So, Jesus saved everyone and you won’t be punished for not believing that he did?
If that’s the case then Catholicism has considerably risen in my esteem.
I agree. That passage is describing a trial by ordeal. The references to wombs miscarrying is about the verdict of trial; if the woman is guilty of adultery, God will make her sterile.
I don’t know what the Old Testament may or may not have said about abortion, but it’s worth pointing out that most Christians, today and historically, don’t hold to sola scriptura. While there is no explicit mention of abortion (or for that matter, of when life begins) in the New Testament, most Christians today and historically view Christian tradition as a valuable means of reaching the truth, alongside with scripture. (Catholics and Orthodox refer to scripture and tradition, Anglicans to scripture, tradition and reason, certain other Protestants to ‘scripture, tradition, reason and experience’, etc…).
As soon as you no longer restrict yourself to looking at scripture, the prohibition on abortion is one of the best-attested and oldest features of Christianity there is. Abortion is explicitly condemned (as equivalent to murder) in a few texts that almost made it into the canon, it’s condemned in texts that probably date back to the mid- or late-first century, and it’s condemned by a whole bunch of church councils that (as far as the brand of Christianity practiced in Ireland or Poland is concerned) have equal authority to scripture. We also have evidence that by around 200 AD or thereabouts (whenever Clement of Alexandria was writing), Christians of all stripe (orthodox and heretical) were more or less unanimous that life began at conception.
I don’t know for sure if Jesus said anything explicitly about abortion, but given how old, well attested and (at least for the first thousand years or so) unanimous the “abortion = murder” belief was, I would be surprised if it didn’t date back to Jesus.
I mostly agree with you, but I have a couple of small nitpicks. I personally don’t view “sola scriptura” as using the Bible and nothing else. Rather, it means the principle of looking at the Bible first. Logic, tradition, and so forth are valuable and useful primarily only to the extent that they corroborate Scripture. Tradition can also be useful in pointing out the correct interpretation of Scripture. If two people disagree on something, and one of them can point to a bunch of early Church Fathers that agree with a certain interpretation, then that is likely the correct one. However, their writings do not originate the interpretation, but merely confirm it.
Also, taking about dates in general, BC dates take the format of “Year BC.” However, despite the fact that that form tends to feel like the only correct one, AD dates take the format “AD Year.”
[QUOTE=Sage Rat;20120509
The Bible explicitly demands that abortions be performed when a woman may have been impregnated out of wedlock (Numbers 5:11-31).[/QUOTE]
No, it doesnt:
And you will note that I explicitly stated that no one has been following Christianity for millenia.
Christianity is based, if nothing else, on the words of Jesus. If 100% of the practice of the religion directly conflicts with the explicit words of Jesus, then it’s fair to say that no one really, in their heart of hearts, is taking it all that seriously.
I note that he explicitly fails to quote the part in the Bible where it states that the fetus might be aborted and that this an express goal of “bitter water”. He can deny it all he wants, but:
“may the Lord cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”
I will take the explicit statement of the Bible that abortion is the goal over the denial of some guy on the internet.
I will agree that the recipe given is nonsense, but presumably that is not the full recipe which was used at the time. You will note, for example, that no recipe is given for “the curse”. Find the recipe book for Rabbinic curses and we’ll see how non-reactive they are.
Sage Rat:
It demands nothing of the sort.
In fact, if the woman confesses to having committed adultery, the ordeal of the bitter waters is not performed, and if she is pregnant, the child is carried to term. Also, the whole thing only applies if the woman is merely suspected of adultery, not if she is clearly guilty of it (by witness testimony), regardless of the possibility of her pregnancy.
The bolded phrase (bolding mine) is a mistranlation. The Hebrew words are “yerecheich nofeles”, which means “your thigh collapses (or “falls”)”. “Yerech”, translated by me as “thigh” does not necessarily connote “womb”, the word is used in connection with the male thigh as well, and there’s a different Hebrew word that means womb, which is “rechem”.
I’m struggling to make sense of what you are trying to say here.
With respect to abortion, you yourself claimed that Jesus didn’t say anything about abortion. I don’t believe that’s true, but if it was, then by definition Christian prohibitions on abortion cannot possibly “directly conflict with the explicit words of Jesus”, since he was (according to you) silent on the matter.
There’s a deeper problem here which that you are going from “The NT contains no explicit prohibitions on abortion attributed to Jesus”, to “There are no explicit prohibitions on abortion attributed to Jesus.” That’s only the case if you view the canonical New Testament as an exhaustive guide to everything Jesus ever said. Which is in itself, assuming a contested premise, to wit, sola scriptura. (It’s also self contradictory, since the end of the Gospel of John notes that Jesus said a lot of things that never made it into scripture).
If we reject sola scriptura, then we can infer what Jesus might have said from the practices and beliefs of early Christians, and from the Christian apocrypha, and once we do that we get to a prohibition on abortion quite easily.
