MAGA on full display

breepf said:
I don't think ancient Israelites and/or Judeans felt the same pressure as modern-day Christians to regard the text of the bible as literally true and actionable. Not to mention: the actual contents of the Hebrew Bible were the purview of a small fraction of literate urban scribes. The hoi polloi gaveth no fucks--scriptures takes a backseat to the ways is in which religious ritual inflects the mundane and cyclical events of the days and seasons.

Yes, modern-day Christians are in a tougher spot. Luther fucked them over with sola scriptura. Plus, they can read and the printing press made the bible super fucking easy to find.
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Certainly most modern Christians do not take everything in the Bible as literally true. It’s easy to draw arbitrary lines where one might believe Jesus healed the sick but not that women were literally created from a rib and some dirt by claiming something like “well some of the bible is allegory”. Sure. Reasonable take — although some disagree. However, if you want to see a believer really dance, asking them to justify why they should only follow *some* of Jesus’ teachings but not all of them is a different exercise entirely to me.
 
Milk and Cookies said:
Certainly most modern Christians do not take everything in the Bible as literally true. It’s easy to draw arbitrary lines where one might believe Jesus healed the sick but not that women were literally created from a rib and some dirt by claiming something like “well some of the bible is allegory”. Sure. Reasonable take — although some disagree. However, if you want to see a believer really dance, asking them to justify why they should only follow *some* of Jesus’ teachings but not all of them is a different exercise entirely to me.
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With sola scriptura, and a supposed aversion to hundreds of years of Church guidance, Protestantism severely restricted what legitimately counted as an interpretive resource for Christians because Luther had no use for (some) figurative and/or allegorical readings. What Protestantism thus wrought was a dependence on the Bible. This dependence makes sense inasmuch as, in the absence of Church tradition, what was the alternative?

And, even then, "literalness" was not really ever the interpretive point prior to the development of American fundamentalism. The two-headed monster of biblicism and literalism starts to emerge from the fundamentalist fever swamps to oppose scientific understandings of the world precisely because Protestantism had impoverished the non-figurative capacity for understanding the text. Conversely, the Catholics had always known how to roll with science.
 
breepf said:
Well, there's the law of Moses, and then there's the law of Moses. Inasmuch as he walks and talks like a Pharisee, Jesus was another participant in the constant renegotiation and reappraisal of the Mosaic law. Of course, you're still welcome to pass on it, but Jesus did not have some literalist take on the law, and not just because such a thing is impossible. Just like every Pharisiac interpreter, he could go stricter: no divorce! He could also go more lenient: don't cast stones, though that story is a later interpolation, i.e., it's definitely ahistorical.

Long story short--yeah, slaves were ok, but I don't think scholars have actually concluded that practical, on-the-ground jurisprudence resulted in people constantly stoning impudent children and the like.
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Interested in the evidence for the ahistoicality of the "let he who is without sin cast the first stone", thing.

EDIT: Not because I want to contest the point. More becuse I want to know the background.
 
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Ddseddse said:
Interested in the evidence for the ahistoicality of the "let he who is without sin cast the first stone", thing.

EDIT: Not because I want to contest the point. More becuse I want to know the background.
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As far as I can tell, the bulk of scholars consider the episode to be an interpolation and, for that matter, don't consider that position controversial. Wikipedia has an overview:

Jesus and the woman taken in adultery - Wikipedia

I stumbled across the interpolation argument in Raymond Brown's 2-volume Yale UP commentary on John. FWIW, Ehrman also always describes it as an interpolation.
 
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