Nonviolent Resistance in the Sermon on the Mount

The Sermon on the Mount, as many Christians will know, is a famous “sermon” given by Jesus in the book of Matthew, containing some of Jesus’ most familiar sayings. I put the word “sermon” in quotation marks, because it is unlikely that Jesus uttered all these sayings in one long soliloquy on a single given day during his life. Comprising three full chapters in Matthew’s gospel, it reads more like a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, which Matthew collated into a single teaching discourse.

Entire books have been written about the various teachings that make up the Sermon on the Mount, but I want to focus particularly on five sayings that fit with Jesus’ profile as a prophet engaged in nonviolent resistance to the domination system of imperial Rome and its Jewish collaborators.

RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS IN PREINDUSTRIAL DOMINATION SYSTEMS

Don’t let the subtitle scare you. A “preindustrial domination system” is simply an anthropological way of referring to just about every civilization that existed prior to the industrial age of the 18th century. A “domination system” is a type of civilization where the vast majority of the populace lives near or below the subsistence level, with the fruits of their labors being expended primarily by a powerful and wealthy few. Think of medieval Europe, where the peasants – the serfs – worked the land and lived in virtual poverty, so that the kings and dukes and lords could live in luxury. This is a classic domination system, preindustrial, and thus “agrarian” (farm-based).

This is the kind of civilization Jesus and his followers lived within. The Romans were the imperial overlords, and the Jewish elite – the “chief priests, scribes, and teachers of the law” frequently named in the gospels – were their native collaborators. They were “collaborators” because they did Rome’s bidding to the detriment of the Jewish population. They kept people in line, collected taxes and fines, oversaw the court system and the religious system, and generally acted as the pawns of imperial Rome. Rome rewarded them with wealth, status, and power.

This, needless to say, did not go over well with the average Jew, which led to a serious of resistance movements and armed rebellions over a period of 140 years, from the death of Herod around 4 B.C.E., to the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132 C.E.

The resistance movements that rose up among the Jews during these years are consistent with the kinds of resistance movements that tend to crop up in all agrarian domination systems. There are generally two types of resistance, each with two possible methods.

The first type is violent resistance, and it includes both passive and active violent resistance. Active violent resistance is, of course, akin to armed rebellion – bands of angry peasants rising up with sword and spear to overthrow the authorities. Passive violent resistance can be characterized as opting out of a true act of war, but being prepared to defend one’s self violently if necessary. “I won’t draw first blood, but I’ll strike quick and deadly if you make the first move.”

The second type is nonviolent resistance, and it too has passive and active forms. Passive nonviolent resistance is the form of resistance that many Jews of the 1st century took, including the gospels’ infamous Pharisees. Instead of violently resisting the Roman overlords and their native collaborators, the Pharisees delved into their religious traditions as a way to passively resist cultural, religious, and even genetic assimilation. This tradition of passive nonviolent resistance has become the hallmark of Judaism, and it is the reason why Jews still exist as a distinctive culture to this day, despite nearly 2,000 years without a homeland. In the annals of anthropology, this is quite remarkable. Notice that there are no Assyrians, Hittites, or Medians still around in the 21st century – they were assimilated long ago.

Active nonviolent resistance, on the other hand, is akin to the type of resistance the United States saw during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. Violence is rejected, but active resistance through defiance, civil disobedience, and noncompliance with cultural norms is affirmed.

This active nonviolent resistance is the type of resistance that Jesus and his follower embraced during the first part of the 1st century. Jesus does not appear to have engaged in or supported violent rebellion, but he encouraged his followers to actively resist the domination system around him.

ACTIVE NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

With that context in mind, we move to the Sermon on the Mount, which has several sayings that illustrate Jesus’ commitment to active nonviolent resistance of the imperial Roman domination system and its elite Jewish collaborators.

The sayings in question make up only a fraction of the entire discourse, but their importance to the Jesus movement cannot be underestimated. Walter Wink was the first scholar to highlight their importance as forms of nonviolent resistance, and the following analysis is largely Wink’s work, repeated by scholar Marcus Borg in a recent book on the historical Jesus.

1. You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer.

2. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.

3. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.

4. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.

5. You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,” but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

Each one of these sayings is rife with active forms of nonviolent resistance, though many (if not all) of them are frequently misunderstood in popular Christianity.

EYE FOR EYE, TOOTH FOR TOOTH

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer.

I have often found it odd that Christians frequently quote this phrase to support the idea of capital punishment and other punitive measures against criminals. “If someone stabs a person 20 times, they should be executed by being stabbed 20 times.” I honestly couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this argument. A cruder version goes something like this: “If someone commits rape, they should have their genitalia removed.”

I’m reminded of a well-known song by the Charlie Daniels Band called “Simple Man.” After a verse that talks about all the violent things that the narrator would like to do to criminals, the chorus states: “The Good Book says it so I know it’s the truth: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. You better watch where you go and remember where you’ve been, that’s the way I see it, I’m a simple man.”

This sort of thing dumbfounds me because in the “Good Book,” Jesus explicitly rejects “eye for an eye” justice systems. Perhaps Charlie Daniels doesn’t realize there’s another 27 books after Malachi in his bible.

In any case, when Jesus says “do not resist and evildoer,” there is a slight mistranslation at play that causes the phrase to come off as entirely passive – if you are attacked, simply lay down and die. But in the original Greek, the word translated as “resist” implies violent resistance. So what Jesus says here is that his followers should not “violently” resist an evildoer. Resist evil, but not with violence.

Thus, this saying is a kind of introduction to what comes afterward. The remaining sayings in this cluster illustrate what it means, in practice, to resist evil nonviolently.

TURN THE OTHER CHEEK

But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.

As with the phrase “do not resist an evildoer,” there are those who would suggest that the “turn the other cheek” statement encourages us not to fight back if we are attacked. Lie down and die, as it were. It is difficult to believe that Jesus taught this – and clearly if his followers had followed such a teaching, the religion that sprang up in his name wouldn’t have survived the persecutions of the 1st century!

Instead, this saying from Jesus is talking about something much more specific – namely, the imperial domination system of the 1st century Jewish homeland.

In that context, consider the word choice: Jesus refers specifically to the “right cheek.” Picture a person slapping someone on the right cheek. In order to do it, the striker would have to use a backhanded swing. The backhanded slap was a way a superior struck his subordinate. A forehand slap was the way an equal would strike another equal – such as during a fight. In this saying, then, Jesus is talking about a superior – one of the wealthy, powerful elites – striking a commoner. Perhaps a landowner striking a day laborer. When this happens, Jesus urges, turn the other cheek as well. By doing so, you are giving your left cheek, which would require a forehand slap – the slap of an equal. This is a powerful image of active nonviolent resistance. You can strike me, but you will do it as my equal.

GIVE YOUR COAT AND YOUR CLOAK

And if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well.

The radicalism of this particular saying is sometimes lost because modern folks don’t generally understand the clothing designations of the ancient world. To put it simply, a common Jew in the 1st century wore two garments – a cloak or tunic, which covered the body, and a coat or robe worn over top. The cloak, then, was the undergarment, and the coat was the outer garment.

