Paul's Writings Underpin Western Thought

[Mister Agenda]

Demonetization or demonization?

[SteveII]

As noted previously, one has to take the bad with the good, and among Paul's other contributions regarding shame related to the body and natural instinct, one has to count his contribution to anti-homosexual prejudice among the negatives.  Little about any inherent dignity of human life in his condemnation of homosexuality.  As well, in considering his views on women, while there is implicit support for the idea that he had a positive view of women and their role in the church, it must be remembered that it was the misogynistic passages in his writing which stood out and formed the locus of anti-women attitudes throughout the middle ages and into our modern era.  Having an implicitly laudatory attitude is small consolation if the more explicit effects of one's writings are grossly oppressive.  (On a personal note, although I'm not making an explicit argument for it, Paul's concentration on faith versus works perpetuates a religious view which seems to encourage hypocrisy as well as perpetuating a religion that basically rests upon a supposed thought crime.  The enormous amount of devastation that Christianity has left in its wake, both in terms of death and oppression related to people being seen as "believing the wrong things" is enormous.)

How much responsibility does Paul have when he does not address an issue (like women, like slavery)? He was not writing for all time as he penned his words. You have to remember that he was writing to churches with particular problems he was addressing and in a specific culture. The problem (and I don't think it's Paul's problem) is differentiating doctrine (usually introduced with an argument of some type) with practical issues. There is a Wikipedia article on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_A..._and_women

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What specific Christian-originating strain of thought led to the extermination of six million Jews? Seems to me you would need there to be some pretty substantial ambiguity to make the connection to the Holocaust.

You mean besides anti-semitism in general?

It's hard to see how Paul was anti-semitic or that his writings could legitimately be claimed as the source for it.

[Amarok]

It's hard to see how Paul was anti-semitic or that his writings could legitimately be claimed as the source for it.

Then like always your blind

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Demonetization or demonization?

 demonization?

[Angrboda]

You mean besides anti-semitism in general?

It's hard to see how Paul was anti-semitic or that his writings could legitimately be claimed as the source for it.

I didn't claim either of those things, Steve.

[Minimalist]

1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 as follows:

For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s churches in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.

Just a guess.  Feel better though.  There is a strong sense among some scholars that this is one of those later interpolations...which means that it was the fucking church which was anti-semitic not whatever clown wrote the original.

[Pat Mustard]

What specific Christian-originating strain of thought led to the extermination of six million Jews? Seems to me you would need there to be some pretty substantial ambiguity to make the connection to the Holocaust.

The nazi ideology against jews in Europe was explicitly based off of catholic and protestant dogma in existence for more than a thousand years. There were many christian progroms of and massacres of jews down the ages, but it was only with the advent of the mid-20th century that the technical, techonological and logistical capacities were created to kill off the jews on a mass scale.

The holocaust was the culmination and final solution of one thousand years of christian policy and ideology.

[Fake Messiah]

Sure, New Testament is very anti Semitic but, from my observation, vast majority of Christians don't care what it says in the Bible, instead they care what some authoritative person told them what is in the Bible and throughout their lives they look for people that say similar things.

Now to the anti-antisemitism in the NT:
John 5:16 ("Therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay him, because he had done these things on the sabbath day"),

John 5:18 ("The Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal to God"),

John 7:1 ("After these things Jesus walked in Galilee: for he would not walk in Jewry; because the Jews sought to kill him").

These three verses alone are sufficient to create hatred of Jews in the minds of Christians. But they are only part of a larger picture. In John 8:52 the Jews directly accuse Jesus of "having" a devil and according to John 18:35 the Jews are responsible for delivering Jesus to Pilate to be executed. Lastly, John 19:1-23 indicates that, along with the Roman soldiers, some Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.
The author looked upon Jews as the main enemy of Jesus and the primary force behind his demise.

In John 8:44 Jesus himself attacks the Jews by saying, "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do." Imagine saying that the Jews are "of your father the Devil"! If that is not made to order for the production of antisemitism and Nazi thought, nothing is!

Of course Paul adds to the hammering by saying in 1 Thessalonians 2:15 that the Jews killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets. According to Acts 9:23 and 13:50 the Jews are accused of persecuting Paul and his followers: "After many days were fulfilled, the Jews took counsel to kill him [Paul]" and "The Jews stirred up the devout and honorable women, and the chief men of the city, and raised persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and expelled them." Even Peter enters the anti-Semitic attack by accusing the Jews of crucifying Jesus (Acts 4:10 and 5:30).

[Angrboda]

I think, reviewing my comments that Steve was responding to, that he may have simply misread and came away thinking I was laying the blame for the holocaust at Paul's feet. That was not my intention, and whether greater Christianity can be blamed for the holocaust raises some questions that I'm not all that clear about. Steve seems to be waffling back and forth on whether we're simply considering the contributions of Paul to Western thought, or the combined impact of Paul and the theological movement which he helped shape, which we now know as Christianity. I had assumed the former, but given recent comments from Steve, especially concerning the so-called deutero-Pauline epistles, I'm not so sure, and hope he will clarify. Either way, I think that Steve was not explicitly denying the link between Christianity and antisemitism so much as objecting that it wasn't essentially a result of Paul's letters.

[vulcanlogician]

Hey Steve,

First of all, it's perplexing to hear someone laud Paul for fighting against the evils of slavery when he wrote this:

22 Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. 23 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, 24 since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. 25 Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism.