You’re on slightly more solid ground with respect to things like divorce (although I’d add that Jesus on at least one occasion followed up by saying something to the effect that 'Not everyone can live by this saying…") or for that matter the prohibition on usury which is also Dominical.
I was speaking about sola scriptura in general, not abortion, in that quote.
I don’t disagree with anything you say in your post, but I also wouldn’t say that it bears much relation to my statements. To be certain, there are tons of rationalizations out there in the world about why any one particular line of the Bible shouldn’t be read literally, shouldn’t be taken as still being in effect, etc. And, similarly, there are many places where the Bible directly contradicts itself and so it would be, effectively, impossible to live up to the rules that it contains.
But, in actual practice, we don’t see people trying to find a reasonable compromise where the Bible is inconsistent. Generally, the rules of society are amorphous through history, and the interpretation of the Bible is modified as necessary to back the existing culture rather than to create it. And for the parts which have no ready re-interpretation, the rationalizations of overridings all devolve into, “Well, that’s just fucking stupid, so clearly it’s not saying exactly what it is saying.”
For example, let’s accept that the “bitter water” is really just sand and water. Why sand would make water bitter or cursed, I do not know, but we’ll accept that it is true.
Now let’s look at blowing smoke up someone’s ass. This was a genuine medical procedure, similar to the Heimlich maneuver, that was supposed to help someone recover from a possible drowning. The British government spent a large sum of money to see to it that there were long pipes installed up and down the length of the Thames, just as we might install floating doughnuts today. Does the fact that this procedure is fucking stupid, with no possible chance of doing anything towards its intended aim mean that it was not genuine, official practice? If we are to read a medical book from the 18th century, should we read that section as being nothing more than a joke?
If the Bible says that the goal is to abort the fetus, why take the fact that the methodology is fucking stupid as evidence that the goal isn’t to abort the fetus?
If Jesus says, in Matthew, that you should follow all of the laws and procedures of the Old Testament, including the rule that you must have your child stoned to death if he is not obedient, does the fact that this is fucking stupid and evil mean that Jesus was just having teh lolz and we should disclude all of the rules of the OT, including the rule that cheating women should be given sand water as an abortifacient? Based on whose authority can anyone make that decision? If you simply deny everything that is stupid and evil in the Bible and replace it with something that is reasonable and kind, then are you really practicing Christianity? Our cultural norms hew a ton closer to Enlightenment era humanism than it does to anything written in the Bible, even if you exclude the OT and Jesus’ statement that you should include the OT.
If we look just at Jesus, excluding the OT, we see a man who:
- Is strongly opposed to divorce
- Is strongly opposed to interest-based lending (by and for your fellows within the religion)
- Mandates that you should give away everything you own rather than live better than any other person on this planet
Here we live in a Christian nation which makes divorce available on most any pretext, has a currency the majority of which exists through the process of inflation - a side effect of interest-based loans, and abhors the concept of anything like Communism or Socialism.
To the extent that we can be certain of anything that Jesus himself preached, we’re basically batting a 0. And the reasons that we give for ignoring his teaching is that those teachings are amoral, counterproductive, or go against the status quo of the evolution of ideas through the millennia. Both #2 and #3 are anathema to the Republican party and yet that is the party of Christian Fundamentalism.
In medieval times, we had a religion strongly tied to iconography in a religion that is strongly aniconic. In Renaissance times, we had a religion that was strongly opposed to personal wealth, and yet the Church was an ideal way for men to become wealthy and powerful. If we accept the modern day idea that Jesus was a peace-loving hippie, all of the various Christian wars through history make no sense.
Again, to be sure, you can find rationalizations for all of this. Sometimes those might even be not completely unreasonable stretches. And I will accept that my “plain reading” of the Bible is not necessarily completely accurate. It may well be that if I had more historic knowledge of the time, that I’d realize that “destroy the thing from her womb” doesn’t mean “abortion”, but minus compelling, ancient documents support a different interpretation, I’m going to take the plain reading - no matter how stupid the content might be - over any attempt - no matter how wordy - to explain why it don’t mean just what it says.
But the Bible says nothing of the sort.
At best it seems to indicate that such is a punishment for cheating on your husband and lying about it. If that is the proper translation, which CM Keller and most other say it is NOT, then it’s a curse, not a abortion.
This is an isolated interpretation of the texts. The NIV is the only translations to use the word “miscarriage” and they insert it in the place of words that translate as “waste away”. Only a couple of translations even translate בֶּ֖טֶן (be·ṭen) and בִּטְנֵ֖ךְ (biṭ·nêḵ) as womb. The rest use belly or abdomen.
*
Note that the NIV is the only translation to use the word ‘miscarriage’ (see Numbers 5:22 in parallel to 18 other translations). The translators interpret ‘Your thigh to rot’ and ‘to rot [your] thigh’ as ‘miscarriage’. Whereas the Hebrew for ‘thigh’, יָרֵ֑ךְ (yā·rêḵ), is translated elsewhere in the NIV Bible as ‘side’.
