(Also, the story of Jesus and the leper may have been nothing more than an attempt to talk about Jesus' miraculous powers.)
if you dont have soap rinsing your hands with water that could be contaminated by a myriad of bacteria may not be the best course of action. Even in the modern world of less-developed countries, most gastrointestinal infections come from (unclean) water, not food.
>”Soap became hugely popular throughout the Roman Empire, around 100 BC to 400 AD. When the ruins of Pompeii were excavated, an entire soap factory was discovered in the rubble.”
Honour your father and mother. Be just to your neighbor. Trust God above man and cultivate a loving relationship with both. The modern day godless neo-pharisees will of course, as always, ask questions and make remarks that are trite, intended to discredit people's faith, or trip heartfelt believers into contradiction. They want to maintain the social order they're scared of having overturned by a just man willing to make a real sacrifice going against its grain in a sorely needed fashion. They don't understand, so be it.
Also, hand washing is a matter of cleanliness period. Not spiritual cleanliness, not ritual cleanliness, not karmic cleanliness, not any other kind of something cleanliness. It is simple, ordinary, banal cleanliness.
> The modern day godless neo-pharisees ...... want to maintain the social order they're scared of having overturned by a just man willing to make a real sacrifice .......
Who is this modern day man? JetAlone, who are you talking about? And who are his opponents?
> You can wash your hands if you think it is wise to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness that you place trust in the performance of above God as the pharisees did. As you say, God can make the water a worse poison to you.
That paragraph is very much refering to the present, not to biblical times. For some reason, contrary to what most Christians belive, JetAlone seems to doubt the usefulness of hand washing, because why bother, God can make the water into poison.
JetAlone, do you believe in a malevolent God?
In a way, I can understand it. If you have ultimate unshakable faith in God: a) You believe God will not let any harm befall you no matter how irresponsible your behaviour. b) You also believe that should harm befall you, it is inevitable, because it is God's will. But is this not called tempting God and against Christian dogma?
You can also take a bath if you want to, but don't make it a matter of spiritual, ritual cleanliness as Jesus did.
Also, Christians really need to learn what "pharisee" actually means before throwing the word around the way you do. "Neo-pharisees" would imply that the pharisees were some ancient group that ceased to exist at some point. In reality "pharisee" simple means "rabbi," and the only reason the term fell out of use is that the only recognizably Jewish movement to survive the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish-Roman wars was rabbinic Judaism. Almost any Jews you meet today practice a religion that can be traced directly to the pharisees mentioned in the New Testament. Moreover, the religious movement Jesus led was closer to what the pharisees taught and practiced than it was to any other Jewish movement of that time. One easy example is Jesus' own teaching that a man who has lustful thoughts about a woman has already committed adultery in his own heart; this is the kind of broadening of Jewish law that is common in rabbinic documents like the Talmud (e.g. "yichud," a prohibition on unmarried men and women being alone behind a closed door). Jesus also taught his followers answers to common Rabbinic debates, such as the famous dispute between Hillel and Shammai about when divorce is permitted.
Jesus was not nearly as radical as some Christians think. His movement was very slightly outside the mainstream, and for the most part his focus seems to have been on avoiding blind adherence to tradition. His willingness to accept disciples who were uneducated and even outcasts was unusual, but not that unusual, with the Talmud indicating that Rabbi Akiva was illiterate until he turned 40 and that Rabbi Shimon bar Lakish was the leader of a criminal gang before he began studying to be a rabbi (you may not believe such stories, but remember that the New Testament is no more historically reliable than the Talmud). Paul taught a religion that was much more radical than anything Jesus taught, but somehow I do not think you were referring to Paul when you spoke of "a just man willing to make a real sacrifice."
He saw His own flesh as the bread of life, greater than the manna in the desert.
I am not sure we can easily comprehend how out there this was.
He resurrected people and died for the sins of every human. His teaching wasn't just a list of debates, but it was full of claims and events that you can't honestly compare to other "rabbies"
The whole thing about forgiveness, non-retaliation, redemption is very distinctive from usual Judaism though. That's one of the core aspects of Christianity.
Leprosy was viewed as a symbol of sin. This story was about Him touching a sinner and purifying them from that sin.
A good dogma is like xkcd.com, you can always find a relevant quote for any given thing.
A rigid dogma can not, therefore it is a bad dogma, therefore it does not stand the test of time.
Yes, if it was only about hygiene, this would seem strange. But the actual passages are more complex: and naturally, ignoring symbolism, ignoring the whole context, the huge difference between Law and human rules, the giant focus on sin in thousands of years of Scripture, Christ's ministry and the Law, Israel society, one can leap to any interpretation he wants.
