About the various rules and regulation in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). there is another interpretation than standard Christian apologetics. There is real value in that kind of interpretation, of course, it provides a New Testament answer to the more egregious oddities in the OT, some of which are discussed in the following article. In Christ any number of prohibitions and other things that were meaningless by the first century AD and really are meaningless now, are rendered inoperable --at the same time the integrity of the OT is maintained: Some of it no longer applies but most of it is as valid as ever. Needless to say, this is also my position. However, there are other reasons for taking this view. Where do these prohibitions come from in the first place? Consider when the Bible -the OT- came into its final form. This doesn't count the later Prophets like Malachi nor the later "writings" like Daniel and Esther. But it does include just about everything else. Scholarly consensus is that we are talking about the immediate post-Exilic era and essentially discussing redactional work done by or supervised by Ezra. The exact dates in question are unclear but necessarily fall some time between ca. 465 BC and 380 BC, with most scholars favoring a date more like 450 BC than anything else. That is, the time in question reflects the fact that by that period the Jews of the Exile had lived under Babylonian rule for at least a century. That was time enough to absorb all kinds of Babylonian superstitions, many of which we find in some form in the Bible itself. And of any people in the ancient world, no-one was more superstitious than the Babylonians. Accordingly, many of the prohibitions in the OT derive from Babylon; God had little or nothing to do with any of them. They are cultural artifacts with no objective merit. This was totally unclear by the time of Jesus, most of that history had been lost. Yet the need to dispose of the superstitions themselves was vital, they were doing no-one any good and were an impediment to any kind of rational life. The New Testament solution to the problem was quite good, but it was incomplete simply because the knowledge needed to be complete was not available at the time. But Moses wrote the Pentateuch? Probably he wrote parts of it, that much seems plausible. But the Torah shows unmistakable signs of multiple authorship over an extended period of years, several centuries, the so-called E-J-P-D hypothesis, or maybe E-J-D-P, all of which was redacted into final form either by Jeremiah's scribe Baruch, which seems to me less likely, or by Ezra, some time later, but in the early Persian period. By that time the world that Moses knew was long gone even if all kinds of historical facts were, indeed, faithfully transmitted to posterity by the (proto-)Biblical authors. The official canon of the OT was not finalized, of course, until after the time of Christ, but in the first century AD. In case you are interested, the POV here says that there were "good" cultures in ancient Mesopotamia, notably those of Sumer, Sargon, Hammurabi's Babylon, and the Assyrians (with various qualifications) but that the era of later Babylon, maybe best to call it the Chaldean era, was a cultural mess, as was the much earlier post-Hammurabi era of Babylon. Confusing ? OK, it is complicated, but we are talking about approximately 2500 years of history, from the rise of civilization in about 3100 BC until the rise of Persia with 525 BC a date of convenience. There is no simple explanation for all of those centuries of history, you need to learn it if you want to make the best sense of the Bible, there is no shortcut around the problem. A few considerations to think about. Billy -------------------------------- Shellfish, slavery and same-sex marriage: How not to read the Bible Glenn Davies ABC Religion and Ethics 4 September 2013 (http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/201309/r1169459_14838605.jpg)
88 [uninformed, ignorant] comments Proponents of same sex marriage should simply say they disagree with biblical teaching, rather than pretend their shallow, ill-informed reading is in line with the Bible's primary theme of love. Credit: www.shutterstock.com In recent days a number of strange claims have been made about _slavery_ (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-02/rudd-appears-on-q-and-a/4930540) and _shellfish_ (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-03/grant-how-could-a-christian-pm-call-the-bible-pro-slavery/4932422) in the Bible. The line normally goes something like this: although the Bible prohibits God's people from eating shellfish and also endorses slavery, we can disregard these ethical instructions because we have come of age and can see things differently - indeed, more clearly - with our advanced knowledge and superior wisdom concerning what is right and wrong. Therefore, when it comes to novel concepts such as redefining marriage to include two persons of the same sex, we can simply abandon the teaching of the Bible, and in particular, even the teaching of Jesus, on the grounds that the Bible has been superseded by the moral insights of the twenty-first century. This confused way of handling the Bible springs from an ignorance of the Bible's own narrative. The Bible's story is a progressive