What does it mean to talk about someone “suing” you for your coat? Quite simply, this is a reference to a person being sued for clothing because of debt. This may seem foreign to our modern sensibilities, but this was the nature of poverty that so many common Jews lived within in the 1st century. Indebtedness was rampant and feared almost more than anything else, and if you could not pay your debts, you might be sued for the coat on your back, so that the creditor could sell your coat to recoup his money.

When Jesus encourages his followers to give both coat and cloak, the image is quite striking – the debtor would literally be left naked. This, like the image of turning the other cheek, is a powerful image of active nonviolent resistance. First, it shames the creditor, because in 1st century Jewish culture, nakedness shamed not the person who was naked, but the person who saw the nakedness. Secondly, as Marcus Borg puts it, it serves as a symbolic statement: “Look what this system is doing to us, stripping us naked.”

GO THE SECOND MILE

And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.

This statement, rather than being a general statement about giving yourselves to others, is referencing a specific practice in the Roman Empire. A journeying Roman soldier had the right to force a commoner to carry his heavy gear for one mile. The limit of one mile was put in place because the practice had been abused, and commoners were often forced to march with the army for extremely long distances. To put it bluntly, they sometimes had to walk as long as it took for the soldier to find another sucker. This, of course, not only served to stir up resentment, but also could have had an economic impact, as a landowner might see his fields lay dormant for a day because a passing regiment enlisted all his workers to carry their gear to the next town.

After the “one mile” rule was put in place, it was enforced with sometimes severe penalties. No Roman soldier wanted to be caught forcing a peasant to carry his gear for miles on end. So, as Walter Wink suggests (and Marcus Borg repeats), the image is almost a comical one, of a peasant insisting on going the extra distance, and the soldier wrestling with him to put the gear down and go home.

As such, this too creates a powerful image of active nonviolent resistance to the entrenched domination system, by revealing its absurd side and putting the soldier (who represents the power base of the system) in an uncomfortable spot. It turns him – and thus the system – on its head.

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,” but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

In the same way that the “eye for an eye” saying functions as a kind of introduction to this cluster of instructions about nonviolent resistance, so the “love your enemies” saying works as a kind of summary or conclusion to the theme. “Resist evil,” Jesus says, “but do it nonviolently, and love your enemies just the same.” This, for Jesus, is illustrative of God’s character. As Marcus Borg puts it, speaking about Jesus’ perspective: “Love of enemies and nonviolent resistance are grounded in God’s character and passion.” For Jesus, Borg argues, “God’s character is nonviolent; therefore, be nonviolent. God’s passion is justice, therefore be passionate about justice. Resist injustice. And do so nonviolently.”

CONCLUSION

Jesus opposed the domination system of his day through active nonviolent resistance, illustrated by several teachings recorded in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Jesus rejected compliance with the powers that be, and attempted, through his life and message, to encourage his followers to resist the imperial domination system – what scholar J.D. Crossan calls the “violent normalcy of civilization” – through nonviolent means. These nonviolent means, like the sit-ins and freedom rides of the 1960’s, were geared at making powerful statements and exposing the dark underbelly of the systemic evils in normal society.

It leaves us with several important questions. As Christians, what are we doing, today, to resist systemic evil? We no longer live in an agrarian domination system, but in what ways does our own civilization encourage oppression and subjugation? And, most importantly, are we fighting and resisting those oppressive elements in our own society, or are we collaborators against God’s sense of justice and compassion, against Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God?

A Den of Robbers

Is a “den of robbers” a place where robbers go to steal, or a place where robbers go to hide?

Perhaps one of the most famous actions attributed to Jesus in the gospels of the New Testament, the account of the so-called “Cleansing of the Temple” is one that most Christians, devout or otherwise, are familiar with.

Theologians and historians have been picking apart this story for centuries, but my purpose here is not to give a detailed analysis of the story itself. Instead, I want to focus on one of the more famous lines from the story, uttered by Jesus: that the Jerusalem temple had become a “den of robbers.”

To give but a brief background, the story takes place during Jesus’ last week of life in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. The gospel of John also relates the story, but places it early in Jesus’ ministry, most likely for thematic reasons. Most historians agree that the event most likely occurred near the end of Jesus’ life. Indeed, Mark tells us explicitly that Jesus’ actions in the temple led directly to his arrest and execution: “And when the chief priests and scribes heard [Jesus’ pronouncements against the temple], they kept looking for a way to kill him” (Mark 11:18a).

In the story, Jesus enters the temple during the week of Passover and begins to “drive out those who were selling and those who were buying,” going so far as to “overturn the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves” (Mark 11:15). In John’s account, Jesus actually brandishes a whip! After he is finished, he quotes from two of the great Jewish prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah. From Isaiah, he states that the temple is to be “a house of prayer for all the nations” (Isaiah 56:7), but has instead become, from Jeremiah 7:11, a “den of robbers.”

This scene has traditionally been interpreted in quite simple terms: Jesus created a scene because he was angry to find the temple being treated like a marketplace – people buying, selling, and changing money, rather than worshipping and praying and sacrificing. In this perspective, Jesus’ reference to a “den of robbers” implies that in addition to not showing the right kind of respect to the sacredness of the temple, the merchants there were robbing people – charging exorbitant fees, making unfair exchanges, and applying unreasonable prices. Indeed, this idea of the merchants being unscrupulous has been behind countless interpretations of this story over the centuries. A quick Google search on “cleansing of the temple” turned up a bible study lesson from bible.org as its first site: “Of course, the dealers in cattle and sheep would be tempted to charge exorbitant prices for such animals. They would exploit the worshippers…The money-changers would charge a certain fee for every exchange-transaction. Here, too, there were abundant opportunities for deception and abuse. And in view of these conditions the Holy Temple, intended as a house of prayer for all people, had become a den of robbers.”

I like to call this sort of interpretation a “Sunday School answer” – it fits a very widely-accepted model, not too deep, easy to digest, easy to believe, and, I believe, utterly wrong.

First and foremost, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that prices placed on sacrificial animals in 1st century Jerusalem were tightly regulated. By the time of Jesus, an increasing number of Jews no longer had their own herds from which they could bring a sacrificial animal, and many who did still retain herds could not afford to use one for a sacrifice. Additionally, even those who could bring along their own animals were frequently loath to do it, because the journey to Jerusalem was hard enough without toting along a slew of sacrificial animals, particularly since the animals given for sacrifice were supposed to be unblemished. For the average Jew, it would have been next to impossible to make it to Jerusalem with an unblemished animal. For all these reasons, the sale of sacrificial animals in Jerusalem was a big business, one that made money for the temple treasury and which offered a much needed service to the average Jew. Since it was such a big business, prices were tightly regulated. There simply isn’t much evidence to suggest wide-spread price-gouging or wide-spread discontent among average Jews about having to buy sacrificial animals in the temple. Those commentators, like the one quoted above, who argue that corruption was widespread, are simply making wild, and certainly unsubstantiated, guesses based on understanding the story out of context.

Second, when we consider what the phrase “den of robbers” actually means, and apply it to the historical context of Jesus’ life and message, it becomes clear that this event had nothing to do with accusing temple merchants of robbery, or suggesting that financial transactions had no place in the sacred space of the temple.

