(June 23, 2021 at 8:54 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote: this probably wasn't an actual judicial punishment. According to the Talmud, there was a specific set of rules governing capital punishment and a stupefyingly high burden of proof for these cases. They were just short of being so self-contradictory that the death penalty could never be carried out, but it was hard enough that if a particular court carried out more than one execution in the span of I'm not sure how long
It seems that stoning was a punishment, although later on it did was "abandoned" in a way that it was made self-contradictory. From Wikipedia:
Quote:Stoning appears to have been the standard method of capital punishment in ancient Israel. Its use is attested in the early Christian era, but Jewish courts generally avoided stoning sentences in later times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoning
So perhaps this is the reason why this story appears: it was put there when Jews were abandoning stoning as capital punishment.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
