Doesn’t The Torah usually include rabbinic commentaries?
The heart of the issue, as I see it, is what the leader of each religion actually said and did:
Muhammad married a child and ordered the murder of his enemies.
Jesus turned the other cheek.
In my posts, I have refered to comparing the books in like manner.
And I have stated my opinion that it is not logical to do so.Simply comparing the texts is a very,very oversimplified way of looking at them, and whatever conclusion you draw will be irrelevant and misleading, causing you to misunderstand the meaning of the texts…
You need historical context, as Jenkins stated.
(See my example comparing the US and Russian constitutions.)
Hey,buddy,…if you bring up jihad, pretty soon the thread will degrade… 
For Orthodox Jews, yes. And the commentaries are vast.
To get an idea of how vast: think of the Torah as being the US constitution, and the rabbinic commentaries being the entire body of all the constitutional law cases ever written by every court in the US for 2 centuries. It takes many years to read it all, and learn how the original text of the Bible was actually used over the course of history. Historical context is everything!
That’s enough of that. Don’t derail this one.
Indeed, and all of them with only persuasive - not literal - authority. Nothing in the commentaries can be considered a word of God, they’re just one person, or one school’s, thoughts on particular passages.
It’s similar to my Study Bible, with commentary on each of the 66 books. I place a lot more significance on the actual text than on the commentary, but the commentary helps to provide context.
I do also realize that the Bible is a collection of books whose inclusion was decided on by councils of humans who can be errant.
But those thoughts are vital to understanding the original “Word of God”. For example, the Bible calls for the death penalty in certain cases, such as blasphemy. That would seem simple, right? But it is not—because the later commentaries impose such stringent restrictions on the death penalty that is was never used in actual practice. The commentaries severely limit,- and sometimes even reverse- the word of God.
(Rough comparison: the US supreme Court places limits on freedom of speech, and gun ownership, etc.)
So a newcomer, reading the Bible without reading the commentaries, can reach the wrong conclusion about what the Bible means to the people who follow its rulings.
Now, the average person cannot spend years reading all the commentaries…so if you want to understand the Bible (or the Koran) what you need to do is look at the historical context, and see how the followers actually use the text.
Otherwise you might think that Jews kill blasphemers, when that does not happen and never did.
Holy amnesia Batman!
The Bible generally tells the Jews to take out specific groups of people - the Gargamelites or whatever. I think the only person you’re allowed to just out and out kill without God’s explicit pre-approval is Atheists. Those, you’re supposed to collect and stone to death.
I haven’t read the Koran, but even if it gave “kinder” rules of warfare than the Bible does, the Bible doesn’t advocate warfare with any particular group. So the question comes down to who, in the Koran, are people currently supposed to be attacking and/or killing? The quotes in the article are about things Mohammed himself was supposed to do, not ongoing rules for society.
I think they are both spectacularly violent and could both be used to advocate both abject pacifism and extreme warmongering. They have both been used such, in fact.
What’s more important is what goes on today in the real world. We can get into the complex reasons that as a rule the OECD countries (which mostly are traditionally Christian countries) have very low levels of religious violence. We’re talking true rare shit here, like once every five years a Christian might kill an abortion doctor, or in Norway someone will vaguely shoot a bunch of people for vaguely Christian (but also xenophobic) reasons. Many Muslim countries around the near east have very high levels of religious violence comparatively.
If that part of the world had developed to be the technologically and economically reigning top of the world I suspect things would be very different, and those of us in OECD countries would be a lot different people today, probably more violent. But that’s also an aside, whatever the cause for lower levels of development in technology, economics, and frankly a host of enlightenment values that came to the West along with those developments we’re in a situation where today Islam has a much greater problem with religious violence than Christianity.
Where Christianity is practiced in less civilized and violent societies, however, you do see Christian violence. But with Christianity being the dominant religion of North and South America and Europe you see very little Christian violence on those continents.
