The second quote does not say that King James actually wrote that version of the bible.
I don’t think “wrote his own version” necessarily means that he wrote it out in his own hand.
Euthanasia only makes sense if you think that pain is bad for you.
However, the Christian/Catholic tradition holds that suffering is valuable. We wouldn’t be suffering if we weren’t either being taught something or being punished for something. The suffering on Earth will produce rewards in Heaven. Euthanasia or suicide would then be avoiding God’s lesson, avoiding God’s punishment, and/or giving up eternal rewards for a temporary reprieve. All this is exemplified by Christ’s sacrifice and the early martyrs.
Protestant Christians don’t hold this view in quite the same way, but all of them would basically agree that pain is not inherently bad and that any eternal reward would outweigh any amount of temporal suffering.
Are you sure about this? Is there denominations that actually say its ok for a ternimally ill person to drink barbituates as is legal in Oregon or at Dignitas in Switzerland? I’ve never heard of any.
Thanks to Smapti for the 1980 Vatican statement but there must be something earlier than that? Euthanasia was practiced in the 1890’s using opium for people with Cancer, I’m sure the Church had something to say about that. To be honest I was expecting to hear about some relevant writings from the early church fathers in 500 AD or so.
I went looking for sites purporting to present the Christian perspective on euthanasia. There are quite a few of them out there, but one of the best I found was this one from the BBC, of all places. (There’s also a short Wikipedia article on Christian views on euthanasia.)
Aha, I found something, this is what I was looking for. Looks like we can blame church father Tertullian for this one:
In considering the word in the New Testament, the church father Tertullian believed “kill” there had a wider meaning. Referring to the Creator, Tertullian wrote: “He puts His interdict on every sort of man-killing by that one summary precept ‘Thou shalt not kill.’” (De Spectaculis 2 ANF 3.80).
from here: PEMPTOUSIA | Mount Athos – Wisdom – Holiness
So Tertullian was responsible for the shift from the narrow “thou shalt not murder (illegal killing)” of the original Hebrew to the broader meaning that eventually became the KJV “Thou shalt not kill”.
Theres lots more good stuff in the link above.
I have heard any number of people say they built their house when in actuality they hired it done, by me or others.
Can we drop this? Its not relevant to my OP. Clearly no one thinks the King James actually wrote the KJV himself personally.
Catholics also have the principle of double effect, which is often relevant in euthanasia cases. The principle applies to cases where an act is, in itself, either morally good or morally neutral, and can have effects which are both good and bad. In such a case, the act is permissible so long as the good effect is the intended one, everything possible is done to minimize the harm, and the good outweighs the harm.
For instance, suppose that someone is in the late stages of cancer, and is thus in a great deal of pain. It is acceptable to give that person painkillers: Administering painkillers is not in itself an evil act. It is possible that, if the pain is severe enough, it can only be relieved via extremely large doses of painkillers. Extremely large doses of painkillers have a secondary effect: They sometimes kill the patient through overdose. But it can still be permissible to give the extremely large doses with the goal of relieving the pain, even though this might kill the patient. It is not, however, permissible to give the extremely large doses of painkillers for the purpose of killing the patient. If there are multiple painkillers available, and one of them is less likely to kill than another, for the same amount of pain relief, then one must choose that one.
Point one–life is a gift from God.
“Thus saith the LORD that made thee, and formed thee from the womb.” (Isaiah 44:2a).
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7).
Point two–God has a plan for every life.
“Then the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:4, 5).
Suicide is, in the plainest sense, murder. It is also taking something that we have no right to take–thus distinguishing suicide from the voluntary giving of one’s life in order to save somebody else.
Somebody who commits suicide is saying that they know better than God does how their life should end. Thus it is not only murder, but also sinful presumption.
Euthanasia is in many cases both suicide and “regular” murder merely dressed up in a medical pretext.
This is more or less right. I’d add that Christians, in general, from the very earliest days have generally viewed the commandment as, at the least, a prima facie statement that killing is bad- not just unlawful killing, but killing in general. This would be consistent with, for example, Jesus’ remarks against the death penalty in John 8, and the early Christian opposition to abortion and suicide. While there may be exceptions (capital punishment, for example), those are just that, exceptions. Many if not most of the early Christians (i.e. pre-5th century) were opposed to war and the death penalty, which is why people like St. Augustine had to argue for a change in the teaching once Christianity became the dominant religion of the empire.
In addition to the King James version, Luther’s German translation and Jerome’s definitive Latin translation appear to have used synonyms for ‘kill’ as well. I don’t know what the Septuagint said, but if it used the Greek for ‘kill’ rather than ‘murder’, that would explain why the early Christians followed suit.
Augustine is the earliest I know of to write extensively on suicide (in a strongly negative vein, in The City of God). He was responding to a particular situation around his time: when Rome fell to the Goths in 410 AD, a lot of Christian women committed suicide to avoid being raped by the Goths, and there subsequently grew up around them a cult of veneration. Augustine was careful not to pronounce on the fate of their souls, specifically, but went into some extensive argument about why suicide was a sin, and was specifically a violation of ‘thou shalt not kill’.