We can also add James epistle , James 4:8-9: "Come close to God, and God will come close to you. Wash your hands, you sinners; purify your hearts, for your loyalty is divided between God and the world."
That is the very point of dogma beeing incoherent. Any interpretation can be derived. Therefore you need a profitable hierarchical beurocracy to tell the people the right interpretation. Every cult new and old has worked the same way.
But very often the truth reason that we don't like them is not because of our intelligence(you can find genius people believing in almost every kind of faith or ideology), but because of trauma, misunderstanding or the fact that often deep down we want to be our own gods, but we just end up being slaves to our own fragility and animal-like passions.
Hebrews 4:12
"For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it pierces even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart. "
(edit: also, my point is: if you ignore all the things you shouldn't ignore, it's easy to leap to wrong interpretations. you shouldn't ignore them! end of edit)
Jesus spoke sternly several times about the hypocrisy and burden of those artificial rules. He pointed out how they would "strain a gnat and swallow a camel" (straining their drinking water to avoid unclean animals while enjoying camel steaks which were unclean) or meticulously paying tithe of their little herbs while taking bribes and corrupting their legal judgements or promising their possessions to God so they could avoid honoring and taking care of their parents.
He talked about how they made the Sabbath a burden and the day of rest was made for the good of mankind rather than mankind being made slave to their onerous Sabbath rituals (eg, you couldn't go more than a certain distance, but if you went out before Sabbath and laid out parcels of food, you could go the distance, then stop at your "house" for a meal and then continue on).
If Jesus was indeed the Creator and Son of God, then His establishing a ritual would be very different from an ordinary man creating a ritual.
Jesus fulfilled the ceremonial laws when He died (becoming the literal death the symbol that the lamb pointed toward). This applied to the rest of the ceremonial laws (though not the Ten Commandments else sin could not exist as it is defined as the breaking of those laws).
In effect, the many daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly ceremonial rituals were swept away. Their replacements were a single baptism when one decided to follow Him and an occasional ("as often as you do this") ritual of humility (foot washing) followed by a ritual to remind of His death (communion).
What kind of god, with the ability to completely cure a horrible disease with a simple gesture, instead goes arround and publicly heals a handful of people. How do you classify someone with the ability to eradicate a source of suffering, only making use of it for a few public appearances surrounded by those who will tell the tale.
And if you respond that it is not him that healed them, it is their faith, that faith has spread far and wide on all continents since then, yet the only progress humanity has made against Mycobacterium leprae, has been since sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccination (BCG vaccine) entered the stage.
Here is a chart about leprosy epidemiology in 2016: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprosy#/media/File%3ALepros...
It must be really nice living in a country where the threat of leprosy is closer to a myth than to an everyday topic. One in which you are not praying to a god each day to be shielded of the threat of leprosy or to be cured of it because you have better things to pray for.
I find it amazing how some human traits are so deep that people do not realise just how human, every single description of a god is. It is a monumental failure of imagination of what a god might be. And no wonder it is so. People before the enlightenment had far fewer sources to feed that imagination. And people after, found better uses of that imagination.
Christ himself wasn't spared a brutal death in this life: many apostles and martyrs in a similar way, and this wasn't by accident. Earthly comfort or even health isn't the goal of christianity. Being re-united to God and stop being slaves to sin is more important: but this is a question of free will imho.
(as apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians: 1 For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. 2 Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling,..)
The faith doesn't make sense, if one believes only in the material world. It's central point is the Resurrection: "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." (1 Cor 15:19)
[1] 1 Corinthians https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians...
Unfortunately, this comment illustrates the issues with this line of thinking perfectly. There is no reason to strive to make life better for others or for one's self. The optimum Christian life optimises for the maximum confessed penance before death (but after baptism) in order to obtain salvation which is the optimum afterlife.
Precisely this overvaluation of afterlife and undervaluation of life results in this being called a death cult.
This is precisely why there is no empathy for the people who suffered from the pandemic. Millions died. Good for them.
> But being scared of the air is certainly not something Jesus would have been.
In other words, a 76 year old man, 1 year away from retirement, the period of life one gets to reap the fruits of their labour, for whom Covid is not a mild cold, but most probably a matter of life and death, should grow some balls and behave like the omnipotent God.
It is crass.
Yet it is in accordance with Christian belief. Only a life of faith and penance after being baptized grants you a chance at salvation in the afterlife. One should face potential disease with courage, because one has faith in God. If it God's will, to die a quick death so be it. If it is God's will to survive unharmed for a few more years, so be it. If it is God's will to die a slow agonizing death, so be it.