As noted above, the phrase first appears in Jeremiah, where the prophet stands before the temple and indicts its leaders for not staying true to God’s justice. Jeremiah, speaking with the voice of God, lists a number of sinful things that the temple authorities routinely engage in, then accuses them of believing they are safe in the temple: “Will you [commit these sins], and then come and stand before me in this [temple]…and say ‘we are safe’ – only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this [temple]…become a den of robbers in your sight?”

The Hebrew word translated most commonly as “robbers” actually has a more violent meaning to it. It is more akin to “destroyer,” and is often used to describe a wild animal. In its original setting, it has nothing to do with simple theft at all. Consider its usage in Ezekiel 18:10: “If he has a son who is violent, a shedder of blood…” The word is question is translated in this passage as “violent,” but it’s the second phrase – “a shedder of blood” – that indicates exactly what this word means. It is not a simple “robber” who steals things, but a violent person – someone who commits acts of violence against others – which may, of course, include violent robbery. But in the context of robbery, think of a mugger who clobbers someone over the head with the butt of a gun, then steals her purse, rather than a thief who sneaks into a house, steals a TV, and sneaks out unseen.

So when Jeremiah says that the temple has become a den of “robbers,” he is saying that it has become a place full of “violent people.”

The second, and perhaps more poignant, aspect of this phrase is the word “den.” The Hebrew word means “cave.” As such, Jeremiah is talking about a place where violent people congregate – literally a hideout. The temple, then, is not a place where violent people go to commit violence, but a place where violent people go to hide. Robbers, after all, don’t rob inside a cave. They hide inside a cave. The context of the passage makes this clear. As seen above, Jeremiah says that these people commit violent acts of sin, then go to the temple and say “we are safe.” Thus, as Jeremiah notes, they have turned the temple into a hideout for violent people – a “den of robbers.”

With this context in mind, Jesus’ use of the phrase becomes clear. The buyers and sellers, who represent the powerful Jewish elite, have turned the temple into a “den of robbers.” They don’t go to the temple to commit crimes; they commit crimes, and then hide in the temple. The phrase, then, does not implicate the Jewish elite for being robbers, it implicates the entire domination system that oppresses the Jewish population in the name of the temple – that is, in the name of God.

This, of course, is perfectly consistent with the context of Jesus’ overall message. As I have described elsewhere, Jesus spent his life fighting against a domination system – a system of Roman overlords whose “dirty work” was carried out by powerful Jewish collaborators, namely, the high priests, client-kings, and local authorities who ruled the Jewish homeland on Rome’s behalf. Rome’s imperialism oppressed the average Jew, and the Jewish elite – those very leaders who were supposed to be watching out for the best interests of God’s people – collaborated with Rome’s oppression.

In summary, when Jesus “cleansed” the temple, it was not an attempt to purify the temple from unscrupulous merchants or impious business practices. His action was a sociopolitical statement: you oppress God’s people and mock God’s justice, then you screen yourself inside the temple, making the temple itself little more than a hideout for violent robbers.

This, of course, sheds a whole new light on our own era. Is the modern Church working within Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God – a kingdom of justice, love, and acceptance? Or is it a den of robbers – a hideaway for those who would pervert God’s love and oppress God’s people?

The History of Hell

As noted in a previous post, I have been thinking recently about the Christian concept of hell, and although I have written about hell several times in the past, I wanted to add some fresh perspectives on the topic.

When I went off to college in 1993, to a small, Baptist school in central Kentucky, I had the same traditional beliefs about hell that many Christians still hold today: hell is a literal place where people who are not saved literally go to spend eternity in suffering and torment. Like many Christians, I don’t think I had ever given a whole lot of thought to this idea; I believed it simply because it’s what I had been taught from a young age. The bizarre idea that a loving God would send the vast majority of humans to suffer in eternal flaming agony for all eternity had not really crossed my mind. That was an intellectual conundrum I would not come to face for quite some time.

In any case, shortly after arriving at college, I heard talk about how one of the religion professors (at this small school, there were only about three) did not believe in hell. I was scandalized by this. How could someone, especially a Christian professor of religion at a private, Baptist college, not believe in hell? I found this perplexing indeed, and wrote it off at the time as simply the weird ideas of a new-age academic (“new-age” is the term I would have used at the time to refer to what is now frequently called “liberal” or “progressive”).

Now, seventeen years down the line, I count myself among those Christians who disbelieve in the existence of hell. I can state categorically that I do not believe hell is a literal place of flame and torment that exists in space and time.

This statement, of course, may cause my readers to ask the same sorts of questions I asked when I first learned about the religion professor who did not believe in hell. How can someone be a Christian and not believe hell exists? The Bible, after all, talks explicitly about hell. Hell, as the counterpart to heaven, has been part of Christian beliefs from the earliest days of Christianity. Jesus mentions hell in the gospels. When you deny the existence of hell, aren’t you essentially saying that Jesus was at best mistaken, and at worst a liar?

Like many issues within Christian history and theology, this requires a bit of background.

JEWISH BACKGROUND

In the Jewish scriptures – the Christian Old Testament – hell is never mentioned. Indeed, the ancient Jews had no conception of a place like hell. In the Old Testament, when people die, they simply go to the grave. Good or bad, Jew or non-Jew, the grave awaits us all. The Hebrew word in question is sheol.

Sheol was a word used both literally and metaphorically by the ancient Jews, much the same way we used the word “grave” both ways today. We talk about visiting our loved one’s grave, and we also talk about having “one foot in the grave.” The same is true of sheol in the Old Testament. It can be used metaphorically (“The cords of the grave [sheol] entangled me, the snares of death confronted me” Psalm 18:5), or literally (“The bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall be brought out of their tombs [sheol]” Jeremiah 8:1).

Sheol was not, as some recent commentators have suggested, the equivalent of the Greek idea of Hades. In Greek thought, Hades was the abode of the dead. It was not a grave, but rather a sort of collecting place for human souls that had departed their dead bodies. All human souls went to Hades – good and bad. Hades was not a place of punishment or reward, but simply a place for souls to congregate in a sort of dreary underworld existence.

The reason sheol was not like Hades is very simple: ancient Jews had no concept, as the Greeks did, of a soul separate from the living human body. This of course, like the existence of hell itself, is different from much modern theology, which tends to affirm the existence of a soul. Our ideas about a soul separate from our bodies, of course, come from the Greek philosophers of late antiquity, most notably Plato. This Hellenistic philosophy was rampant through Judaism by the time of Jesus and the earliest Christians, which is why souls are talked about consistently by the Jewish-Christian writers of the New Testament. But in the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament, the human soul is always mentioned in unified connection with the body. For the ancient Jews, souls weren’t separate. They did not leave the body at death. Soul and body were inseparable. The soul, for the ancient Jew, was equated to the breath. The very Hebrew word for “soul” had, as its root, the word “breath.” Just as God “breathed” his own “breath” into Adam, so our own human “breath” is equated with our soul or spirit.

