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I'm sure you know what the 5th Amendment means to our culture and thinking without having read the whole constitution. In fact it's an amendment, the actual mea

I'm sure you know what the 5th Amendment means to our culture and thinking without having read the whole constitution. In fact it's an amendment, the actual meat of the constitution is largely unknown to most of the population and mostly irrelevant to most of our culture. (If you are not American, sorry) So read the most relevant OT books and get on with it! Genesis, Exodus, Duteronomoy, Ruth, a little of the major prophets, Job, Proverbs 8, Psalm 22,23,91 I think? I'm probably missing a lot but seriously it's not needed if you want to understand NT context. I mean the rabbinical culture that Jesus was dealing with in the Gospels was based on a side-conversation the Jews were having about the Torah, not even about the Torah itself. So you'd have to read the Mishnah as well if you really wanted the full context. I think it's safe to say that analyzing any historical work requires a bit of back referencing. I believe I watched Spaceballs before watching Star Wars, and I think I enjoyed Star Wars more because of it. Can't say for sure, it was a long time ago.

aasasd 7y ago
I intended to pass on replying to this, as my position is not changed, but then realized I can illustrate my point in regard to the Fifth Amendment. I'm not from the US, but I have an idea about the amendment's contents. Afaik it makes little sense without the presumption of innocence. So to a person living under the feudal law, the self-incrimination clause would be mostly useless. Similarly, if the mankind adopts hard collectivism in the future (in light of overpopulation), the 5th might become meaningless to them. Even today, there are countries where constitutional freedoms are just a political circus, or communities living under mob rule, and if you recite the 5th to a person there, they'd laugh at you. In the US, southern towns until ~1960s are often portrayed this way. The same way, I'm pretty sure the culture ≥2000 years ago was quite different to ours, and personally I'm not interested in cherry-picking the text just to get through it as fast as possible―especially since e.g. Dante or Joyce might have considered different chapters obligatory.

aasasd 7y ago

I intended to pass on replying to this, as my position is not changed, but then realized I can illustrate my point in regard to the Fifth Amendment. I'm not from the US, but I have an idea about the amendment's contents. Afaik it makes little sense without the presumption of innocence. So to a person living under the feudal law, the self-incrimination clause would be mostly useless. Similarly, if the mankind adopts hard collectivism in the future (in light of overpopulation), the 5th might become meaningless to them. Even today, there are countries where constitutional freedoms are just a political circus, or communities living under mob rule, and if you recite the 5th to a person there, they'd laugh at you. In the US, southern towns until ~1960s are often portrayed this way. The same way, I'm pretty sure the culture ≥2000 years ago was quite different to ours, and personally I'm not interested in cherry-picking the text just to get through it as fast as possible―especially since e.g. Dante or Joyce might have considered different chapters obligatory.