I’m interpreting this thread the same way. Let’s look at the text and see what it says. One might separately ask how it is interpreted today, but that’s a different question.
I’ve not read either the Bible or the Koran en its entirety, but I have read a good amount of the Bible and virtually none of the Koran. So, I’m willing to accept Jenkins’ analysis unless someone has a differing source with a different conclusion. We’ve certainly seen that, historically, Christians have been every bit a brutal as even ISIS in terms of enforcing religious orthodoxy. How the various religions change and evolve over time is yet another question.
You appear to be saying it can’t be considered/judged/discussed as being an item, and yet if that were true, you wouldn’t have been able to make the statement above. You wouldn’t be able to call it ‘the Bible’, or ‘it’ - those terms treat it as an item.
For the purpose of the question raised in this thread, it doesn’t matter what it is - the question is about what’s in it.
The problem with saying “Oh, but we have to look at how it’s interpreted, rather than comparing the texts!” is that when the interpretations are compared, generally, it’s by people who know one text AND its interpretations, but only have access to the other text. So, they compare a Bible passage (text) plus their interpretation to a Koran passage (text) taken on its face.
If you just do a textual comparison, that precise type of bias is not the starting point. Obviously, bias creeps in simply because it’s impossible not to apply knowledge.
I took the OP’s question to be “If strangers to both religions read each text, which would they think was more glamorizing or advocating of violence?” Talking about the interpretations does not forward that question.
This 2010 NPR treatment of the OP topic may be of interest. Is The Bible More Violent Than The Quran? : NPR
Jenkins is quoted saying the same thing mentioned in an earlier post:
But then:
Both textual analysis and historical context are crucial to addressing the OP question, surely.
I’m most curious about the incidence of messages of entitlement in the various holy books: how often is it claimed that members of the One True Religion (whatever it may be) are entitled to dominion over all other humans?
One of the major selling points of the Abrahamic religions has always been that men are assured of dominion over women (well, that’s more of a selling point to the men than it is to the women, of course). But to what extent are adherents of one or the other religions assured that they have a right to rule over all people?
I’d maintain that this is what is bringing all those young men to the so-called Islamic State: the promise of being part of the ruling regime. Maybe it could be considered analogous to what motivated young men from the British Isles to join the British Army back in the days of Empire: you can feel righteous and be in charge of your own fiefdom, too!
Humans tend to respond to that sort of thing in general; young men who’ve lived most of their lives in a recessionary, impoverished world, with few prospects for material advancement, may feel it particularly strongly.
And of course, it’s all the better if your power comes with a healthy dose of Righteousness: God is On Our Side!!!
For all I know, there’s an absolutely equal number of “we have the right to rule over all” messages in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and in the Koran. Or the quantities could differ. Of course any such analysis should include historical context, too.
But it would be interesting to know.
nvm.
IMO, the Koran is comparable to Psalms. Both are collections of verses praising God and elating in victory. They’re both a little bloodthirsty, but also both lyrical.
Even if these two characterizations were less selective and biased, you would still be glossing over the fact that the two “leaders” are presented in their respective scriptures as two completely different types of being. Muhammad is represented as a historical human being, albeit one involved in a number of miraculous events, while Jesus is considered to be God Himself temporarily incarnate as a human.
Consequently, behavioral comparisons between the two are pretty much pointless. It would make more sense to compare Muhammad to, say, a plausibly historical human religious leader in the Bible, e.g., Moses or Paul.
Oops, just saw this mod message. Sorry about previous post.
I mean, it certainly can be treated as an item. I think it’s a mistake to do so.
If you do insist on treating the Bible (which Bible, incidentally? Different churches have somewhat different biblical canons, and the translations and source documents can differ quite a bit) as a single document, then you can certainly find nasty stuff in there, yes. I don’t think that’s a particularly smart way to look at the Bible, though.
Don’t many Muslims consider Muhammed as an exemplar of human behavior, though?