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"We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and
"We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce."....
"Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners."
Juxtaposed against the dig at "holy texts" in the first half of the article, the proposed philosophy in this article is literally the core tenant of Christianity. All are imperfect, sin has corrupted relationships, the path to salvation is selflessness and sacrifice, embodied by Christ's sacrifice for us. Christians cannot live this out, garnering a bad name for the broad religion as a whole, but again, as humans, that's sort of the point. Grace is given to those who accept it which further propels them towards giving themselves up and extending grace to others. It's a daily, hourly exercise pictured most frequently and accurately in marriage.
> The proposed philosophy in this article is literally the core tenant of Christianity
I think you mean tenet.
> the path to salvation is selflessness and sacrifice, embodied by Christ's sacrifice for us.
To anyone who considers Christianity in context, it is almost entirely unremarkable, coming as it did some 96,000 years into humankind's rich history of co-operation, compromise, and community, and with much of it borrowed from other places.
It contains few novel ideas or suggestions. For example, the maxim of reciprocity ("Do ut des" -- colloquially known as "The Golden Rule") is likely an example of simultaneous invention: many Christians seem to believe that, until Moses, it had escaped humanity's attention that treating others as you wish to be treated is a sensible basis by which to organise a collective of people, but it is simultaneously visible and documented in multiple ancient traditions which predate Christianity and are spread across the ancient world.
This might be useful context in considering the author's intentions when writing.
The problem is that marriage is really a necessary evil for Christianity, and a required one if you wish to engage in sex at all. It won't exist in heaven (jesus said we shall be as the angels there), and Paul outright says that its better to be unmarried to serve the kingdom of God.
The issue with this kind of view is that without the divine commands, why get married? Why have to deal with wrongness at all? And you kind of see the issue with secular people now, who choose other values over opportunities to exercise grace, as you put it.
I have to disagree with you here, but I am reformed, not Roman Catholic so I may have different beliefs than others you've come across. Christians believe marriage was established by God in the beginning of time. The ten commandments and other laws contain laws particularly for married individuals. Christ presided over a marriage in the New Testament. Paul gives advice in Ephesians as to how husbands and wives should treat each other. Paul's advice in Corinthians is related to his status as a lifetime single, fully devoted to spreading the gospel as an apostle of God, and I think it gives relief to those who don't find a partner in life. I don't think it's appropriate to single out this one section to stand as the Bible's entire stance on marriage. The other examples provide the biblical view that marriage is a gift from God, intended, as all things were, to reflect His glory back to Him. As for marriage in heaven, I don't know enough about the theology around the New Heavens and New Earth to say, but I know marriage is intended to be a picture of Christ and His Church and we will ultimately be "married" to Christ in eternity. Constantly praising and in awe of His Glory. So considering that, I would say there is no longer the need for the covenant of earthly marriage.
> Christ's morality is quite different from the golden rule and much more radical. "Turn the other cheek" is not the golden rule.
I did not mean to suggest that the golden rule is the core of Christianity, although it's certainly one facet of Christ's teachings which people erroneously consider to be novel. I offered it as one simple example of something within Christianity which is borrowed from elsewhere, and which is also wholly unremarkable.
FYI, turn the other cheek is not what Jesus said. He said:
> If anyone slaps you on your right cheek, turn to them your other cheek also.
I was a Christian for a long time and the sort of mistake you’ve just made really does vitiate the faith’s proponents. Quick summary (Walter Wink would be spinning in his grave): left hand only used for wiping butt. Not for anything else. Right cheek slapped = back-handed slap with right hand. It’s not an attack, it’s a rebuke. Therefore turning the other cheek is a means to challenging the slapper as an equal.
It’s the opposite of what you think it is: it’s sticking up for yourself and using the law to get the better of someone. Ditto the “go the extra mile” (any Roman could have any Jew or Gentile carry something for them for one mile, but no further — with a penalty if they did). Can’t remember the bit about the shirt off your back but it’s also a way to fuck with people.
I'm not sure if you are a Christian or not but if you really believe that you have a personal relationship with an almighty being, I can't comprehend how you would not really be sweating the details on what he said during his time here on earth, and trying to understand it in its proper context.
> Christ's morality is quite different from the golden rule
You seem to be at odds with OP in a way that makes me believe you may be a Christian. OP talked about Christianity, which I would consider to be the synthesis of the teachings, texts, and traditions of Jesus and the early Church. You are specifically talking about Christ’s teachings only, which is suggestive of someone who believes in Jesus as mythical hero, since very few secular scholars would feel comfortable prescribing to Jesus the views offered in the synoptic Gospels without heavily caveating the gospels’ own complex origin story.
Nonetheless:
1. I don’t want to presume anything of anyone reading this, so I will state the obvious: there is a secular consensus that Jesus existed in history. By which we usually mean: a person known as Jesus was at large in the same parts of the middle east as the Bible conveys during approximately the same time period, and he was likely a Jewish preacher (possibly a Rabbi), who was executed and ultimately his followers eventually formalised Christianity approximately a generation after his death, which eventually overtook pantheism, Mithraism and a host of other cults to become the prevailing religion in Rome a few hundred years after Jesus’ death.
