Luis Castelar tells Stephen Tamberly:
"'You are no holy man. I think you may be a magician who should burn at the stake.'" (p. 667)
Why should a magician burn? Leviticus says that a wizard should be stoned:
"A man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death; they shall be stoned with stones, their blood shall be upon them."
-Leviticus, 20:27.
However, Leviticus does decree burning for someone:
"And the daughter of any priest, if she profanes herself by playing the harlot, profanes her father; she shall be burned with fire."
-Leviticus, 21:9.
(These Leviticus quotations and others similar are in Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.)
Horrific. At the weekend, I asked an Evangelical propagandist about execution by burning in the Bible and he claimed to think that I was talking about the sixteenth century. Castelar is indeed from the sixteenth century but his ideas come from the Bible. Needless to say, my attempt at dialogue with the Evangelical was highly unsatisfactory.
10 comments:
According to traditional Latin Christian theology, the New Testament supersedes the Old.
Hence Christians are not bound by Leviticus -- the dietary taboos being the most conspicuous instance, but not the only ones.
Historically, attempts to bring back Old Testament proscriptions and prescriptions were denounced as "Judaizing".
This is actually fairly significant.
Unlike the other two "Abrahamic" religions, Christianity isn't a law code for the most part.
It makes -general- prescriptions and then lets people interpret them.
Eg., it doesn't say what taxes you should pay.
When a man asked Jesus whether it was legal to pay the tax to Rome, Jesus asked whose image was on the coin. When told it was Caesar's, he said, famously: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."
And to clarify: "My kingdom is not of this earth."
Likewise with the Sabbath (the episode where they rub out grains from the ear) and the "woman taken in adultery".
Christianity emphasizes that for religious purposes specific instances have to be dealt with in terms of general moral principles, rather than detailed legislation.
This marks a break with what you might call "archaic-Semitic legalism" and marks it as a more universalistic and sophisticated system.
You don't have to wear particular clothes, eat particular food, have a particular system of government, etc., to be Christian.
It is still horrific that people believed that God HAD legislated death by burning and stoning.
Well, that was pretty well universal -- the thing about Christianity is that it eventually moved -beyond- that.
It's sort of like slavery: until historically quite recently, it was near as no matter a universal institution. Slaves among hunter-gatherers (mostly women, like Sacagawea), slaves among Neolithic farmers, slaves in city-states and empires and nations and whatever.
Western Europe was the first large area in the history of the world that -didn't- have slavery to a greater or lesser extent; it died out there in the course of the early and High middle ages. In 1086, 15% of the population of England were chattel slaves. Two hundred years later, it was zero.
Japan was the other leader, though a bit later.
Everywhere else, slavery was abolished essentially by West Europeans and their overseas descendants nagging, threatening, soft-powering in many cases and pistol-whipping and gunboating other people into abolition.
Similar things happened with judicial torture.
But that Evangelical guy is committed to believing that God really did order burnings and stonings yet he just tried to duck out of it in conversation.
"Nothing to see here, move along, move along." 8-).
In fact, the Evangelical is simply theologically unsophisticated.
The actual orthodox answer is that morality changed when the Incarnation occurred, IIRC.
The Old Testament is the rule of Law, simpliciter; the New, that of Love.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I've wondered if you had any such debates and discussions with Catholics, as well as Evangelical Protestants? If so, I hope my co-religionists were more sophisticated and nuanced!
Mr. Stirling: I would say, rather, the Catholic view of the OT is more complex than Christianity superseding it. Rather, Christ and Christianity came to FULFILL the Law and the Prophets. Christianity still took MUCH, after all, from Judaism. Which is why the Old Testament is canonical scriptures to us.
Also, Catholics believe things like Sacred Tradition, the authority of the pope and bishops, etc., keeps Christianity from disintegrating into the kind of theological and doctrinal anarchy characteristic of Protestantism.
And that famous incident from Matthew about tribute to Rome had enormous consequences. It led to denying the state, any state, has the right to complete dominance over all aspects of human life.
The Catholic view is not a Protestant style "either/or" but "both x and y." That is, both law and love/caritas is necessary.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I was brought up Catholic after all. A Jesuit priest and a Presbyterian minister officiated at Sheila's and my wedding. Despite all that, I am still unsure on one point. Should Catholics say that God really did command punishments of stoning and burning? Or is the OT wrong to state that God directly revealed such laws and such punishments to Moses?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't know. You are making points I would need to check up on before being able to respond. I don't usually pay much attention to the obscurer points of Leviticus!
After all, even before the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in AD 70, I doubt Jews were doing much stoning and even less burning. The general tendency of the rabbis seems to have been in the direction of ameliorating punishments.
And this ameliorating can be traced far back. The example I thought of being this from 4 Kings 14.5-6, about Amaziah/Amasias, King of Judah: "And when he had possession of the kingdom, he put his servants to death that had slain the king his father; but the children of the murderers he did not put to death, according to that which is written in the book of the law of Moses, the fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers, but every man shall die for his own sins."
In short we see Judaism moving away from collective to PERSONAL responsibility for one's crimes.
Ad astra! Sean
Re: Slavery. I think I should listen again to number 3 in this series
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3TaPgchJtRjl-WiM1_CGzTSRznxOvZx
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