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Honestly I don't understand how they are still legal in most of the world
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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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You're assuming that modern religious orthodoxy correlates their views and behavior to progressive cherry picked passages from their texts.
While Jesus does say those things, modern conservative religious figures bring up "spoil the rod spoil the child" from the OT to rationalize and justify their own world view.
For example, would you argue that the conservative Judaism in Israel today is likely to support eradication of any political division or disenfranchisement between Palestinians and Israelis given the following in the Torah:
No, of course not. They are going to pick and choose from things like the ahistorical book of Joshua's divine entitlement to seize territory from Canaanites (for which there's zero evidence of it having even happened) to justify what they want to justify while ignoring passages that would force them to behave differently from how they would want to.
The tenets of a current religious movement is only tenuously connected to earlier source material and frequently involves multiple layers of reinterpretation and selective sourcing.
There's even evidence that parts of the New Testament were literally rewritten to reverse inconvenient teachings of a historical Jesus, such as how at the last supper in Luke he reversed the prohibition on carrying a purse when ministering (making monetary collections impossible) - found unanimously across the Synoptics. That passage isn't found in Marcion's version of Luke, which may be the earliest extant form of it, but it is very convenient to set up things like the older couple struck dead for not giving Peter all their money in Acts 5.
Yeah, that's what I was already pointing out in my original comment.
But they didn't die because they didn't give the money. They died because they said they gave all the money but hadn't. They died because they lied, not because they didn't give money.
I don't know how you can read that passage and come away with the idea that they died because they didn't give money to the church.
Acts 5:1-10 [emphasis mine]
Why can't things change across a narrative? That's like saying "Harry Potter can't be a wizard because at the start of the story he didn't have magical powers. So he can't go to wizarding school later on. This story makes no sense."
Technically, no one actually died, the story is simply a narrative attempting to parallel the story of Achan keeping the spoils of Jericho for himself in the book of Joshua.
And yeah, sure, it was because they lied. Because if they only gave a dollar of the proceeds and kept the rest for themselves, that would have been fine, which was why the author was explicitly paralleling that one other time when someone kept goods for themselves and died for it.
They do - especially when the narrative is gradually constructed over centuries.
For example, early on in the narrative of Christian canon development you have 1 Cor 9 where Paul is debating with other Christians in Corinth who oppose the notion of people ministering being able to have monetary gain (in keeping with the no purse prohibition and sentiments found elsewhere in extra-canonical sayings attributed to Jesus).
A few decades later you have the Gospel of Mark written which contained a saying attributed to Jesus opposing carrying a purse when ministering with no exceptions.
Later on, this gets copied into Luke and Matthew who use Mark as a source.
Later on, Marcion's version of Luke gets recorded by critics quoting it, so we know that version at that time has absolutely no last supper reversal of carrying a purse. So either Marcion was very selectively removing a ton of nuanced things from across the Epistles and Luke... or things were being added in later on (like when Paul swears to the Holy Spirit he's telling the truth in Romans 9:1, an entire chapter absent from Marcion's version).
Finally, the versions of Luke we have today have a special reversal of not carrying a purse that's more in line with Paul's side of the argument in 1 Cor 9 and the practices of the canonical church over the years after Jesus was dead. A reversal that was absent in the earliest version of Luke recorded.
So yeah, narratives do change. Just like there's a first edition, then a second edition, etc.
That's not an example of the internal narrative changing, that's the external narrative. Retcons are not what I was talking about.
I know. But what you were talking about made no sense given the context and text's history.
If there were internal narrative changes like that in Mark that migrated to Luke or were found in Marcion's version, there'd be no questioning that an author was having that change take place in their original composition.
But what you have is a brief interpolated reversal of an earlier prohibition attributed to Jesus, a position both canonically and extra-canonically, suddenly inserted out of the blue in the narrative which doesn't appear in the earlier source where the original prohibition comes from and isn't even present in the earliest extant version of the story where the reversal is.
It's not an internal narrative change like Harry Potter becoming a wizard.