I hope you can see how this line of thought can be nauseatingly repulsive to some people.
However, you took this sense out of context: the context is "There is something worth non 0 value of living in a society who accepts you despite being sick or 'dirty', and is willing to take the risk of having those who are tainted amongst them. I feel that's an attitude that comes from a place of strength not weakness."
This is much more nuanced. Nobody should be forced to do this! And after all, it's someone's interpretation. The OT specifically instructed people for such diseases as you might know. Christ helped the sick not naively, but knowing he can heal them. Doing things naively is not always good.
The picture you draw sounds like a strawman of catholicism. Well, "The heart is deceitful above all things" says Jeremiah: our flesh is very proud and letting the ego go is extremely hard for it. However this is more similar to the frustration of a child wanting to create it's own society far away from parents and then going and living in the jungle in utter helplesness and self-delusion.
There is a paradoxical beauty in the eternal which is hard to even articulate and those materialistic arguments ring hollow. I can totally see how it might look like that, but I'd say it's a look from someone who haven't yet actually tasted the beauty of Christ and the faith, see the peace in the Word or the saints. I've been in a boat similar to yours many years(and yes, you can have read the Scriptures 10 times and led 200 discussions, information is just information)
> The OT specifically instructed people for such diseases as you might know.
You just vindicated the professor. The students ar just as much vectors of disease as those lepers banished from the city were to the city city dwellers. The joys of incoherent dogma, you can always find an applicable quote.
Your 4'th paragraph is a space filler. Let me guess you are Eastern Orthodox. It is common for Eastern Orthodox to blame the Catholic heretics, or worse those Godless Protestants for all the bad reputation Christianity has among the non-religious. If only people knew the true Christianity, they would see the light.
As for your fifth paragraph, just no, to basically every sentence.
Excuse my sarcasm, but I really hoped you would be able to empathize with my previous comment and understand how awful the thread opener was, along with equally crass now deleted comments by podgaj and this comment by coldtea:
> On the other hand, this is life. You can die from 100 other ways, and in his age, he could die any moment anyway. At some point you soldier up and don't fuss like a baby over any danger.
Or this one by tokai:
> I rather get paid without having to work and taking any risk of illness, than doing my job and providing the students with the teaching they have paid for?
Have you maybe considered that maybe the professor is not a Christian. Maybe he is a Jew and behaving according to scripture by keeping their distance from people who are potential carriers of disease. Maybe their religion is none of our business and we should not assume strangers should behave as saints and judge them for not doing so. It truly is upsetting that pointing out the vitriol thrown towards him has failed elicit any trace of empathy towards him. And if entitled vitriol is bad, religiously moralistic vitriol is the worst.
I am a protestant. Despite that, I actually wanted to defend catholicism in the sentence you reference. Because many hollow critiques of christianity draw this caricature of gloom and hopelesness which is totally contrary to it, even to catholicism imho
I find it bizarre to focus on endless discussion of hygiene and misunderstood Biblical quotes which replace the actual focus on deep problems in the fallen human nature with filler. This happens all the time: the flesh is very happy to discuss every non-important detail leaping over the actual narrative and meaning.
The problem of humans is sin and separation from God: only Christ can fill the yearning for truth, meaning and actual love, not the emotional comfort zone filler that we often call love these days and only He can save us from being slaves to sin and our passions.
Catholicism has it's own unique flavours of gloom with purgatory. But the issue beeing critiqued is non-specific to any branch of Christianity. It is a core at the root of all Abrahamic relicions. All Abrahamic religions have a morality core. Morality of people is a prime concern of these religions. The moral framework is primary component of the dogma. Yet that very core is hollow.
I have detailed in a separete comment why the focus on hygiene was on point.
You claim that others do not get the narative and the meaning. Make no mistake, we get it. I am perfectly capable of playing your role in this debate. I have done so in the past plenty of times. In this entire debate I have not once denied the critique of hypocrisy with regards to pharisee rituals, nor have I denied that there is value in overcoming fear of disease. (These two are the relevant fragments to the discussion.) I have simply rejected that any if this is relevant to the professor's situation. I have critiqued the moralistic vitriol thrown his way. And I have rejected the notion of religion providing a foundation for morality.
We can discuss at length the various profound implications of each passage of the scripture. There are many great moral lessons to be extracted from Abrahamic religions as there are from any other supernatural fiction and a good interpretation can go a long way. But that is irrelevant for this thread, both me and betterunix2 were sarcastically critiquing the daft moralistic comment about the professor being "scared of air".