one, unfolding through the lives of Noah, Abraham and Moses (and the nation of Israel) and culminating in the arrival of Jesus, the long awaited Messiah, not only of the Jewish people, but of all people - from every tribe and nation. In preparation for the coming of Jesus, God provided specific cultic commands for the nation of Israel as a visual teaching aid for understanding holiness of life through ceremonies of ritual cleanness, which specifically distinguished Israel from other nations. An obvious example is the system of sacrifices instituted under Mosaic law, and the corresponding distinctions between clean and unclean food - hence the prohibition of shellfish. Yet, these only applied when God's people were co-extensive with the nation of Israel (while also including any non-Israelite who wanted to follow the God of Israel), which identified them as being both morally and ceremonially distinct from all other nations. However, when Jesus arrives, he comes to fulfil the law of Moses (Matthew 5:17). A significant consequence of his coming is the fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham that all nations would be blessed, without needing to attach themselves to the Jewish nation. Consequently, the need for national identity markers, such as food laws and circumcision, are no longer valid under the new covenant, which is established by Jesus. This is foretold by Jesus's own teaching in Mark 7:19 and expounded by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:19. The teaching methodology of ritual cleanness is thereby abolished, along with animal sacrifices and food laws, because these symbolic markers have found their fulfillment in the life and death of Jesus, who is the way, the truth and the life. That the Bible commands a diet of only ceremonially clean food at one stage of redemptive history and then abandons this requirement when Jesus comes to fulfil God's purposes for humankind is not some form of contrariness, or worse, an inherent contradiction in the Bible's teaching. Rather, it is part of God's intended plan in preparing his people for the coming of the Messiah Jesus. The apostle Paul likens this transition to that of a minor coming of age (Galatians 4:1-7). It reflects the unfolding purposes of God's plan through the distinctive ages of human existence. Therefore, it is a shallow approach to the Bible to mock the prohibition concerning the eating of shellfish (Leviticus 11:9-12) as if it still applied today, without understanding this temporary command within the sweep of redemptive history and the explicit teaching of Jesus who has come to liberate us from such ceremonial and cultic behavior which distinguishes between clean and unclean foods. Moreover, it is also a misguided approach to the Bible's teaching to infer that because the form of ceremonial activity has changed, that the ethical imperative undergirding the ceremony has also changed. Not so! Jesus's words in Mark 7:18-23 are as instructive to us today as they were to his first century hearers: "Do you fail to understand?" Jesus asked. "Don't you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn't go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of their body." (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.) He went on: "What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person's heart, that evil thoughts come - sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person." Jesus affirms the moral integrity of God's laws expressed in the Old Testament, and their abiding character and application for us today, but re-establishes them for his disciples in a non-ceremonial and non-cultic manner, as befits the age of fulfillment that Jesus came to bring. When Jesus taught his disciples about the sanctity of marriage, he reminded them that marriage was not a human invention but God's idea: an exclusive relationship between a man and a woman for life. Yet he also recognized that in a fallen and broken world, some marriages may end in divorce, due to the unfaithfulness of one or both parties. While this was not the original intention, Moses's law provided for divorce in certain circumstances, and so did Jesus. In similar manner, the Old Testament provided for the equitable treatment of slaves, but this was not part of God's original design, where all men and women were created equal. That Israelites could not be kept in slavery for more than six years (Exodus 21:2) demonstrates that even in a broken world, God saw slavery as temporary, and the redemption of the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt bears ample testimony to God's purposes for bringing freedom from bondage for all humankind and his condemnation of the slave trade (1 Timothy 1:10). While Australians wrestle with the implications of redefining marriage to include a union of two persons of the same sex, it would be a much more enlightened debate if proponents of this novel redefinition did not misuse the Bible in mounting their arguments. It would be more honest to declare their disagreement with biblical teaching, rather than pretend by shallow, ill-informed exegesis that they are following the Bible's primary theme of love. Here again, Jesus's words are instructive: "If you love me, keep my commandments" (John 14:15). -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