“Gird your sword on your side, you mighty one; clothe yourself with splendor and majesty.” (Psalm 45:3 NIV)
And the Hebrew for ‘to rot’, or ‘waste away’, נֹפֶ֥לֶת (nō·p̄e·leṯ), is translated elsewhere in the NIV as ‘to fall down’ (see Judges 19:27 NIV) Similarly, only a couple of translations even translate בֶּ֖טֶן (be·ṭen) and בִּטְנֵ֖ךְ (biṭ·nêḵ) as ‘womb’. The rest use ‘belly’ or ‘abdomen’.
Interpreting these scriptures to mean abortion is isolated to the questionable translation given in the NIV.*
*"The 2011 edition of the NIV mistakenly states that the drink will cause miscarriage in Numbers 5:21-22, 27. However, this is not what the passage is talking about. Pregnancy is nowhere mentioned, or even hinted at, in the text. The only thing that even sounds like pregnancy is the guilty wife’s stomach becoming bloated, but even in that instance, it has nothing to do with pregnancy. Further, the passage does not say that drinking the concoction would cause an abortion/miscarriage. While drinking a poisonous mixture of ingredients could very well cause a miscarriage, that is not what this text is speaking of.
If a wife was found guilty, the punishment was death (Leviticus 20:10). If the wife was found innocent, she would be “cleared of guilt” and “able to have children” (Numbers 11:28). So, again, Numbers 5:11-31 does not refer to abortion in any sense. Rather, it is describing a method that God allowed to be used to determine if a wife had committed adultery against her husband.*
In any case, the trial could* only* be held in the Temple.
and he doesnt do that either:
Your cite doesn’t support your interpretation. It offers alternative explanations, based on the possibility that " not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law" refers only to a subset of what could be “the Law”, and the Biblical evidence that Jesus and the disciples didn’t follow all the old Law. Which doesn’t actually provide proof against** Sage Rat**'s interpretation.
Wouldn’t that apply equally to the “slavery = acceptable” belief?
Nope. Jesus sacrifice is necessary, but not sufficient for salvation (note that heretical sects did teach that it was sufficient, hence that the concept of sin wasn’t relevant anymore after Jesus’ death). You’re not guaranteed salvation, just offered it.
But the RCC doesn’t presume anymore that following its teaching (or even Christian teachings in general) is the only possible path to salvation.
You could make that argument, but it would be weaker. I said that the ideas that abortion was murder and that life began at conception were unquestioned in early Christianity (Clement of Alexandria, writing around 200 in a document directed to Gnostic Christian heretics, uses “life begins at conception” as one of the universally accepted premises on which the orthodox and the heretics could find common ground). The orthodox church also accepted the legitimacy of slavery, at least in principle, but that was the subject of a lot more dissent. Setting aside Christian heresies (some of whom encouraged slaves to desert their masters), the unquestionably orthodox Gregory of Nyssa also condemned slavery. I’m not aware of any equivocation about abortion until the thirteenth century or so, when Western Christians started reading Aristotle and some of them relaxed the teaching about early abortion.
It’s worth pointing out also that even if you do think some form of slavery is in principle acceptable, on Christian grounds, it’s a long way to showing that slavery as practiced in America, which was probably one of its most inhuman forms, was acceptable.
If you’re asking if I think Jesus condemned slavery, in principle, then I’d say probably not. But I don’t think slavery was ever as universally accepted among early Christians as the teaching against abortion.
Okay, so Jesus made it possible for everyone to be saved, but you won’t be punished if you don’t believe that?
I believe Catholic doctrine is that people who never had a chance to learn about Jesus are not held responsible for not believing in him. They can receive salvation as long as they live otherwise virtuous lives.
But if you’re aware of Jesus and reject him, then you’re held accountable for that choice. That’s denial of Jesus rather than just ignorance.
You’re partly right, and partly wrong.
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Christianity isn’t “aniconic” as a whole. Certain brands of Protestantism are, as are Judaism and Islam. Orthodox Christianity, however, condemned iconoclasm in the eighth century. Those Christians who believe in icons tend to view the “graven image” commandment as having been superseded with the Incarnation.
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Jesus said that the law stood until “all was finished”, but you can make a good case that that happened with his death (and it’s not clear why the Mosaic law would ever have applied to gentile Christians anyway).
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As far as divorce and usury, you’re right: Jesus condemned them in no uncertain terms. And yes, a whole lot of Christians have gradually made their peace with both. I think you can make a decent case (not based on Christian grounds particularly, but based on more general grounds of reason and experience) that with the advent of contraception what sex means has changed, and that sexual morality therefore needs to change as well. As for usury however, you’re right: most Christian churches backed down from that over pressure from the World, and I think that was a moral and spiritual mistake.
But I believe the early admonitions against abortions (which were also present in secular texts) were based on the state of medicine in those times. Abortion was equated with murder because attempts at ending a pregnancy often killed the woman who was pregnant.
The idea that killing a foetus was murder is questionable. You’ll find numerous references in the Bible that equate breath with life. It’s easy to argue that by biblical authority, you’re not truly alive until you’ve been born and have drawn breath.