I'm not trying to throw this verse in your face or anything. I can see that, in its historical and religious context, it might even be seen as a compassion-driven verse. After all, abolition of slavery in classical Rome/Judea was simply not a realistic agenda item to push. The common assumption was that slavery was an inescapable component of civilized society, and I don't blame Paul for sharing this common assumption. But by the same token, if this passage is supposed to be unblemished, timeless moral truth, it fails miserably. A call for the abolition of slavery would have been a bullseye, regardless of how impractical it was. In his idealism, Paul missed the mark there because (as we know in modern times) civilization can exist without ownership of human beings.

But one can find some positives in the epistle, if one looks carefully and reads charitably.

Though Paul advises slaves to be obedient, he urges them to spiritual serenity. And he expresses empathy for them in their predicament. Again, one cannot fault Paul for showing what appears in modern times as a callous acceptance of slavery. The verse is deeper than what a surface reading reveals. But at the same time, this is hardly a depth charge against what is the greatest evil that one human being can inflict upon another (IMO, slavery is just as evil as rape, because slavery contains rape; it's just as evil as murder because slavery is no less the taking of a life than murder is).


What we prize in the West (as champions of individual liberty and inalienable human rights) is not the spiritual freedom described by Paul in his epistles, but rather actual freedom from the bondage of unjust laws such as slavery. Paul's message was not "free the slaves." Rather it was: "slaves in this life will be free in the next." HUGE difference in sentiments there, and one might even go so far as to say that Paul's words inspire complacence--not action.

The Christian attitude toward slavery is hardly cut and dried. Here is a wiki article with some gritty details concerning Christian Europe's supposed abolition of the old Roman institution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in...val_Europe

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In fact, there was an explicit legal justification given for the enslavement of Muslims, found in the Decretum Gratiani and later expanded upon by the 14th century jurist Oldradus de Ponte: the Bible states that Hagar, the slave girl of Abraham, was beaten and cast out by Abraham's wife Sarah. A popular medieval legend held that Muslims were the descendants of Hagar, while Christians descended from the legitimate marriage of Abraham and Sarah. By extension it was therefore permitted for Christians to enslave Muslims.

The Decretum, like the Corpus, defined a slave as anyone whose mother was a slave. Otherwise, the canons were concerned with slavery only in ecclesiastical contexts: slaves were not permitted to marry or to be ordained as clergy.

In the Christian tradition, pagans and heretics were similarly considered enemies of the faith who could be justly enslaved. In theory, slaves who converted could embark on the path to freedom, but practices were inconsistent: masters were not obliged to manumit them and the practice of baptising slaves was often discouraged.[159] The enslavement of co-religionists was discouraged, if not forbidden, for Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. Consequently, northern European pagans and black Africans were a target for all three religious groups. Ethnic and religious difference were conflated in the justification of slavery.[160]

A major Christian justification for the use of slavery, especially against those with dark skin, was the Curse of Ham.....

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Perhaps Europe's de facto abolition of slavery had little to do with Christian ethic. Maybe it had more to do with Europe's plunge into utter ignorance (the Dark Ages) whereby knowledge of math and science that was available even to the Babylonians faded into obscurity. There was simply no infrastructure to support slavery, though serfdom was a vague semblance. Inasmuch as as a lack of intellectual resources was responsible for slavery's lapse, Christianity was responsible. As soon as the lost knowledge was returned to Europe (via the Enlightenment) the good Christians resumed the selling of men, women, and children like chattel. Paul's verse was even used to justify slavery in the American South.

The deeply Christian American South was not urged by its Christian ethos to dismantle the evil institution; the slaves of the South had to be wrested from Southerners' hands by force. Abolitionism was a cultural phenomenon of the North, whose religiosity was lukewarm by comparison to Southerners. Admittedly, Christ's teachings were an inspiration for many abolitionists in the day, but the ultimate demise of the slave culture had more to do with secular progress than an adherence to religious values.

If you or I want to laud someone for speaking against the evils of slavery, we'll have to find actual abolitionists, and resist the temptation to superimpose an abolitionist ethic where one does not exist. Seneca (a hero of mine) was a moral thinker who advocated for humane treatment of slaves, but he was no abolitionist. So it is with Paul. Henry David Thoreau was a genuine abolitionist, and you don't have to run his words through a meat grinder to produce a condemnation of slavery: "I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house." There isn't any ambiguity in that statement, let alone any "slaves, obey your masters" crap. If you're looking for Christian heroes, you'll find many of them in the Quaker movement. But then again, many evangelicals denounce Quakerism as doctrinal heresy.

Historically speaking, Christianity has found itself on the anti-Enlightenment side of almost every issue. In retrospect, it would seem that the less power and control that religious institutions have, the more Enlightenment values are realized by society. Yet Christianity still claims credit for each advance in human rights because it still had some power when whatever injustice was finally abolished. Let's not forget that sodomy laws (laws with an obviously religious motivation that infringed upon consensual relations between adults) were only declared unconstitutional not much over two decades ago. Christianity was no catalyst to the Enlightenment. It was, and continues to be, its most persistent stumbling block.

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What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day!

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[Brian37]

1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 as follows:

Just a guess.  Feel better though.  There is a strong sense among some scholars that this is one of those later interpolations...which means that it was the fucking church which was anti-semitic not whatever clown wrote the original.

Even without sectarian squabbles between the different sects of Christianity, the bible clearly has Jews turning in the Jesus Character. Otherwise there is no reason for Christians to claim Jesus was a Jew. 

The point of the martyr story as a motif has nothing to do with the validity of the fantastic claims of the bible, and everything to do with creating a hero motif.

Every religion has this hero motif. Every religion has a good vs evil motif.