What this all means is quite simple: the ancient Jews had no concept of an afterlife. Soul and body were inseparable, two sides of the same coin, and when a person died, their body (and thus their soul/spirit/breath) simply went into the grave. These ancient Jews, of course, had a concept of heaven, but heaven was not a place of eternal reward for everyday Jews. Heaven was the abode of God and his retinue, not a place pious Jewish souls ventured after death. And there was no concept of a place of punishment like hell at all. Death itself was punishment enough.

Why didn’t the ancient Jews conceive of an afterlife for everyday Jews? That’s a difficult question to answer, but at least part of the answer probably lies in the Jewish tendency to reject anything that smelled of Gentile theology. Remember that the story of the Jews began in slavery in Egypt. After the Exodus, when the Jews settled in the Promised Land and began forming their own kingdom and their own religious codes, they tended to reject all the trappings of “pagan” religions, especially those centered in Egypt, the land of Jewish captivity. They did not worship multiple gods, like the pagans. Unlike the pagans, they did not utter their god’s name. They did not build statutes or draw pictures in likeness of their god – they considered such things to be “idols.” And, unlike the ancient Egyptians, whose concept of the afterlife permeated all levels of Egyptian culture – indeed, it’s fair to say the ancient Egyptians were certifiably obsessed with the afterlife – the ancient Jews did not accept such pagan ideas. The afterlife was a Gentile notion; that, by itself, made it immediately suspect to the sensibilities of self-respecting Jews.

(It’s interesting to note that the ancient Egyptians, while having a very complex and well-developed theology of afterlife, also did not have any concept of a soul separate from the human body. As noted above, this is an idea that did not develop in Western culture until Plato and the Greek philosophers of late antiquity. The Egyptians mummified themselves for the very reason that they had no concept of a soul-body separation. The physical body itself needed to be preserved for the afterlife.)

CHRISTIAN BACKGROUND

We have seen that the ancient Jews had no concept of an afterlife for humans, which means they also had no concept of a place like hell. We have also seen that their word for “grave” – sheol – did not mean anything like the Greek idea of Hades, which necessitated a belief in a soul separate from the human body – a concept that did not exist among ancient Jews.

In the last few centuries before the birth of Jesus, however, Greek culture began to permeate the Jewish homeland. Although the Jews fought, and ultimately won, a great war against Greek overlords in the 160’s B.C.E., Greek culture had come to stay. The Jews, as they say, had become Hellenized.

With this Hellenization came new theologies and ideas. First and foremost, the Jews began to conceive of an afterlife. But their concept was not like afterlife conceptions most common in Christianity today. Since, despite Hellenization, Jews still clung to the idea of a soul inseparable from the body, the Jews began to develop the notion of resurrection. Those pious Jews killed so unjustly over the centuries by various invaders and persecutors, would one day be physically raised back to life. Their bones and bodies would literally reform and come walking out of their tombs.

Along with resurrection for the pious, Jews also began conceiving of punishment for the wicked. God would not only reward the pious with resurrection, but would enact punitive measures against evildoers. This punitive aspect of God was, of course, nothing new in Jewish theology. But where the God of the Old Testament had always enacted his punitive measures against evildoers during their lives (usually by some horrible method of dying), now God’s punitive measures would extend beyond the natural human life. Jews looked around themselves and saw their enemies and persecutors prospering, living fat and happy to a ripe old age. Clearly the old ideas about God’s punitive measures against Israel’s enemies could not stand up to this “modern” scrutiny. So Jews began conceiving of “ultimate” punishments for evildoers. While the pious would be resurrected, the evil would be eternally punished.

What would this punishment look like? In Jewish sources from the time, a number of metaphors are used to convey emerging ideas. From a 1st century B.C.E. book called the Wisdom of Solomon:

The Lord will laugh [the unrighteous] to scorn. After this they will become dishonored corpses, and an outrage among the dead for ever; because he will dash them speechless to the ground, and shake them from the foundations; they will be left utterly dry and barren, and they will suffer anguish, and the memory of them will perish.

Later, in the 1st century C.E., around the time of the New Testament gospels, a work of Jewish apocrypha called 2 Esdras was written, most likely in response to the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 C.E. As an apocryphal book, it envisions the end of time and the Last Judgment:

The pit of torment shall appear, and opposite it shall be the place of rest; and the furnace of hell shall be disclosed, and opposite it the paradise of delight.

It was, of course, in the gospels of the New Testament, written about the same time, where we begin to see references to hell, usually on the lips of Jesus.

In both the New Testament, as well as the above-quoted passage from the book of 2 Esdras, the word used for hell is the Greek word geenna. This word referred to a place outside the city walls of ancient Jerusalem known as the Valley of Hinnom. It was here, in the Valley of Hinnom, that the inhabitants of Jerusalem deposited their collective waste products. It was, quite literally, a garbage dump. Because such a place would have been considered immensely unclean to average Jews, it was perpetually on fire, which helped to keep the contagion of “uncleanness” in check, and also helped the dump from becoming overwhelmed with garbage.

As such, references to geenna (often transliterated into “Gehenna”) were metaphorical in nature. When, for instance, Jesus states, in Matthew 23:33: “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?” he is referring to Gehenna – the Valley of Hinnom, the burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem’s city walls. He is not, quite obviously, suggesting that God is going to send all evildoers to the burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem’s city walls for all eternity. He is using that place as a metaphor for destruction – which is, itself, a way of referring to exclusion from God’s kingdom. If you reject God’s love and God’s vision of justice, you are not part of God’s kingdom; you are as good as a corpse burning in the Valley of Hinnom.

Consider a modern analogy in regards to flushing a toilet. I might lose my job and, upon returning home, my wife might tell me that I’ve just “flushed my career down the toilet.” Does she mean that I have literally flushed my literal job down a literal toilet? Of course not. It’s a euphemism – a metaphor.

Suppose I said that evildoers – those who are not part of God’s kingdom – are flushed down the toilet. Would you suppose I meant a literal toilet and a literal flushing? No. You would understand that I was using a metaphor. Now suppose that a thousand years from now, Christians come to believe in a literal cosmic toilet where God literally flushes evildoers into an eternal tank of sewage and waste. Sound silly?

To literalize Jewish metaphors about the burning garbage dump outside ancient Jerusalem’s city walls is to completely misunderstand the idea that was being conveyed. If Jesus, or the early Christians who used the metaphor of Gehenna, could somehow be told about modern concepts of hell, based on the euphemisms they used in the 1st century, I believe they would find it bizarre at best. Geenna – Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom – was a metaphor used by early Christians to illustrate their ideas about what one’s life was worth outside the kingdom of God. It wasn’t considered in cosmic terms.

Despite its common place in Christian theology, hell is mentioned only about a dozen times in the entire New Testament. More than half of those come in the Gospel of Matthew alone. There are other references to “fire” or a “lake of fire,” but most of these also come in Matthew and the book of Revelation.

In the modern day, many people imagine Satan as the ruler of hell. This is reflected in our jokes and our colloquialisms. Yet, in the New Testament, no such thing is ever implied about Satan. Satan is not the ruler of hell; he is an evil presence on earth. In Revelation, in fact, the writer tells us explicitly that Satan lives and has his throne in Pergamum, a city in modern day Turkey!