As for your last paragraph, you are free to believe whatever you want, and for as long as you are able to believe it, it will be wholesome for you and your peers of same belief. And rather gruesome for everyone else. I understand perfectly how liberating and empowering being a believer is. Eternalism is incredibly alluring. It provides the structure to keep chaos at bay. It is far more stable than other stances.
But just as you have found your eternalist fix, others have found their own different and incompatible eternalist fix. And others are fine navigating the stormy seas of other stances.
I have my doubts: even the comment you were critiquing, it seems to me that you read it with bad faith, assuming ill intentions which leads me unconvinced that you could argue objectively from the Biblical viewpoint in other cases.
I had my share of non-christian worldview for many years, so there is sadly not much surprising about your arguments except for the stubbornness in applying interpretations on Scripture that no normal christian through the ages or even scholar probably held.
I know we all go through different periods in our lifes, so I hope you find Christ again. He loves all of His lost sheep. See you.
Read Mark 7:
1 The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus 2 and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.[a]) 5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”
larger second EDIT:
The focus is of course, spiritual, and it is on the actual things that defile people, for example:
20 He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. 21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”
I can understand to some degree why they act as they do; they honestly think lots of people will tragically die and have their rights trampled on if they don't generate enough apostasy or prevent enough conversions to deter the Christian worldview from regaining enormous appeal. Being an anti-christian culture warrior feels rewarding. I should know, I used to be one. The simple matter I eventually discovered as I got older is, there is no life, no justice, no joy, no freedom, no rights, no good, nothing worth having without a sincere relationship with the Creator of all these things. I can't just generate these virtues and hoard them for myself, they ultimately came from something greater than me.
That passage is about how action is more important than ritual. That ritual was built on superstitions which were built on observations that cleanliness resulted in better life outcomes. Over time people forgot the reasons behind the (healthy) ritual. The moral of that passage is that interpersonal behaviour is more important for salvation than conformance to rituals. It is replacing one superstition.
On the other hand, in a paralel thread, you are pushing that very idea you are complaining about.
> You can wash your hands if you think it is wise to, but ...... God can make the water a worse poison to you.
I also take issue with the idea that there is no joy or value in life unless someone has a "sincere relationship" with the Christian deity. There are plenty of happy, healthy, and fulfilled atheists, not to mention the many polytheists and idolaters who live equally fulfilling, joyous, and righteous lives. You do not have to agree with how anyone else approaches life, but to claim that only the Christian deity can bring meaning, worth, freedom, or good to a person's life is the darkest worldview I can imagine. Christianity is the world's most popular religion but the majority of the world is not Christian. Do you actually think that non-Christians live depressing lives dominated by evil and unjust practices?
Also, no, this is not the message in the Gospel. Here is an example commentary of the scene if you actually want some context: https://biblehub.com/commentaries/ellicott/matthew/15.htm
That line of thought will not lead to a good place.
Really though, what makes you think any form of Second Temple Judaism could have survived the destruction of the Second Temple? Moreover, if Jews could find a way to keep Judaism alive in some form after the destruction of the First Temple, why should it be surprising that some form of Judaism was kept alive after the destruction of the Second Temple?
Obviously rabbinical judaism believers see themselves as the actual following: and that's where we disagree. However their explanation seems stranger than the christian one: we stopped having major prophets because the Son of God Himself came to reveal the Father and to save us, we don't need animal sacrifices and a Temple from human hands, because they were just a shadow to the Cross, prophesies from OT were fulfilled with the promised Messiah. The rabbinical judaism: they don't have prophets, because ..? Why would God let their temple be destroyed, if they were right about Jesus? Where is their messiah?
Islam obviously disagrees.
You asked where the Jewish messiah is, but like the old joke goes, for Jews the problem is waiting and waiting for a messiah that has yet to come, but for Christians the problem is that the messiah came and the world did not change.
Obviously rabbinic answers are not going to be very satisfactory or convincing to you; if rabbinic teachings made sense to you then you would have converted to Judaism by now. That said, rabbinic teachings are not a secret, so here are some answers to your challenges:
The animal sacrifice system was, according to rabbinic teaching, sufficient but not necessary to atone for sin. Among other things Jews point out that during the Babylonian exile there was no temple in Jerusalem and no sacrifices being offered, but that God did send prophets to explain to the Jewish people how they can deal with sin while in exile and without sacrifices. Another point is that when the sacrificial laws are stated, non-animal sacrifices are explicitly described; poor people could, for example, offer just a handful of flour if they could afford nothing better.
Why did God let the temple be destroyed? For the same reason the First Temple was destroyed. The Jewish people were punished for their national sins. In the case of the Second Temple, part of the national sin was dividing into competing factions who would sometimes try to use the oppressive Romans as a means to undermine competing sects.
