Hacker News Reader

Comment by LNSY | Hacker News Reader

I think the primary reason Jesus never argued for divorce is that he didn't reach middle age.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments like this. It leads to worse discussion. In this case we got a religious flamewar—the dumbest and most avoidable kind of flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's unfortunate that just bringing up Jesus can cause the discussion to go off into the weeds like this, but FWIW I don't think GP can be blamed for that. I think their comment was relevant (the main reason Milton would have even had to argue for divorce was because of the way Jesus' words were interpreted by the powers that be at the time) and respectful (lots of people are unrealistically idealistic when younger, and develop more complex views after being exposed to more life experience). I think it would be a shame to prune off relevant points just because other people are prone to start flamewars in response.

The comment was a shallow one-liner which doesn't come close to supporting your interpretation. The Jesus bait just made it more flammable. Commenters can, and should, do better than that here.

Actually the primary reason he never argued for divorce was that in his day, divorce was actually super easy. During his day there were two schools of thought on divorce; one required specific grounds for divorce (which included adultery, abuse, and abandonment); the other allowed it for "any cause". There's a case to be made that Jesus' teaching on divorce (most fully represented in Matthew 19[1]) was aimed exclusively at the unfair use of this "any cause" divorce [2].

[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+19%3A1-...

[2] http://www.instonebrewer.com/DivorceRemarriage/Articles/Whit...

Jesus never married in the first place. Nor had sexual/romantic relationships.

Maria Magdalena would like to have a word with you.

Dan Brown and Nikos Kazantzakis are novelists, not historians.

...joining a long tradition of storytelling about this person.

Have HN Gold my friend.

...some of which claim to be eye witness accounts, being weirdly restrained in describing the highly miraculous, placing these miracles against a backdrop of great received wisdom and mundane details, all the while sounding as if they actually have the personal backgrounds, sources and motives they claim to have.

Sure but some stories are a little more reliable than others.

I don’t know. The story that a charismatic 30 year old man has no sexual history is a story I find to be totally unreliable.

Which do you consider reliable?

Reliability requires some fact checking. Rather impossible in this case

especially the ones that talk about people performing magic...

Nor is the Bible reliable historical evidence.

Neither did they invent Maria Magdalena.

Haha this made me laugh :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com