I know where you are living, where Satan’s throne is. Yet you are holding fast to my name, and you did not deny your faith in me even in the days of Antipas my witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan lives” (Revelation 2:13).

Antipas, referenced in this passage, was the bishop of Pergamum who was martyred in the early 90’s C.E. (and not Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee during Jesus’ life).

There are only two spots in the entire New Testament where Satan is connected to hell, and these two spots, again, come to us from Matthew and Revelation. In both cases, the writers predict that Satan will be thrown into “the fire” at the end of time (in Revelation it is the “lake of fire and sulfur”). Hell, then, is a punishment for Satan, at the end of time, as it will be for evildoers. Satan does not rule hell.

In the same way that “hell” (geenna), is used metaphorically, so are these references to “the fire” and the “lake of fire.” They are metaphors for utter destruction. In the ancient world, fire was one of the four elements of nature, and it was nature’s destructive force. When an ancient person equated an ultimate punishment to “the fire,” it was a way of saying that the coming punishment was destruction. When Jesus, for instance, says that the “fire” is reserved for “the devil and his angels,” he is saying that evil’s fate is destruction. Again, if I said that my career has been flushed down the toilet, am I talking about a real toilet? Jesus isn’t talking about a cosmic pit of fire.

This may not be persuasive to many of my readers who believe strongly in the existence of a place called hell. But consider one final point. “Fire” and “hell,” as ultimate punishments for evil, are used most frequently by the writers of Matthew and Revelation. But other writers use them as well, particularly “fire.” Such references can be found in both Mark and Luke, as well as 2 Peter, Jude, and the book of Hebrews. Yet among these different writers, there is disagreement about the nature of hell. In Matthew and 2 Peter, for instance, hell, or “the fire,” is a place of complete destruction. For instance: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28); and “But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless (2 Peter 3:7). Additionally, Hebrews 10:27 speaks of a “fire that will consume” the ungodly, and 2 Peter, Luke, and Jude all make references to the utter destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, reduced to ash, and how that is a symbol of what will happen to the ungodly.

In all of these accounts, the ultimate punishment is destruction. Yet most people, when they think of hell, think of a place of eternal punishment, where one will burn in agony without dying, suffering through all eternity in unimaginable torment. In the New Testament, there are only two spots that seem to support this sort of view. The first is found in a parable of Jesus. As a parable, of course, the details are not intended to be taken literally in the first place, but to be seen as pointing to a greater truth. In any case, the parable in question is found in Luke’s gospel, and is usually referred to as the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. In this story, Lazarus is a poor man begging in front of a rich man’s house. The rich man ignores him. In time, both men die, with the beggar going to heaven, and the rich man going to hell. The rich man is in “torment” by the “fire,” and asks for a drink of water, which Abraham (who is there by Lazarus) is not able to give him, because of the great chasm that separates them.

There are a lot of interesting things to say about this parable, but the one that matters here is the image of hell not as a place of utter destruction, but a place where someone remains alive in tormenting flames.

The only other spot where this idea is supported in the New Testament comes at the end of Revelation, after Satan is finally defeated by the forces of God at the end of time. There, the writer tells us that the devil will be thrown in the lake of fire, to be “tormented day and night for ever and ever (Revelation 20:10). Again, this supports the idea of hell being a place not of destruction, but of eternal, unceasing torment.

These are the only two spots where this idea is affirmed by the New Testament. As noted above, there are far more references that support “ultimate destruction” rather than “eternal torment.” Furthermore, one of these two spots comes in a parable of Jesus – a morality tale rather than a statement of metaphysical truth. Additionally, it is important to note that Luke never actually uses the word “hell” (that is, geenna). Instead, he calls the place Hades. Also, he doesn’t say that Lazarus is in “heaven,” but rather “with Abraham.” Finally, as the use of the word “Hades” makes clear, by the time of Luke’s gospel (circa 90 C.E.), many Jewish Christians had been Hellenized by Greek philosophy, and had adopted the idea of Hades as a holding place for souls to await a final judgment. Luke adds in the idea of torment and flames, but since he calls the place Hades and not hell, it is consistent with his other comments (the Sodom and Gomorrah reference above) about the ultimate punishment being utter destruction. Hades first, then complete destruction at the end of time.

With that taken into consideration, it is fair to say that of all the New Testament writers who talk about hell, fire, and ultimate punishments, only one writer – the apocalyptic author of Revelation – affirms the idea of hell being a place of eternal torment, rather than a place of final destruction. And even in that account, it is only the devil, the beast, and the false prophet who are explicitly said to be “tormented day and night for ever and ever.” Other ungodly people will be thrown in the lake of fire, so they too will presumably suffer this same outcome, but that is not necessarily stated explicitly by the writer of Revelation. Perhaps only the devil and his angels will get that particularly odious fate.

CONCLUSION

We are left with a few things to make sense of. First, the Jews of the Old Testament did not believe in a place like hell. They had no particular afterlife beliefs at all, good or bad. By the start of the Christian era, Hellenism had brought ideas about souls, the afterlife, and Hades to Judaism, and Jews themselves had developed apocalyptic ideas about ultimate punishments and rewards. In the New Testament, these apocalyptic ideas are illustrated with the use of metaphors: ultimate punishment is related to the destructive element of nature – fire – and is symbolized by the metaphor of the burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem’s city walls – the Valley of Hinnom. Ultimate reward, on the other hand, is symbolized by the kingdom of God and a life lived in union with God. The yin-yang idea here is one of life and death; in early Christian practice, these were referred to as "the Two Ways." One led to destruction – that is, death – and the other to abundant life. Numerous authors in the New Testament describe ultimate punishment in terms of ultimate destruction. Only one writer explicitly refers to ultimate punishment as eternal torment, and even that is only given in the context of the devil and his minions. It is left unclear whether this counts for ungodly human beings as well.

For these reasons, I do not believe in hell as a literal place of eternal torment for people who have not made the right profession of faith. I believe hell is a metaphor for separation from the sacred, from God, and therefore functions as a symbol of what life apart from God might look like.

In the words of the early Christians, it’s like being thrown on the burning garbage dump outside town; in my own words, it’s like being flushed down the toilet.

Writer's Block

Apparently, I've got some serious writer's block.  I started a blog post tonight about the Tea Party Movement, and I got nearly a page into the essay and decided to just trash the whole thing and give up.  Then I went to a friend's blog and was typing out a response to something he had written, and I ended up trashing that too and not commenting at all.

The creativity seems to have dried up for the moment, for some reason.  I've actually been scouring the internet and some of my favorite websites for inspiration, but there's just...nothing.  I've looked through some of my past work, hoping for inspiration from some tangential topic, but again there's just nothing there.  I've been wanting to do another commentary on Christianity and hell, but the creative urge just isn't there to even get me started.  I'm reading a fantastic book by Marcus Borg right now on the historical Jesus, and books like this usually inspire a number of blog posts, but this time around there's just nothing.

Did you notice how many times I used the word "just" in the paragraph above?  I can't even think of a better way to phrase those sentences.  It's just (there it is again) rambling.  That's all I've got right now.