2. The synoptic gospels were written between 40-100 years after the death of Jesus, and contain accounts of Jesus’s deeds which can be simply split into: legend (things we know cannot be true), contradictions (things the various books disagree amongst themselves about), theological copypasta (bits which are the same but which seem obviously lifted from different sources — e.g. Marcan priority sees the gospel of Mark written first, and the authors of Matthew and Luke drawing from Mark + a non-canonical source called the Q document).
3. Legend is a loaded term, so: large parts of the story are clearly legend. The massacre of the innocents is totally invented, as is the ridiculous census requiring Jesus’s parents to travel 200km to Bethlehem (all elements contrived to fulfil Jewish prophecy), as is his birthday (not mentioned in the Bible but 25th December is borrowed from Sol Invictus). Clearly to anyone who does not believe in fairy tales the immaculate conception and Christ’s miracles were also invented, and there is some evidence to suggest that some of his miracles (esp. Lazarus) were crafted to fit archetypes in other traditions. Ditto the immaculate conception and the notion of the “rises after death” God.
4. The only parts of the Bible that you can really read much into are the actual teachings, and that narrows the field enormously (particularly when the authors do this brilliant trick of repeatedly telling us people’s reaction to Christ’s teachings, but not the teachings themselves. “Everyone was super impressed!” “Oh what did he say?” “Errrr…”).
5. There are a few different interpretations of the teachings, ranging from “psychiatric disorder” (I’m not joking! There is a school of thought that Jesus had borderline personality disorder or something), to “magician” with much in between. The most compelling one to me is “apocalyptic preacher”. Most of the writings of the early Church and the behaviour of the early Christians indicate that they truly believed that the world was going to end, and apocalyptic cults were in vogue at the time.
6. So now we get to the morality of the man. Let’s see…
• Scapegoatism. He preached and encouraged a belief that people need not atone for their sins themselves. Pretty ghastly stuff. As Christopher Hitchens said, even if you served my prison sentence for me, you couldn’t absolve me of the crime itself on a moral level. It’s by this scapegoatism that we know Christians must accept that Hitler, murderer of 6 million Jews and Roman Catholic, is very possibly in heaven, whilst Bill Gates — agnostic atheist who has done as much for mankind as anyone you’d care to mention — is destined for hell. But, the good news is for our argument that whilst this is obviously utterly immoral and disgusting, the idea of sins being cast on to symbols of purity is by no means novel. It is present in many traditions and religions, and predates Christianity. As does the notion of the "dies and rises again" superhero.
• Beatitudes. Lots of people inexplicably consider these to be fairly radical. The concepts and morality within are echoed in Buddhism (which, uncomfortably for “JESUS WAS TOTES RADICAL!” fanbois, predates Jesus by centuries), and of course the Old Testament (he’s basically just remixing Psalms ffs — “For though the LORD is high, he regards the lowly, but the haughty he knows from afar.“) but if you subscribe to Marcan priority it’s a bit sad to see that in Mark the reaction is so bad that Jesus says “Lol tough crowd, nobody is appreciated in their hometown”, when everyone is like “????”, and when the story is repeated in Luke he still sheepishly says that, but the reaction of the assembled congregation becomes “omg radical huge this guy is incred!!!” — a likely interpolation unfortunately. So people didn’t consider it especially radical when he said it, and it’s all stuff from other religions and texts. (You have a really, really hard time ahead of you if you’re going to try to claim that an illiterate Jew who lived for 30 years nearly 100,000 years into mankind’s existence had anything especially interesting to say.)
• Turn the other cheek. As discussed above, this is widely misunderstood. It wouldn't have been that radical for Jesus to be a pacifist. Most of the Old Testament is either God saying "BE NICE TO EACH OTHER FFS" or "Ugh OK let's kill them all but only because I said so" (uncomfortable scene where he has bears kill teenagers for mocking a bald guy notwithstanding).
• Universal judgement and coming apocalypse — everyone at the time had a big hard on for apocalyptic cults, so this is not novel. He tells his followers to sell all their stuff which I guess is pretty radical? In the same way as Scientology pursuing years-long vendettas against apostates is ‘radical’? (I.e. it’s totally fucking immoral?)
• Obviously he calls a Canaanite woman a dog and was pretty dickish towards Samaritans (even a charitable interpretation of the “good” Samaritan must be balanced against Jesus telling the bois to not spread the word to Samaria at all (or any Gentiles), but I expect you’re not looking for examples of him being a radical douchebag and just examples of the novelty of what he said, right?
Anyway, fast forward the 50-90 years we need to get to any written accounts of Jesus which aren’t the hilarious bundle of contradictions we find in the synoptic Gospels, and where we would hope to see the impact of Jesus and his mega radical ideas… and you get to Josephus and the Antiquities & Tacitus. In terms of proving Jesus the Radical, the first mention of Jesus from Josephus is pretty good for your cause:
> About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.
The bad news is that literally nobody considers this to be authentic. It looks like it’s from several hundred years later, when Jews were trying to really boost Jesus’s street cred. It may as well be written in red crayon over the original text, it's so obviously fake.
