As a roman catholic I have always thought I can eat whatever I want. It turns out however that the Bible states than there are certatin laws governing what we can or cannot eat. Pig is a no no apparently! Can anyone tell me why I was allowed to eat pork in my Roman Catholic shool ( which incidentally was run by nuns!) and why the laws are so relaxed now in relation to what the bible says…Incidentally , the chapter I am reffering to is Deutronomy 14:3 to 14:8.
We have been decieved!
Well, you somewhat answered your question. The eating thing is a “throwback” to the old testament. I have been told by man Christians, that basically Jesus changed all the rules.
On the logical front, I have always felt that many of the things said in the OT were simply ways of getting a primative people to not do something which would hurt them. Improperly cooked pork can kill. And, it’s much easier to just tell people “don’t eat that” than to try to explain that there are microscoping organisms that will kill you if you don’t cook the mean enough to kill them.
This is a popular belief but doesn’t really bear up under scrutiny. It’s not all that likely that the early nomadic Jews would have been able to deduce the connection between undercooked pork and trichinosis. A better explanation for the prohibition on pork is found by noting that pigs are “high maintenance” animals that are expensive to feed. Cows, sheep, goats, and so forth will thrive on grass, a foodstuff that people don’t do well on. Pigs, on the other hand, cannot thrive on grass, and in fact compete with humans for food. In a desert environment, where food is generally scarce, pigs are a poor choice as a food animal. You run the risk of starving the people to feed the pigs. The rule probably springs from an anecdotal instance of some tribal ruler doing exactly that.
Christians look to Acts 11 and Peter’s vision as an understanding that the New Law of Jesus supersedes the old in terms of the dietary restrictions.
Jews, obviously, see this as unlikely.
Regardless, the dietary laws are part of the Mosaic Covenant, and Gentiles–among whom are the overwhelming majority of Christians–are not bound by them. (You are certainly welcome to abide by them, of course. If you live far from a Jewish community, you may find it difficult as the dietary laws are wide-ranging and are not limited to avoiding pork, cheeseburgers, and shellfish.)
Well, do disagree a bit, that’s not the reason that Orthodox Jews don’t eat pig. Ultimately, we don’t eat it because we believe that God told us not to. It trichinosis disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, we would still be forbidden to eat pork.
Zev Steinhardt
One thing that most people don’t understand is that the Catholic Church announces itself as a “Living Church,” meaning that as it gets older, it matures and grows. This means it adapts to the times. It’s not hypocritical, it’s not going against God, it’s surviving and doing what it can to help the message spread. That’s the reason Jesus’s message was allowed to spread to the gentiles and other “hethens.” Acts of the Apostles talks about how the law of circumcision was no longer a requirement to be considered a follower of the law, even though many of the Jewish converts made a big stink over it. Jesus himself talked out openly against specific laws, such as the rituals of washing before meals and eating with lepers. These are all things discussed as laws in the old testement, and things the Catholic, and most other Christian Churches no longer follow, and haven’t seemingly since the beginning. Jesus didn’t denounce the OT, but he did point out the fact that many of the rules and laws were somewhat foolish compared to the time he lived in, and thus, the contradictions of the two shouldn’t be something one should worry the fate of their eternal soul over.
Heh. This is a favorite of those who believe the dietary laws were all about health and santitation.
As an aside, iduring the period of various diseases (notably the Black Plague), the Christians dying by the cartload noticed that the Jews did NOT have such high illness rates, and concluded that the Jews had poisoned the wells and caused the disease with witchcraft. Thousands of Jews were murdered on account of this accusation. It is argued, of course, that the Jews washed their hands before meals as a matter of ritual and law, and thus avoided many of the bacterial infections that plagued the non-washing Christians.
It is unlikely that Paul (or Peter, or whoever) suggested that it was OK to eat pork because of improved health standards (and knowledge of trichinosis.) That knowledge came many many centuries later.
I find it interesting that the Old Testament dietary rules, promulgated somewhere between 1250 and 600 BC (say), are today seen as very modern, disease-avoiding.
That’s because it’s more likely to be true, what with Occam’s razor and all.
Well there you go. The connection between ritual cleanliness and disease avoidance is there, yet misunderstood.
Did no one in the world eat pork until authorized by Paul? It was a political move to make it easier to gain converts from among pork-eating populations (who were obviously coping with the disease threat).
Just because people didn’t understand the germ theory doesn’t mean they couldn’t make the connection between behavior and disease. A likely scenario is that some tribesmen ate a pig, but with some trepidation since it’s it’s such a filthy, ugly animal. But the meat was sinfully delicious–like sex–so when they got sick, the guilt thing kicked in and they concluded it was God’s punishment.
So what some of you are saying is that as a Christian, Popes/Cardinals etc… can change the laws stated in the Bible under the pretence of calling the Church the ‘living’ Church to get more followers?
Did the Romans not do that in the first place? I thought they did not like the version of the Bible and instructed John(??) to re-write it so it became more palitable to them?
How many other laws governing us from the Old Testament have been changed/ignored?
It seems to me the only faith which is upholding the Laws of the OT are the Muslims and possibly some of the more fundamentalist Jews.
Any opinions?