It's almost a feeling of hopelessness or uselessness.  What can I say that hasn't been said 100 times better by countless others?  What difference am I going to make with my little tiny corner of the blogosphere that gets, if I'm lucky, 150 hits a day?

For crying out loud, I just wrote two or three paragraphs about a discussion that I have been involved in recently, which I was going to try to connect to the theme of this post, and I ended up just erasing it all because it was just utter crap, and whatever point I felt like I was going to make just wouldn't come out.  It was just rambling garbage.  It's kind of like when you're trying to take a crap, and it's RIGHT FREAKING THERE, but it refuses to come out.

See, that's the level I've come to.  Making poop analogies.

And now I can't figure out how to close out this stupid post, so I guess I'll just leave it with shit, since that's been what my blog has been worth for the last 2 months.

The Sound of Silence

Sorry for having so many sounds of silence on my blog for the last month or so.  In fact, if I'm not mistaken, my last post, from mid-April, is the only one I've made since mid-March.

Well, I've got a good excuse, anyway.  In mid-March, I started a new job, and now I'm having to, you know, work for a living and stuff, so I haven't had the time to blog like I did in the early part of the year when blogging was my only full time job.

Once I get a bit more accustomed to the new job and the new schedule (which is not a set schedule), I hope to get back to doing some more writing.  But for now, you're just going to have to suffer through the sound of silence.

I would like to make one quick observation, based on my first two months in real hospital work: there are a lot more morbidly obese people in America than what most people realize, and all of them are in the hospital.

Jesus and Institutional Religion

INTRODUCTION

A friend of mine, who is a minister, recently made the following comment on his Facebook status update:

The more I learn about Jesus, the more I realize that His biggest problems weren’t with non-religious people, they were with religious people. That has major implications.

I agree with this position completely, and wanted to expand upon it by providing some textual discussion to back it up.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

What does it mean to say that Jesus had bigger problems with religious people than non-religious people? As I noted in response to my friend’s comment, one must admit that “non-religious people” would have been virtually “non-existent” in 1st century Galilee, so it is not so hard to see that Jesus would have faced off against other religious people far more often (if not exclusively) than against non-religious people. The fact is, in the 1st century Jewish homeland, an atheist would have been essentially unheard of, and while some people would have been more or less pious than others, religion and religious traditions permeated every aspect of life – for the shallow and devout alike.

So the key is not that Jesus faced off more often with religious people, it’s that Jesus – as a religious person – was facing off against institutional religion. His beef wasn’t with religion itself, it was with how religion was being practiced around him. This antagonism between Jesus and institutional religion, in fact, formed the basis of Jesus’ entire life and message.

As many scholars have noted in recent years, one cannot understand the historical Jesus without understanding the Judeo-Roman context in which he lived and worked. As scholar J.D. Crossan has argued, Jesus’ message was a retaliation against the “violent normalcy” of Roman imperialism and commercialism in the 1st century Jewish homeland, and the collaboration with that Roman system by the Jewish religious and political elite.

Imagine a modern scenario in which a society with a very long-standing cultural heritage is overtaken by a new government structure. The new government begins to dramatically infringe on the traditions and rights of this old society. People are pretty upset. Imagine now that the primary and powerful religious institution of this old society not only does not fight against the new overlords, but instead collaborates with them in their oppression of the populace. Now people are even more upset, and are angry not just because of the upheaval in their ways of life, but also because they feel betrayed by their own leaders.

This is the scenario into which Jesus was born, and from within which he lived and worked. Jesus’ problem was not with Jews or Judaism. He was a Jew, after all, living and teaching from within Judaism. His problem was with Jewish leaders and their collaboration with the Roman overlords who governed their nation. In short, his problem was with institutional religion and how it was being practiced at the expense of the common Jew.

The four gospels of the New Testament continually illustrate this friction between Jesus and the Jewish and Roman elite.

With all that in mind, we will consider a few of the more famous sayings from Jesus throughout the Gospels.

JESUS AND CAESAR

From Matthew 22:21; Mark 12:17; and Luke 20:25:

Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.

Many folks take this statement from Jesus as a command to pay one’s taxes and support one’s government. But when understood in context, this is a far more radical statement than that. Here, Jesus is saying that the pretty little coins with the offensive graven image of Caesar don’t interest him at all. Caesar’s coins, after all, represent the commercial oppression of the Jewish people. Caesar can keep his blood money. Instead, Jesus is concerned with what God wants.

Despite its common modern application to encourage Christians to support their political leaders, this statement from Jesus is actually a radical rejection of the political status quo and its oppressive greed.

THE PARABLE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN

From Luke 10:30-37:

Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite…But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds…Then he put the man on his own donkey, took him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

This parable of Jesus, found only in the Gospel of Luke, is every bit as radical as his statement about Caesar’s money. Among 1st century Jews, Samaritans were sinful half-breeds. They were descended from a group of ancient Jews who had intermarried with Syrian gentiles – thus making them unclean. They had their own Samaritan version of the ancient Israelite religion, which they claimed was the one true religion of Abraham. The Jews, of course, disagreed with this wholeheartedly and considered Samaritans not just as bad as gentiles, but actually worse because they were half-breeds and they followed what the Jews believed was a profane version of the Torah. They were heretics. The Samaritans even had their own holy mountain – Mt. Gerizim – which they claimed was the true location of God’s earthly home, as opposed to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In short, Jews detested Samaritans.

Typically, this parable is interpreted in modern sermons to encourage folks to care for one another, even strangers from different ethnic, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds. Though there is certainly nothing wrong with this interpretation, it often misses the true radicality of what Jesus was saying.

In Jesus’ parable, notice that the two men who pass by the injured stranger are both Jews. One is a priest, which specifically refers to a priest of the Jerusalem Temple who offers sacrifices to God on the great altar. A very powerful person in the Jewish hierarchy. The other is a so-called “Levite.” The Levites, unqualified to be priests because they came from the tribe of Levi instead of the priestly tribe of Aaron, instead became assistants to the Temple priests, singing the sacred hymns, keeping the Temple and the sacred utensils clean, performing the ceremonies of opening and shutting the temple gate, and so on. They were, essentially, junior priests.

The point here is that the two men who passed by the injured stranger were not just ordinary Jews, but specifically Jewish leaders in the Temple. By saying that the priest and the Levite passed by the injured man (who is also a Jew), Jesus is illustrating his contempt for the Jewish leadership and its collaboration with Roman oppression. The injured man represents the common oppressed Jew; the passing priest and Levite represent the Jewish leadership who, in Jesus’ opinion, and to put it frankly, don’t give a damn. More specifically, their regulations about cleanliness prevent them from helping someone who needs help. Jesus found this abominable. It was a systemic evil imbedded in the institutional religion of 1st century Judaism, and Jesus railed against it.

Rather than the powerful priest and Levite, the hero of this story is, of course, the unclean Samaritan. The half-breed. The sinner. The enemy of the Jews and, therefore, of God. A modern parallel might be “non-Christian.”

Indeed, the parable of the Good Samaritan is radical and shocking in myriad ways.

JESUS AND THE PHARISEES

From Matthew 15:1-14:

Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”

Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition…? Listen and understand. What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean.”

Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”

He replied, “…If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.”

