Jesus and Paul were not Literalists!

Virtually everything that Jesus says about the Old Testament law is geared towards encouraging a spiritual, rather than literal, interpretation.

Indeed, in the Gospel of John the idea of interpreting Jesus' words literally is mocked. For example, in John 3 a member of the Sanhedrin (who we can assume is reasonably well-educated and intelligent) is shown having trouble understanding that Jesus is using "born again" as a metaphor.

In several cases, his emphasis is on how people are harmed by the strict literalistic interpretation of the law. Jesus rejected the close literalism of his day, in ways that demonstrate that he would reject Fundamentalism today.

In the argument over picking wheat on the Sabbath, he demonstrates that David, the pinnacle of Jewish identity, bent the Sabbath rules to keep from starving.

His message is that the Sabbath rules were never meant to be used to keep people from doing what they must do to live. In the larger context, though, Jesus means that religious codes are meant to make people's lives better, and using them to make accusations of immorality against one's foes -- which is something the Fundamentalists do often -- is against God's intent. To support this, he cites the prophet Hosea, who wrote that God 'desires mercy, not sacrifice.' What he means is that God never meant for us to use religious or moral rules in a way that they cause grief. God desires mercy over 'sacrifice,' or rote adherence to moral codes.

In his comments about divorce, he asserts that it is something which Moses put in the law, not God. This alone demonstrates that he does not believe that the scripture is the literal and infallible word of God.

When his disciples are criticized for eating without washing their hands, he argues that it is far worse for people to spread evil teachings than to eat with unwashed hands. He then cites Isaiah to accuse the Pharisees of promoting teachings which are not those of God but "rules taught by men."

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is another powerful refutation of religious literalism. In the ancient ritual purity code, priests or Levite were required to avoid touching injured or dead people. Interpret this strictly enough, and it would require a priest to literally walk past a man beaten and left for dead by the roadside, in order to preserve his "ritual purity." This parable demonstrates the way a religious rule, meant for the purpose of good, becomes a tool of evil in the hands of religious literalists.

Jesus used the image of a Samaritan to make underscore this point, because his Judean or Galileean audience would have held the Samaritan with disdain. The Samaritan, though he might be unclean or apostate seen through the lens of religious literalism, was called by Jesus more of a 'loving neighbor' than the priest or Levite. This is not simply agitation against the priestly class (though it is that too) but an indictment of the mindset that puts scripture over human suffering.

Today, the Fundamentalists are fond of pointing their finger at people they consider transgressors of religious codes on sex, like gays and lesbians, or "adulterers." Consider though the way Jesus treated "sexual sinners." In the case of the accused adulteress, Jesus was confronted by a crowd bearing an accused adulteress, demanding that in accord with the old laws she be stoned to death.

From a strictly literal standpoint, they were right. But Jesus rejected the literal interpretation of the law because he saw the evil for which it was being used. Instead of agreeing that she should be put to death, he reminded them that all people have their own history of transgressions, and in light of that none of us has the right to judge one another. He then told the woman, “Now don’t do it again” -- hardly a harsh rebuke!

While conversing with the Samaritan woman, he offered her “the waters of life” even though he was aware of her sexual transgressions. The fact too that he, a Jew, was conversing with her was occasion for her shock; so in this event, Jesus was flouting the literal interpretation of the religious code on two levels!

Jesus did have many words of condemnation for different types of people, but rarely towards anyone who is actually in his presence. For example, he is critical of "scribes and Pharisees," the rich, the Sadducees, and so on, when speaking of them abstractly. But it is truly unusual for him to be shown having a harsh word for someone in his presence. Often the people in his presence include those who would have been shunned by most.

Where Jesus spoke against sin, he reserved his harshest words for those who promoted social or cultural evils -- oppression -- rather than individual transgressions. This makes the meaning of his ministry look very different. If he truly meant for people to walk around in a cloud of fear about their sins, he would have spoken directly to people in a much more critical way -- the way Fundamentalists often do today. Instead, he 'suffered' the presence of people who would have been shunned by most (tax collectors and prostitutes and so on), and was not shown being critical of them. If he disagreed with their way of life, he clearly felt that he would get through to them through acceptance, not accusation.

Jesus would not have stood alongside the Fundamentalists in pointing fingers of accusation against people. He would have instead stood in defense of those accused, decrying the hypocrisy of the accusers. He would have berated them for using accusations in their fundraising letters -- making money at the expense of other people -- or using accusations for political benefit.

We might get the impression that Paul was a religious literalist, because of passages like Romans 1 or I Corinthians 6 that take a moralistic tone. But Paul was no literalist, either:

[Romans 7:4] So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God.
[5] For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death.
[6] But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

On the face of it, Paul's argument in Romans, chapter 7 doesn't make sense until we ask, "What kind of sinful passions could Paul mean, that are roused by the law of Moses?" The entire thrust of Paul's argument in Romans, though, is that we cannot rely on religious codes to ensure that we are acting from righteousness. Paul clearly believed that doing so was a trap that causes us to act inhumanely.

Instead of looking into books, then, the key is to judge a teaching or an idea or an action by the guidance of Spirit, in light of its effects on people -- whether it is good fruit or bad.

Paul's argument about the newness of Spirit versus the oldness of the written code is not compatible with the use to which the Fundamentalists put his words.

And where Paul did take a moralistic tone, note that he did not accuse people of acting against scripture, but from the conviction that he thought nature would show certain things to be "inexpedient."

[I Corinthians 6:12] "Everything is permissible for me"—but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible for me"—but I will not be mastered by anything.
[13] "Food for the stomach and the stomach for food"—but God will destroy them both. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

Paul agrees with the Corinthians that "everything is permissible" since Christians are no longer bound to religious literalism. So the main reason we should watch our behavior, he argues, is not to stick to religious law, but to keep ourselves from being ruled by base desires.

His argument with Peter over keeping kosher in Galatians 2, and his writings about eating "food sacrificed to idols" in I Corinthians 8, further demonstrate Paul's opposition to religious literalism.

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