M
Mazza,
For Christians, the Mosaic dietary laws, as well as the necessity of circumcision, were supplanted during the early Church era, as documented in the books of the New Testament (previously mentioned by tomndebb in the reference to Acts 10). If a person believes that was not a lawful change in discipline, then that person is rejecting apostolic authority and at least parts of the New Testament canon. Very few groups since the first century (when some Jewish converts wished to keep elements of the old practices) have combined the Mosaic ritual law with Christianity; one example that does come to mind is the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who appeal to the Law for their rejection of blood transfusions. It seems to me that a wholesale merging of Jewish dietary law with Christian elements would be neither fish nor fowl, neither Christian nor Jew, and would be recognized by neither.
Thanks JohnM but I think you missed my point.
What gave these people the right to change the missives set out in the Old Testament?
Why was a New Testament produced? I know that the New Testament was the word of the Apostles, but why change the ways of the Old Testament.
M.
P.S. I do not wish to upset / annoy anyone with my thoughts but at the moment I am going through a bit of a religeous crisis and the answers do not appear to be out there!
Why was it? Who said it was to be supplanted? On whose authority?
M
Slight hijack — If trichinosis is the reason for banning pork, then why isn’t beef and chicken banned because of salmonella?
In other words, trichinosis is NOT the only disease that one gets from tainted meat. There are lots of others, and my guess is that trichinosis accounts for but a small percentage of all food poisoning incidents. So why would anyone think that 3000 years ago, one specific animal was banned because of this one specific disease?
Mazza, I do see where you’re coming from now.
I’ll try to keep this response generic, but if any bias towards the Catholic interpretation creeps in I hope a Protestant poster will correct me.
I think the answer to your query of “On whose authority?” is Christ. If you accept that Jesus was the Messiah promised by OT prophets, and the Son of God as was understood by the early Church, then his authority was sufficient, since it WAS the authority of God himself. The letters and gospels written by his followers in the decades immediately after his death are accepted by Christians as the basis for the understanding of this new dispensation (though which precise books made up the new scriptures did take some time to work out - see the Staff Report on Who Wrote the Bible?). (Further parenthetical - Catholics and Orthodox supplement the Bible with Sacred Tradition, but that’s a whole other topic).
Also, please keep in mind that what was changed were ritual and ceremonial requirements, not the moral law. If St. Paul had written that under the new dispensation, adultery was now perfectly okay, that would have been in contradiction to the moral code of the OT. Instead, he said that Gentile converts didn’t have to be circumcised, and weren’t constrained from eating “unclean” animals. On the other hand, the Church established new ceremonial and ritual requirements, such as baptism and the eucharist.
Okay, one Catholic quote. This is from the Catechism of the Catholic Church :
May I ask, if you don’t accept the authority of Christ and the apostles to change such things as the requirement to keep the dietary laws, then whose authority would you accept?
My guess is that, since outbreaks of various diseases can vary in frequencey and intensity over time and place, a particulary viriluent series of outbreaks occured among occured among some ancient Hebrew tribes while their cattle tended to remain healthy.
Later, in the 1st century, gentile groups were having fewer problems with their pigs and so were less accepting of that dietary restriction (let alone getting their weenies sliced).
I do accept the authority of Our Lord but I need to understand WHY he changed the laws that had been guiding us for thousands of years and would I be wrong if I reverted back to the directives set out in the Old Testament. Would this be classed as sinful? IE Ignoring the word of Jesus Christ and reverting back to the word of God ?
I do thank you for your patience and time taken to help. I am beginning to get a handle on this!
But, how far do you go? Male circumcision? Dietary laws? Saturday sabbath? Stoning adulterers? Temple sacrifice?
You said in the OP that you are Roman Catholic, so in answer to your question of whether keeping some bits of the OT law out of personal conviction and conscience would be sinful, I would say “no”. But, if you do so in the mindset that “I am right and the Catholic Church (and pretty much every other church) is wrong on this”, that would be more problematic, because you would be denying the authority of the Church and the New Testament in a teaching on faith and morals.
As to why Jesus changed the rules, well, from a Christian perspective, Jesus came to fulfill the Law, and to bring the light of God to the whole world, not just to his chosen people. The Law that had been in place to keep the Jewish people separate, and to prepare them for his coming, was no longer needed.
Please check out the link I gave to the Catholic Catechism in my previous post; it says better than I can the Church’s teaching on Jesus and the Law.
mazza:
Not really. True, they don’t eat pork, and they do circumcise their children, but that’s about it. Which is just as well, since they don’t consider the Bible to be G-d’s word, like they do the Quran.
We call ourselves “Orthodox,” and we’re not that rare. A few of us frequent this message board, including myself, zev_steinhardt and Keeve, who responded to this thread earlier, and others as well.
Mazza,
You may want to check out a thread I started earlier on the question of which commandments Christians are still required to keep and which they aren’t.
Zev Steinhardt
Thanks JohnM I have been to the link…very informative.
cmKeller, I did not mean to offend, if I did please accept my apology.
I do believe in Jesus Christ and I do believe in the Old Testament.
Do Orthodox Jews believe in the New Testament or have they their own interpretation of the Bible, similar to the Greek Orthodox Church?
I feel as if I have learned a lot today and would like to thank all who participated in this debate.