The gospels, of course, are replete with stories about Jesus bickering with, and sometimes even openly insulting, the Pharisees. Scholars generally agree that much of the antagonism depicted in the gospels between Jesus and the Pharisees is more a reflection of Christians versus Jews in the late 1st century than it is a reflection of the historical Jesus versus the Pharisees in the 20’s and 30’s C.E. Still, there is little doubt that Jesus had run-ins with these powerful Jewish teachers.

The Pharisees were a very prominent Jewish sect during the time of Jesus. Modern rabbinical Judaism, in fact, is derived from the traditions of the Pharisees in the 1st century. The Pharisees were well-educated and influential people who provided sweeping interpretations of the Jewish scriptures. In modern parallel, they were the preachers and teachers of their day, wielding enormous influence on Jewish and even Roman leadership.

Often times, Jesus’ antagonism against the Pharisees is interpreted as a rejection of Judaism. In fact, Jesus wasn’t attacking Judaism so much as he was attacking the traditions and teachings of the Pharisees in particular. The story quoted above from Matthew is a prime example. The Pharisees had come up with countless rules and regulations, based on their reading and interpretation of Jewish scripture. Jesus wasn’t rejecting scripture when he stated that “what goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean.” Instead, he was rejecting Pharisaical interpretation of scripture that insisted that one was unclean, and therefore sinful, if they ate without washing their hands. For Jesus, the hate, malice, and evil that comes out of people’s mouths is what makes them unclean and sinful, not the dirty-hand tainted food that goes in.

This passage, of course, can create problems for the modern reader. Washing your hands before eating, after all, is a smart thing to do. But the reasons the Pharisees had for washing their hands had nothing to do with germs, because neither the Pharisees nor Jesus nor anyone else in the 1st century had any idea that germs cause illness. The Pharisees argued about hand washing because it was, as the passage says, a long-held tradition. It may be worth noting that there is no commandment in the Jewish scriptures (our Old Testament) about washing one’s hands before eating. Hand-washing instructions in the Jewish scriptures are few and far between, and are only in reference to Temple priests handling sacrifices, a time when they are also required to wash their feet (see Exodus 30:17-21).

In Jesus’ encounters with the Pharisees, he is not attacking Judaism, nor is he attacking Jewish scripture. Instead, he is attacking the traditions, doctrines, and dogmas of institutional religion. He is providing an alternate interpretation of God and scripture, over against the common and well-known and widely-accepted interpretations and sacred traditions.

CONCLUSION

A Biblical study of Jesus shows us time and again that Jesus’ message was one of love and compassion, peace and acceptance, mercy and forgiveness. This message stood in radical contradiction to the religious traditions and political scenarios of the Jewish homeland in the 1st century. Jesus lashed out against Roman imperialism and commercialism, and the Jewish religious leaders and cultural elite who collaborated with that system. He faced off against prominent religious teachers who were more concerned about tradition and doctrine than love and acceptance.

To Jesus, the religious institution had become bloated with rules and regulations, interpretations of scripture that served the few at the expense of the many, and religious traditions that were silly and no longer made any sense in what was to Jesus the “modern” world.

As my pastor friend noted, all of this should have major implications on what it means, today, to be a Christian and a follower of Jesus on the Way.

Take Up Your Cross

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." Mark 8:34

Perhaps one of Jesus’ most familiar sayings, the instruction to take up one’s own cross has been repeated throughout Christian history to encourage the faithful and call unbelievers to salvation.

Recently, a Christian acquaintance of mine gave his own interpretation of this verse:

My personal theory [about taking up one’s own cross] entails this key phrase: “You must be born again.” This is the beginning of faith. You have to believe that he went to the cross and [was resurrected]. Lots of nice folks go to church…and never are “born again.” Now I am not putting these people down in any way, shape, or form, but the born again experience has to be “experienced” before the kingdom of God is revealed to anyone.

My perspective on Jesus’ instruction to “take up your cross” is somewhat different. Before I get to that, it’s instructive to consider the phrase historically.

The saying first comes to us in the Gospel of Mark, written around 70 C.E. It was later copied by Matthew and Luke, who used Mark as a source. Matthew changes the wording somewhat, but sticks with Mark’s general theme. Luke copies Mark word for word, but makes one slight change, saying that people must take up their crosses “daily.” This slight change seems intended by Luke to ensure that no one misunderstands Mark to be suggesting that Christians should martyr themselves like Jesus – in other words, Jesus is speaking metaphorically; he’s not commanding people to martyr themselves. One has to wonder if perhaps members of Luke’s target community weren’t encouraging one another to martyr themselves because they thought Jesus had commanded it.

In any case, we also find this saying in the Gospel of Thomas. The Thomas gospel is contentious because scholars disagree on when it was produced. Many believe it is a product of the 2nd century – relatively “late” as Christian scripture goes. Others date it around the time of the four Biblical gospels, and still others suggest that in its original form, it pre-dated the Biblical gospels completely and was written around the time of Paul’s letters, perhaps the 50’s C.E. Regardless of one’s own perspective on the correct dating of the work, many (perhaps most) experts agree that it is independent of the four gospels of the New Testament – meaning that its author was not familiar with those texts and was not using them as source material.

This is important because one criterion that historians use to judge the historical reliability of Jesus’ sayings is the so-called “independent attestation.” If a saying shows up in two or more early texts that are independent of one another, the likelihood is higher that the saying goes back to the historical Jesus. If a saying only appears in one text, or if it appears in multiple texts but those texts are not independent of one another, the saying still might be authentic, but there is less certainty about it. For instance, if a saying appears in Mark and also shows up in Matthew and/or Luke, that still only counts as one attestation because we know Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. Since Take Up Your Cross appears in both Mark and Thomas, it passes the criterion of multiple independent attestations.

This one criterion, however, does not necessarily give the entire story. Historians must also consider whether a saying fits in with historical context. In the case of Take Up Your Cross, this becomes an issue. Obviously, we know that Jesus’ life ended when he was arrested by the Jewish authorities, handed over to the Romans, convicted of sedition, and executed on a Roman cross. Before any of that happened, it is unlikely that followers of Jesus, or even Jesus himself, would have thought to make a religious metaphor out of a Roman execution device. Thus, this saying does not seem to pass the criterion of historical context. It seems far more likely that this saying was produced by post-resurrection Christians, thinking back on the life and death of Jesus. He was crucified on the cross; therefore we, as Christians, must also take up our own crosses.

Some might argue that since Jesus was God in the flesh, and since he routinely predicts his own death in the gospels, and since the gospels themselves are the infallible Word of God, Christians must accept on faith that Jesus, in fact, made this statement. To deny that may seem to some Christians as lack of faith at best, and blasphemy at worst. Indeed, such a position is faith-based, and faith-based beliefs are outside the realm of a historian’s work. I tend to agree with scholar and theologian Marcus Borg, who argues that one can believe on faith whatever they want, but what matters most is what it all means for us as Christians. Believe what you will about the nature of the resurrection, for instance, but what does it mean for you if you are a Christian?