The other two references are just “Jesus was this dude’s brother” type things. No indications of his radical nature. Tacitus mentions that he was executed and that Christians were antagonising Jews and cheesing people off.
There are multiple other sources which suggest that Christians were agitators in Rome and generally not well-liked, but it’s fascinating that for all the radical wisdom Jesus allegedly preached, he made very little impact on those around him until he was the subject of significant posthumous interpolation and rewriting.
Folks who try to draw conclusions about Jesus’s teachings in the year 2020 really need to consider them in the context in which they were written (you can’t know whether or not he said it, so view them through the lens of “person writing to try to perpetuate a religion for some reason in the year AD 50”. It makes things a lot easier.
Jesus didn't say or do anything interesting, let alone anything suggestive of his being God. Very open to being shown areas I'm wrong if you're comfortable rooting your analysis in the proper historical context.
What you seem to be purporting as a 'simple' (and previously: 'the simplest') explanation seems to me to be complex in comparison to other possible explanations.
I summarise your argument as: "The autograph author of Luke omitted the word 'right' from their account of the Sermon on the Plain because it was not central to the point Jesus was making. Whilst I do not believe that the message of Jesus is substantially altered between the Sermon on the Mount (which includes the word) and the Sermon on Plain (which omits it), anyone who uses the inclusion of this word or other details present in SM and omitted from SP to argue for that the message had a narrower social focus than Luke's editorialised version is wrong."
I presume a few stipulations: SM and SP are two accounts of the same sermon or sayings, written for two totally different audiences, and likely reliant on Q. The SP is an 'epitome' or summary rather than an attempt at an exhaustive recreation of the contents of the document. The inclusion of the word in Matthew's account lends credibility to the fact that Jesus was believed to have said it and that the Q document included it, and the omission of the word from Luke's account does not diminish the likelihood that he said it. These are unremarkable points.
My position is as follows: the simplest explanation for the omission of the word is a transcription error or a later redaction by someone other than the autograph author of Luke, the argument you are having with Winks (via me) is a microcosm of the scholarly consensus around Luke (Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher with a narrow social focus who debated interpretations of local Jewish law in detail, and seemed OK with violence, not -- as Luke would have us believe -- a man who believed himself to be God, knowingly founding a new religion and espoused a message of pacifism) which is at odds with your view, and the position you hold (that we can look to Luke for a more accurate reflection of the thrust of Christ's teachings) is circular (Luke's interpretation of Christ's teachings is both the most widely pervading interpretation and the least compelling from a historical and sociological perspective).
A bit more detail:
The simplest explanation for the omission of the word is unintentional omission. Very common by Bible scribes and nearly always human error.
Until the middle ages, when we see a kind of 'Cambrian explosion' of manuscripts (95% of all extant manuscripts are from after the 9th Century), scribes were barely literate. There are 5600 surviving Greek manuscripts, with in excess of 200,000 differences between them. Many of them are fragments, so goodness knows what the number would be if we had each codex and scroll in full. (This all changed when reasonably educated monks started doing the work.) There are more differences between the manuscripts than there are words in the gospels.
Scribes would often miss out a word, or even an entire line as they laboured to transcribe a document (often in a language they lacked proficiency in). These omissions are more common with words which do not change the meaning of the text (like δεξιὰν, which is the word you're inexplicably fixated on), and unfortunately because of the nature of the formalisation of the gospel canon and its means of transmission being oral history for a very long time, there are likely thousands of words missing from all extant manuscripts which creates the misleading impression that they were never included to begin with. Some we can infer, and some were inferred by later scribes.
It's also possible, and I would argue more probable than the prevailing text of Luke being accurate in its omission, that a later scribe simply omitted the word. P75 is the only extant papyrus to contain the verses we're discussing, but the scribe omitted personal pronouns (as well as Luke's hilarious interpolation of Christ's agony at Gethsemane -- whoosh! Gone! -- and John's parable of the adulteress. Recent graphological analysis dates P75 to the fourth century, which makes it far younger than originally thought.
Similarly P45 (which picks up one verse after the verse we're discussing) is riddled by such omissions. EC Colwell's withering assessment is that it omits "adverbs, adjectives, nouns, participles, verbs, personal pronouns—without any compensating habit of addition. [The scribe] frequently omits phrases and clauses. He prefers the simple to the compound word. In short, he favours brevity. He shortens the text in at least fifty places in singular readings alone. But he does not drop syllables or letters."
So the two most significant early papyri for the of Luke, and the _only_ early papyrus which includes the actual verse we are discussing, both make a habit of omitting words and verses. So if we're to believe that SM and SP are two reflections of the same event, likely sourced from the same documents (Q for Matthew, and Q and Matthew for Luke), we have to pick: do we take Matthew's far more expansive and detailed word for it, with multiple early and later corroborations of the text (24 total, including one which is certainly second century and a handful which straddle second/third century), or do we consider Luke's summary 911 total, of which all are third century or later, and most are heavily fragmented) to be accurate, in spite of the paucity of manuscripts with which to cross reference?