Why are there no more prophets? In fact the rabbis do not have a single answer, it remains unclear in rabbinic tradition. Is that a problem? There are plenty of unclear, unanswered questions for Christians too; why is Jesus taking so long to come back? That said, some rabbinic answers include: the Jewish people are being punished for national sins; the true end of prophecy was the destruction of the First Temple, with subsequent prophets only repeating earlier prophecies; the prophets were sent at a time when the temptation to turn to idolatry was particularly strong, but that temptation diminished when the Jews returned to Israel and began building the Second Temple.
Maybe none of that works for you, and that's fine -- Jews are not actively seeking converts, so the opinion of non-Jews does not really matter; the Jewish view is that Judaism is for Jews and that the rest of the world only needs to hold to a handful of common sense morals (like not murdering each other and settling disputes in peaceful courts; I assume that much makes sense to you).
Citation needed.
Pretty much all secular scholarship I have ever seen on this topic has concluded that both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity were reactions to the destruction of the second temple. Rabbinic Judaism is the direct intellectual and religious descendant of the pharisee sect, and has always stood on its own merits. The only rabbinic tradition that definitively developed in response to the rise of Christianity is the birkat haminim, a prayer that was used to "out" secret Jewish Christians before the final split between the religions. Beyond that, all there is are attempts to deal with / respond to persecution of Jews and Jewish institutions by Christians in later centuries (e.g. the fixing of the Jewish calendar after Christian Rome disbanded the Sanhedrin).
Don't overstate the importance of Christianity to the early rabbis. Rabbinic literature is generally dismissive of non-Jewish religions and Jewish Christians like the Ebionites were seen as heretics -- a term the rabbis used for non-rabbinic Jewish movements of the Roman era (of which there were many, none of which have survived).
As for the Gospel, it does not really matter what people thought hand washing was for -- ritual washing hands did improve their hygiene, just like ritual bathing. Jesus told his followers not to bother, and it does not matter whether or not he understood the hygiene implications, because not washing their hands was still detrimental to hygiene.
The Scripture is full of similar scenes. Peter sees a vision with a sheet with unclean animals ready for eating. The focus was on evangelizing the people who eat those foods tho: the gentiles.
The destruction of the Second Temple was prophesied by Christ, and apostles started serving in the Church only 50 days after His resurrection, on Pentecost. So yes, rabbinical judaism has been a reaction to the destruction of the second temple, but the Church was already active and persecuted in the center of the roman empire, many epistles were already written and there were churches through greece and rome
For today, I pray that you and yours will not imagine nor try to imagine any worldview darker than the Gospel for the entire day, for there is none brighter.
Moreover, Jesus is recorded elsewhere as having taught his disciples a practice of ritual foot washing (involving washing another person's feet), which remains a practice among some Christians to this very day. He even went on to explicitly indicate that foot washing is spiritually important. Jesus also taught his followers to practice a form of ritual bathing, clearly given spiritual significance and clearly a variation of Jewish ritual bathing, that remains widely practiced by Christians today: baptism. So, if we accept the account of the gospels, it would seem that Jesus was not really opposed to washing rituals in general, nor to treating ritualized washing as a matter of spiritual significance, he just had a different concept than the mainstream Rabbinic tradition.
Christ was not against the concept of God's ceremonial rules/law: after all, He was the one instituting it in the beginning, my understanding is that He was against hypocrisy and burdening people with custom rabbinic rules instead of focusing on the spirit of the Law.
You can just take a look at the excess of some modern rabbinical judaism ceremonial rules for proof.
Again: it's very hard for me to understand how you can read those passages with such a strange mindset: material things were often just shortcuts to spiritual conversations, they already had thousands of years of Scripture in that direction
You are correct that the meaning of that passage is to critique hypocrisy, but in doing so, the nugget of actually valid advice that was accidentally embedded inside a superstition, was extirpated.
Jews 2000 ago, did not have notions of sanitation. They did not have germ theory. They happened to stumble upon a healthy practice and superstitions were built around that practice. They never had statistics or the scientific method to determine the effect of washing hands. Someone simply did so, managed to avoid some disease, then told others that by doing so managed to stay in God's grace. And so, a healthy practice became a ritual. Time passed and the origin of the ritual was forgotten. Jesus comes, and rightfully tells everyone that said ritual is irrelevant for God. Instead here is a bunch of other different superstitions.
Yet, instead of teaching people about hygiene, God chooses to condemn the world to 1500+ years of easily preventable infantile death and all other kinds of suffering. Because, don't worry, afterlife is awesome, unless you go to hell like most people.
John 3:16-21 "16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God."