Something that occurred to me during the discussion on mixed fabrics.
There are roughly 613 laws. A lot of them seem to be very specific and, to say the least, nowadays, odd. Others quite general. We get modern arguments about “the bible says…” and the actual reference turns out to be a prohibition in one of the 613 laws. With some obvious highly politicised issues included.
Years ago I was suffering about of insomnia, and turned on the TV at 4am to be greeted by a fire and brimstone tele-preacher with a large floppy bible open, and to be told in no uncertain terms, that Christians that thought they were not subject to Mosaic Law had it wrong.
So it struck me that any of the Abrahamic religions, and sects/divisions within them may take quite a range of approaches to the old testament laws. So the question becomes, to what extent do the old laws (other than the standard ten commandments) make it out into faiths (and their sub-divisions), beyond Judaism?
When Christian evangelism was extended to gentiles as described in Acts, the original Jewish disciples had to figure out how to deal with this – the unclean foods, lack of circumcision etc. The takeaway seems to have been to just give Mosaic law a pass, and stick to the basic teachings of Jesus: love thy neighbor as thyself, prepare for judgement.
The earliest church expected the world to end any day now. They did a lot of truly radical things along with ditching Mosaic law – shared their worldly goods with each other, women were preachers and deacons. Roman law and general disapprobation provided lots of opportunities for martyrdom.
However, it’s not hard to find textual support for obeying Mosaic law in the New Testament, as well as the exact opposite. In the first place, Jesus was kind of a koan guy. People would ask him a straight ahead question about the law, and he would tell them a oblique story as an answer.
Second, all the Gospel and Epistle writers had a specific audience in view, and those audiences were very different from each other. Different aspects of the message were emphasized or elided. That makes for even more diversity of modern interpretation.
Third, it’s been two thousand years. Everybody seems to like to make up rules for living, to identify themselves as a group. For literalists, who seem to always be with us, Mosaic law does provide a handy list of weird archaic practices. One of the salient qualities of Protestantism is its tendency to splinter into smaller pieces, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find Protestant sects devoted to aspects of Mosaic law.
Us Catholics have had plenty of time to develop our own system of weird archaic practices from scratch.
Muslims have a set of practices beliefs referred to as the ‘Sunnah’, that is, the way of life of the Prophet. Matters range from the mundane – which hand to eat with and how long your pants should be – to general conduct (be well-mannered, etc). It eventually became more codified with the hadith movement which started sometime in the Abbasid caliphate IIRC…
The Muslim practices are one I am interested in - but the question is in parts. The codification of many of these practices has clear parallels to the Judaic commandments, and for many outsiders Halal and Kosher seem to have a lot of overlap, and one suspects derivation.
So, it would be interesting to know what parts of Muslim practice have been explicitly lifted from Judaic law, and whether there are different opinions as to what should and should not be so included. (Obviously those that reject the Hadith are one extreme.)
I’ve often wondered if most Christians know that when he said to love your neighbor as yourself, Jesus was quoting Leviticus 19:18. IOW he didn’t invent this idea; it was already included in Jewish law and practice. In my synagogue these words are carved in letters at least a foot high in stone above the ark (the cabinet) where the Torah scrolls are kept. [/ASIDE]
The influence of Judaism is clear, but SFAIK none of the commandments in the Qu’ran or derived from the Hadith are “explicitly lifted” from Jewish law. Theologically, their moral force for Muslims lies in the fact that they are stated or rooted in the Qu’ran or the Hadith; how they came to be so, historically speaking, or whether similar or identical commandments were previously discerned by Jews or Christians is unimportant.
In other words, theologically speaking, nothing appears in the Qu’ran/Hadith because it previously appeared in, e.g., the Hebrew scriptures. It appears because it is the will of God. It, or a version of it, may also have been discerned by the Israelites and may appear in the Hebrew scriptures, but that is not the reason it appears in the Qu’ran/Hadith.
UDS, that’s actually uncharacteristically inaccurate of you. One of the main tenets of Islam is that it is not new, that it is the culmination of earlier revelations. The earlier revelations and law are still valid insofar as they have not been expressly superseded.
While Islamic fiqah is ultimately derived from the Quran and Sunnah, the main body of law comes from juristic writings and precedents.
Islam holds itself to be a continuation of the faith of Abraham. However, the Shariah (if you needed one word to describe the corpus of Islamic conduct, it’d be this; I was perhaps a bit incorrect in characterizing the set of beliefs as the Sunnah (which, to be sure, they are, but their holding on Muslims comes from their force as Shariah.).).[*Is the previous sentence grammatically correct? :dubious: * ]
However, there is a tradition (sadly non-ubiquitous) in Islam of accommodating the Shariah of different faiths; The Jews are said to operate under Jewish Shariah (which is why the Prophet of Islam made recourse to Jewish scripture when confronting legal cases of Jews), and Christians are said to follow the Shariah of Jesus (I have, as evidence of this claim, Seyyid Hossein Nasr’s commentary on the Quranic verses 3:199, 5:82-83).