Actually, G-d had a plan for Jeremiah. There is absolutely nothing in this text that suggest HaShem has a special plan for every person.
The notion that “thou shalt not kill” is a mistranslation and that the original Hebrew text used a word here meaning “murder” rather than “kill” is one of these factoids that gets trotted out in internet discussion on a regular basis. But I suspect it could stand to be subjected to a bit more scrutiny than it usually gets.
It relies on the assumption that biblical Hebrew had a word whose meaning corresponds to the modern English word “murder”. And when you think about it, it’s not a slam-dunk that this will be so. Even in English, we argue about the borders of “murder”, and in different countries the area covered by it is different. Some people distinguish between murder and manslaughter, for instance. And we also have the term “homicide”, often used to embrace both murder and manslaughter. Are we expected to believe that the Hebrew text did not forbid manslaughter, or other homicides which we consider culpable, but not amounting to murder? Would it in fact be closer to the truth to suggest that the Hebrew word should be translated as “homicide”? Or perhaps as something else? If “murder” means “a killing forbidden by law”, then what law do the ten commandments appeal to to determine the scope of this particular commandment?
English translations of the Bible aren’t unique in using “kill” here. French translations use tuer rather than meurtre. The Luther translation into German makes a similar choice. And so forth. Perhaps they are influenced by the Vulgate, which uses occidere (to cut down) rather than caedere (to slaughter) or necare, to kill or jugulare, to slay. Occidere steers something of a middle course.
The Septuagint uses ou phoneuseis which, I’m told, can refer either to killing or to murder, depending on context. It steers a middle course, like occidere.
I wouldn’t be amazed to discover that the Hebrew word is less univocal that is implied in the claim that “it means ‘murder’, not ‘kill’”. I’d also be interested to know how closely the Israelite concept that we label “murder” corresponds to our own understanding of what is murder and what is mere killing. And I’d ask questions like, is this Hebrew word used anywhere else in the Hebrew scriptures? And does this cast any light on what it embraces, and how closely it corresponds to “murder”? It’s entirely possible that the “middle course” translations favoured in the Septuagint and the Vulgate in fact reflect a certain vagueness or ambiguity in the Hebrew text.
The word is תִרְצָח, which is a form of לרצח, and it definitely means murder. You don’t have to have an established penal code to have a concept of murder. It would be an inappropriate word to use for slaughtering an animal for food, killing someone in battle, or executing someone according to law, or even accidentally killing someone.
The same word is used in the repetition in Deuteronomy.
Thanks again for all the really fascinating and well researched discussion. But does anyone have an answer to the question of whether any Christian Domination says that Physician Assisted Active Euthanasia as practised by Dignitas is ok or not?
Ive already established above that the early church father Tertullian (e.g. the father of western latin theology) is probably responsible for the shift from “murder” to “kill”. See my post #26.
Rabbinical commentary on the word רְצָח, and why it means “murder,” and not simply “kill.” Short version: the word is sometimes modified by “accidental” to describe a crime that is punishable by banishment, rather than death, the implication being that the word alone means willful murder. The word is not the word used to describe killing someone as a form of punishment; it is not the word used to describe Cain killing Abel, because up until then, no one had killed anyone else, and Cain didn’t know what he was doing (beating Abel) would lead to his death. It is not used to describe death in battle.
Caveat: the rabbi who wrote this is a member of “Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership,” not a group I’m especially fond of myself. He’s also a member and advocate of the NRA. However, he is a rabbi, and as it happens, he does articulate the differences among various Hebrew words for willful murder, unintentional homicide, and death in other contexts, pretty well, and he has all the Torah citations in this brief article, so the reader can check them.
Here is a Hebrew/English bible online. It translates תִרְצָח as “murder.”
In fact, one bit I read said that James never got around to fully paying some of the translators - so technically, it isn’t really his bible, there may be workman’s liens on it.
This is the thing. The bit about “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” may have been sarcasm, but the middle ages church intelligentsia (using the term loosely) spent a lot of time discussing and analyzing the scriptures to clarify all sorts of different details of doctrine.
Just as there is no explicit rule about priestly celibacy, for example (except perhaps Matthew’s “no man can serve two masters”) there does not have to be an explicit prohibition in the bible for the church to condemn suicide. The concept was deduced from basic dogma by monks with too much time on their hands.
But the drive to off oneself can be very strong–greater than the drive to feed when hungry, or to swim while drowning. Such a drive is greater than mere temptation. So much so that denying it feels wrong. So who is to say that obeying the suicidal urge is wrong, as opposed to obedience to God’s not-so-subtle command to do so? In his faith, Abraham was willing to slaughter his own son. Would not slaughtering one’s self, under the influence of a similiarly internally-received compulsion, demonstrate even greater obedience? Perhap’s God’s plan for the suicide is to broadcast a clear message, either of obedience, or of protest and desire to further a cause of greater good? For example, in the wake of elevated suicide rates, a society might focus its efforts on recognizing and relieving misery.