gender is important for our function as pro-creators. When we rebel against sex assignment, we are rebelling against God, His design, His plan for our bodies. We may repent of that.
I don’t know if God would expect the saved transgender or homosexual to try to be heterosexual and transgender back to the original –He does accept us where we are –but repentance is necessary –and tampering with our gender is just as sinful as promiscuity –or any other sin. And we are expected to cease sinning deliberately –and seek His empowerment through the Holy Spirit, to quit.
Yes, we are to love homosexuals and transgenders and He will accept them in whatever condition they bring to Him –but He won’t sanctify the basic rebellion against Him that is rejection of one’s given gender. However, He would be compassionate about the misery their dissatisfaction and rebellion have caused them –and compassionate about the harm that may have occurred to them which made them unhappy with their gender assignment and role.
May 10, 2011, 11:34 am