Yuku free message boards

Raphjd ~

R: "What I find rude is you making tons of threads and then when called on blatant contradictions made by you, you never go back to them."

Gimme an example. Oh, you did already:

R: "An example would be your repeated claims that Jesus told people to disregard the Commandment "honor thy mother and father"."

I did not claim what you said I did. Jesus did not tell people to disregard the commandment to honor their father and mother. What Jesus /did/ do was to say that that commandment is lower in the hierarchy of commandments than the commandment to obey God. So if your parent says, "Honor me by disobeying God," you shouldn't disobey God. This was true before Jesus came as well as afterwards; if an Israelite father under the Law of Moses told his children to worship idols, they were not obligated to commit idolatry.

I think this is obvious to anyone who takes the time to consider what I said alongside the relevant texts.

R: "Explaining a contradiction, while making yor own contradiction still leaves us with a contradiction."

But I'm /not/ making my own contradictions.

R: "Most christians and many skeptics dismiss books such as "The Holy Blood, The Holy Grail" because there are too many "supposes" in it."

It's rather history-challenged. Plenty of people have spent their time eviscerating the Holy Blood, Holy Grail / DaVinci Code nonsense, so I will skip all that here. Tangent.

R: "Well, that is what you are insisting we need to do in your explainations. [i.e., suppose this or that.] How can one be bad and the other be good?"

Easy: I'm playing defense. The person who posits a contradiction in the text is already making a supposition; he's asserting that Statement A must irreconcilably disagree with Statement B. The solutions I offer do not always demonstrate that A and B agree, but they do, I think, show that A and B do not irreconcilably disagree -- in other words, the view that there's a contradiction between A and B is not logically unavoidable. And that's the immediate extent of my endeavour.

When I believe that the Biblical text is self-consistent (both as a whole, and in any specific case of alleged discrepancy), I'm making a supposition. I can't always prove that my solution (or any one of several possible solutions, in some instances) is what the Biblical authors had in mind. But the person who insists that there's a contradiction there is also making a supposition -- he supposes that there's no way that Statement A and Statement B can possibly agree.

I'm content to walk by faith. Via my resolutions I want to show that the person who insists that the Biblical authors produced errors is also walking by faith (at least, when he is making a very large percentage of his claims) -- his conclusions (like mine) rest on some unverifiable premises, different and sometimes opposite premises than my own.

Yours in Christ,

Waterrock

Raphjd ~

R: "Depending on your christian view, Jesus or his father or both gave the 10 Commandments and laws to Moses."

Right. And Moses gave the Law to Israel. (And later, when Jesus came to earth, the covenant that Jesus initiated was not only for Israel, but for all humankind.)

R: "If it was his father that gave them to Moses, then he didn't honor or obey his father's wishes."

The Law stipulated that it be enforced by the established authorities -- i.e., the elders, such as the people Jesus was speaking with -- in accord with the protocol that the Law describes: the curser's parents present him before the elders, and so forth. As far as I know, Jesus never was in the presence of such a scene, so I don't know what grounds you are basing for your claim that Jesus did not keep the Law about this. (You might be able to make a stronger case for this line of reasoning, btw, if you were to use the case of the woman caught in adultery; the Law prescribed that adulteresses be stoned but obviously Jesus let her go.)

R: "In fact he totally dismisses his father's wishes, unless of course Jesus agrees that people should kill their kids."

You're making some assumptions and misreadings.
First, the cursing-child (the word "child" may lead to a picture of an immature child, but I mean it merely in the sense of an individual who is the offspring of the father and mother) was not to be killed by the parents but by the community, after they had considered the parents' testimony.
Second, unlike modern criminal-codes, some of the laws in the Law of Moses were written mainly to establish moral principles -- i.e., even though they *can* be literally enforced, their main purpose is to serve as platforms for other teachings. I think that here in the Kill-the-One-Who-Curses-His-Parents we have such a law -- a law that, as far as the entire text of the Old Testament is concerned, we have no example of a literal enforcement. A parent in Israel would be within his/her rights to present a parent-cursing child to the elders, as the Law says, but as far as we can tell, no parent ever actually did so. (Right? Right.)

When Jesus brings up this law, I don't think He's trying to ignite a campaign to rally parents to kill their parent-cursing children. (As far as we can tell, nobody in Israel was literally cursing their parents at the time, and if they were, then as far as we can tell, their parents were not doing anything about it.) Nor is He saying that it would be wrong for parents in Israel to bring their parent-cursing child before the elders to consider whether or not he deserves to be executed (though this would involve a complicated sub-question of whether or not the elders, or the Romans, should be regarded as the valid governmental authority in capital-punishment cases). Jesus is just pointing out that the principle which that commandment teaches -- that children ought to respect their parents, and that it is a very serious offense against God and Israelite society to do otherwise -- is being undermined by the religious teachers' instructions about what is "Corban."

There's no contradiction there. Jesus does not, in this passage, teach that the Law should not be enforced. He's not arguing case-law; He merely cites the law as an example of the establishment in the Law of the idea that children should honor their parents (not only younger children, but adult children. It's adult children, btw, who are in view in the NT passage -- adult children who have the means to provide for their aged parents, but don't).

Now, later on, Jesus /does/ supercede the Law, when He established the new covenant of grace. In the new covenant, we're not bound to stone parent-cursing children; not at all. As Scripture says, if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law. But Christians are obligated to honor their parents, and Christian children are obligated to obey their parents in the Lord (i.e., recognizing a chain of command and recognizing that God's commands outweigh those of any humans, including parents). That's not a contradiction, though; that's a graduation.

Yours in Christ,

Waterrock