Literalists claim the Bible is their supreme authority for the way they
believe and act. They claim that their actions are parallel with the way Jesus
acted in the Bible.
Though there was no such
thing as the Bible in Jesus day, there was the the books that Moses wrote. The
way Jesus treated the scripture is a far cry from the way the literalists do
today. The way Jesus treated the scripture was in a way that literalist
religionists are taught not to treat the
Bible.
Literalists are taught to stick to what
the Bible says and not to go beyond it...Jesus did the
opposite.
For instance, unlike literalists,
Jesus felt He could "pick and choose" what parts of the Old Testament were valid
and which were not.
Religionists are taught in
no uncertain terms that the Bible is a package deal. Believing what the Bible
says isn't like being on a buffet line where you "pick and choose" what you
like. Yet, that's what Jesus did.
For example,
in the Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew, Jesus is on a mountain speaking
to people around him. Several times He quotes something from the Law of Moses
and then contrasts what the Law says ("you have heard it said) with a teaching
of his own ("but I say to you").
Don't be
blinded to what is happening here: Jesus is acting like Moses. He is on a
mountain declaring to the people the Word of God. Really the "Sermon on the
Mount" isn't a sermon, it is a public declaration that, now that He was here,
changes were going to be made.
At some points
in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus simply expands on what the scripture
said...like murder being more than not just physical but also emotional (anger)
and verbal (insults). But Jesus also claims that some parts of the Bible over
and done and it's time to head in a new
direction.
God told Moses that Israelites were
to make solemn oaths to one another as a sort of a binding contract, but Jesus
said the true people of God shouldn't make any oaths. "Let your 'Yes, be Yes and
your 'No, be no'; anything more than this comes from the evil
one."
God told Moses that crimes were
punishable by an "eye for an eye" so as to insure the punishment fit the crime
but Jesus said to turn the other cheek rather than seek restitution. In doing
so, they would be truly following the will of
God.
Jesus taught that some of what God said in
the Old Testament was inadequate, and real obedience to God mean it was time to
move on. If denominational preachers, or teachers taught this about the
canonized Bible they would be out of a
job.
Jesus read the scripture as a Jew would,
not an evangelical or fundamentalist christian
does.
As much as this might not need to be
said, it does. From observation of the way Jesus read scripture, we conclude
that it was Jewish man reading. His creative flare and even his "debating" with
scripture and going in a different direction were part of what it meant to read
the Holy Writ in Jesus' Jewish world.
That
doesn't mean Jesus didn't respect scripture. He did. But He respected it in
Jewish ways, not religious ways.
And that may
be the hardest lesson for the religious literalists to understand...Jesus did
not agree with things in scripture that religious literalists take for granted
and considers non-negotiable and stick to what the text means...or should I say,
what they believe the text says.
By doing so
religion has deafened the ears of believers and they are unable to hear from God
for themselves.
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