Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] The Relevance or Irrelevance of Biblical Moral Teachings by Bart Ehrman Last week I was visiting Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio to give a lecture, and I was given a tour of the impressive Rare Book room in the bowels of their library.
[00:00:18] Before my hosts and I were brought in, we were instructed to wash our hands carefully, and we were informed that the current protocol is not to wear gloves when touching ancient books. Oh really? It's news to me. Back when I was particularly interested in ancient books and manuscripts in my graduate days and in my early career, it was definitely gloves to keep any oil or dirt or whatever else on the fingers from contaminating the page.
[00:00:41] That's obviously still the problem. But rather than separating the human skin from animal skin, such as vellum or parchment with latex, it apparently is better simply to wash the hands. Well, that's because the gloves too easily rip the paper New day, New Policy makes Better Sense Rules, regulations, laws, and good advice all change over time, depending on new knowledge, new experience, changes in thinking, historical development, different cultural assumptions, and lots of other things.
[00:01:11] Is that relevant for the understanding of the relevance of the teachings of Jesus? Or rather their irrelevance?
[00:01:17] There's certainly lots of other pieces of strict moral guidelines and instruction and good advice from the past that few of us would think would make sense anymore. I'm thinking, as a random example, the 18th century policy of trying to revive a drowning victim with a tobacco smoke enema. Apparently it seemed like a good idea at the time.
[00:01:36] Others change because our sense of morality itself has changed, such as prison sentences for homosexual activity.
[00:01:44] Religious laws certainly can go out of date.
[00:01:46] The Hebrew Bible is full of them, and even the most ardent fundamentalist agrees, even if not in their rhetoric. So, for example, when they claim that true Christians will follow the Bible to the T.
[00:01:58] For one thing, some laws of the Bible simply cannot be followed. The Torah is quite explicit that every adult male is required to travel to the Jerusalem Temple three times a year for the most sacred feasts. For that, see Deuteronomy chapter 16, verse 16.
[00:02:12] Christian fundamentalists don't think it has any relevance for them, of course. It's just one of those Jewish things that Jesus did away with, but I'm just using it to illustrate my point. Times change, and life instruction necessarily changes with it.
[00:02:27] Other biblical laws may have made sense in ancient settings, but not in modern, such as the requirement that farmers, meaning literally everybody pretty much not plant or harvest any crops every seventh year, the Sabbath year, but to let their land lie fallow. That's in Leviticus 25:1 7 you might be able to make sense of the command in its time, but it certainly isn't going to have much relevance for federal legislation today.
[00:02:54] Hebrew slaves were also to be set free that seventh year. That's Exodus 21:2 6.
[00:03:00] Not likely to be of any relevance today, nor the laws that follow. Wish to take the terms for taking your daughter back into your household after you sold her as a slave to the guy next door who in the end isn't that satisfied with her? And for that see Exodus 21:7 11 and who's likely to endorse other laws connected with the family, such as Levirite marriage.
[00:03:22] If a married man dies, his oldest still single brother is to marry the widow and have children with her. That's Deuteronomy 25:5 10 or the required death sentences for a child who curses a parent in Leviticus 29. Or a just married bride who turns out not to be a virgin. That's Deuteronomy 22:2021.
[00:03:46] I want to be clear that I am not castigating or mocking these laws. They may make no sense to most people today, but they made perfect sense to other peoples in other times and places, just as did the laws, rules, regulations and good advice in relatively modern times to those who live then. Think tobacco smoke, enemas, prohibition, and unexpectedly low speed limits.
[00:04:10] Some years after the national speed limit was set at 55 miles per hour, I saw a bumper sticker on a car owned by a colleague from the astronomy department that said 186,000 miles per second mentioned is not just a good idea, it's the law.
[00:04:24] Lest you think the outdated laws and injunctions and commandments of a vice in the biblical tradition are restricted to the Hebrew Bible and hence a problem only for modern Jews. There are some obvious examples from the New Testament as well that are usually overlooked by modern Christians.
[00:04:40] Paul, for example, insists that women wear a head covering in Church.
[00:04:44] See 1 Corinthians 11:2 16.
[00:04:48] Ain't too many denominations requiring that one anymore, though some do, including the Plymouth Brethren Church I attended as an evangelical.
[00:04:56] Many conservative churches, of course, do insist that women cannot teach or preach in church and by implication cannot be pastors or priests, let alone popes, because of passages such as First Corinthians 14:34, 35 or 1 Timothy chapter 5, verse 11:15.
[00:05:14] These texts, though, are more extreme than that. Women are explained as being inherently inferior to men and dangerous to listen to in first Timothy, and they are not allowed to speak in church. And that's 1 Corinthians. It does not say speak from the pulpit or lead an adult education class. It says speak as in say anything out loud in church. If they have any questions, they are to wait till they get home and ask their husbands about it. And if you think that one's relevant, you and I aren't likely to be having a friendly chat over a beer on Thursday.
[00:05:45] My point is that there are some things found in the Bible that no one, or so I hope, thinks, can be relevant, and other things that can be either completely or in part either the literal injunctions or the basic intention of the injunctions.
[00:05:59] That's not only true for Bible believing Christians, it's true as well for people of faith who attend church and believe in God, but recognize that Biblical teachings are not inerrant or transferable to the modern world without remainder.
[00:06:12] They are inexorably rooted in their own time and place, and we live in an almost entirely different universe.
[00:06:20] It's also true for those of us who are not believers but still think it's worthwhile to consider the great moral teachings of the great moral teachers of the past and think that Jesus is one of them.
[00:06:30] Can we take anything he teaches seriously? And if so, why should we imagine they have anything of relevance for today?
[00:06:39] A prime example, the one I've been thinking a lot about over the last few years, is Jesus teachings on wealth and possessions. He clearly and literally urges people to take on voluntary poverty.
[00:06:51] Sell all you have and give it to the poor, he says in Mark, chapter 10. He condemns the rich man in relation to poor and starving Lazarus, and notably does not say that it's because the rich guy is mean spirited, greedy, selfish and unrighteous. It's just that he's rich.
[00:07:07] See Luke chapter 16.
[00:07:08] He praises his disciples because they have literally abandoned everything, including their wives, their children, their jobs for the sake of the mission. See Mark, chapter 10 and on and on.
[00:07:19] My view is that anyone who wants to take an ethical teaching from a distant past seriously as some kind or other of guidance for how to live today, they have to determine with some historical insight just why it may have made sense when it was delivered in that context. In what ways precisely, not just vaguely. The context now is not all the same. And whether or not then the advice or the injunction is relevant, and if so, in what way, I think the law about what to do about your daughter you early sold as a slave has virtually no relevance to today.
[00:07:53] So too the injunction for women to wear head coverings in church.
[00:07:58] What about sell everything and give to the poor. Virtually no one does it today. But precisely rather than vaguely, why does it not make sense in the world we live in today?
[00:08:09] The answer is not simply that it's a crazy idea, or it's too radical, or he didn't really mean it. The answer has to do with two specific aspects of Jesus World that made the injunction kind of make sense then that have radically changed since then, making the injunction as a literal guide to behavior irrelevant now.
[00:08:28] But it's inner logic of the injunction still does when, or at least can make sense, and it's worth considering what the logic is, and I'll explain that in the next post.
