Jeremy D

How often do you hear someone defend a sordid statement, act, or command in the Bible by telling you to read the context? At what point does the apologist go full meta - the way a rationalist usually does - and say "Well if you consider it in the context of the culture of the people who wrote the Bible, then it makes perfect sense that they would stone homosexuals"?

For example, Acts 3:23 declares that all who do not accept Jesus "shall be destroyed from among the people." I can kind of see this being read to mean "cut off" or "exiled," but still, I'm sure it has been interpreted more often to mean that non-believers should be killed.

vid

First of all, I don't think early Christians by time of composition of Acts (late 1st/early 2nd century) were in position to kill anybody for belief.

Jeremy D

Surely. Perhaps Romans 1 is a better example. That's the chapter that states that homosexuals are "worthy of death." Many liberal Christians think that this was one of the most damaging interpretations in the entire Bible.

Also worth bringing up: 2 Corinthians 6:14-17 says non-believers should be shunned. Deuteronomy 17:6-10 says they should be killed. Matthew and Luke say love your enemy. Even discounting Deuteronomy for the traditional "The Old Testament doesn't count!" bit, I'm told to read 2 Corinthians "in context" to avoid a contradiction. Huh?

vijeno

I'd just kindly ask them in what context, and how they think that would change the meaning?

mountainman

If Acts were written by Eusebius in the fourth century all this would make more sense. The fourth century christians were consistently executing heretics and referring to non-believers as aliens.

bacht

I guess the context in question would be the neighbours of Israel during its existence as an identifiable nation, starting around the end of the 2nd millenium BCE.

The bias against homosexuality could be seen as the flip of encouraging families and numerical security. One theory I've heard is that the Hebrews brought an essentially Bedouin desert morality into a more urbanized context (Canaan).