I’ll get to the meaning of the Take Up Your Cross saying in a moment, but for the present, there is one more historical issue to consider. I have noted that while Take Up Your Cross passes the criterion of multiple independent attestations, it does not seem pass the criterion of historical context. However, there is at least one other aspect of historical context to consider.

Put simply, Jesus wasn’t exactly the first Jew to be crucified on a Roman cross. Nor was he the first Jew widely considered by other Jews to have been crucified unjustly. By the time of Jesus’ death, the Romans had been in charge of the Jewish homeland for nearly a century, and countless Jews had suffered martyrdom and persecution under their Roman overlords. This imperial oppression, in fact, was the primary impetus for Jesus’ entire life and message. You can’t possibly understand Jesus without understanding the Roman-Jewish context in which he lived and worked. Jesus’ message was prompted by resistance to the systemic evil of Roman commercialism and oppression, and Jewish high priestly collaboration with that oppression, in the first part of the first century C.E.

The point to be taken here is that plenty of pious Jews had been unjustly executed on Roman crosses long before Jesus ever came on the scene. In that sense, it is not difficult to imagine that Jesus may have used cross imagery in some of his teachings – such as the Take Up Your Cross saying at issue in this essay. If that’s the case, then this may indeed be an authentic saying of the historical Jesus, but I would argue that Jesus was likely referring to these pious Jewish martyrs, and not necessarily to his own future death. It only became about his own demise after he was executed.

So we have seen that Take Up Your Cross passes the criterion of multiple independent attestations, and might also pass the criterion of historical context. If it passes both, then I would be inclined to argue that this saying likely did come from the lips of the historical Jesus. But that second criterion is, for me, tentative at best, and I am more inclined to argue that Jesus probably never made this statement. The strength of the metaphorical cross imagery is simply too strong, too perfect, to imagine that it goes back to Jesus himself. As I noted above, only after his execution would the image of the cross have provided a powerful religious metaphor for Christians. Prior to that, a Roman execution device would hardly have been seen as religiously powerful, earlier Jewish martyrdoms notwithstanding.

As I alluded to above, all of this deals with the mode of the story: is it historically accurate – did it come from the lips of the historical Jesus – or was it created by Christians attempting to understand Jesus in light of his execution and their belief in his resurrection? I’ve given my own, albeit tentative, opinion on this, but what matters most is not the mode, but the meaning. What does the Take Up Your Cross saying mean for us as Christians?

I quoted my friend’s opinion above, and I noted that my own perspective was different. For me, Take Up Your Cross is an instruction that encourages Christians to follow Jesus on the Way. The Way was the euphemism used by early Christians to describe the Christian lifestyle – the path of God’s kingdom as illuminated by Jesus of Nazareth (“Narrow is the gate and difficult is the Way” as Jesus says in Matthew 7:14). In modern English translations, the euphemism is frequently lost because the word is often translated as “road,” giving the implication of a physical street. (Consider the story of blind Bartimaeus from Mark 11:46-52. After being healed of his blindness, many modern translations tells us that Bartimaeus “followed Jesus along the road” as he made his way to Jerusalem. What that passage really says is that Bartimaeus, after being made to see by Jesus, “followed Jesus on the Way” – in other words, he became one of Jesus’ disciples, “taking up his cross,” as it were, and following him to Jerusalem).

“The Way” is Jesus’ lifestyle of compassion and selflessness, love and mercy, openness and togetherness, acceptance and grace. It is a path diametrically, but nonviolently, opposed to the status quo and the powers that be, opposed to the systemic evils of the world, evils that oppress people and mock God’s desire for social justice. It is a nonviolent resistance to oppression and domination, cruelty and coercion – in short, the status quo of human civilization.

This is what “take up your cross” means for me. It means following Jesus on the Way, a path opposed to civilization’s violent and oppressive normalcy of power and greed, revenge and malice, self-interest and avarice.

The Last Supper and the Passover Lamb

Each year when Christians celebrate Easter week, Thursday is of particular importance because this is the day Jesus ate the Last Supper with his disciples. It was after this evening meal that Jesus was arrested and put on trial before the Jewish authorities. Depending on one’s particular theological background, this day may be called Holy Thursday or Maundy Thursday.

During the last week of his life, Jesus was in Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. Passover was, and is, the Jewish holiday celebrating when the Angel of the Lord passed over the houses of the Jews in Egypt, sparing their children’s lives during the 10th plague, prior to the Exodus. In antiquity, Jews from all over the Jewish homeland made pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the Passover festivities. In the last year of his life, Jesus also made this pilgrimage, together with his companions.

Part of the ritual of Passover was the slaughter of a perfect, unblemished lamb. This not only hearkened back to the story of the Exodus, when the Jews used the blood of slaughtered lambs to mark their doors so the Angel of the Lord would know which houses to bypass, but it also symbolized corporate atonement for sin. The sins of the Jews were, in effect, atoned for by the blood of the lamb offered as sacrifice to God. The lamb itself was then eaten by faithful Jews as part of a ritual meal that inaugurated the Passover festivities.

According to Mosaic Law, Passover was to be celebrated on the 14th day of the 1st month of the Jewish calendar. Since the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, and thus different from our Western calendars, this is why Passover, and therefore Easter, falls on a different day each year.

In the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, (collectively called the “Synoptic Gospels”) Jesus’ Thursday meal with his companions was not only their last meal together, but it was also the ritual Passover meal. After the meal, Judas Iscariot leads the authorities to where Jesus is praying. Jesus is arrested, put on trial, and finally crucified the following day, Friday. Thus, Jesus’ execution and death happen during the Passover celebration. For these gospel writers, Passover began on Thursday evening and lasted until Friday evening. On Friday evening, the weekly Sabbath began, as it does every week in the Jewish calendar.

Here, it is important to understand how ancient Jews conceived of a day. In the modern world, we understand a day to be a 24-hour period beginning at 12:00 a.m. and ending at 11:59 p.m. In the ancient world, centuries before modern calendars and concepts of time had been formulated, the concept was different. For the Jews, a day simply ended at sundown. Since the “day” ended at sundown, the next day began at sundown. Thus, where we conceive of a day lasting from 12:00 a.m. to 11:59 p.m., the ancient Jews conceived of a day lasting from sundown to sundown. In modern terms, we might say the Jewish day lasts from 7:00 p.m. to 6:59 p.m. Thus, the Passover meal – a meal eaten at the beginning of Passover – is eaten in the evening at the start of the day of Passover. It is an inaugural meal, not an adjourning meal.

For the authors of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Passover began on Thursday evening. Thus, Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples was the Passover meal. Jesus was executed the following day, in the middle of Passover, and was taken down prior to sundown, before Passover ended.

This is important to note, because the Gospel of John pushes everything back a day. For the author of John’s gospel, Passover begins on Friday night, not Thursday night, meaning that Jesus is executed prior to Passover, not during Passover. This also means that for the Gospel of John, the Last Supper is not a Passover meal, but simply the evening meal on the day before Passover.

Consider the language from Mark:

On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, his disciples said to him, “Where do you want us to go and make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?” … So the disciples set out and went to the city…and they prepared the Passover meal (Mark 14:12, 16).

Luke and Matthew also call this final meal the Passover meal.

Now compare John:

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father…And during supper, Jesus…got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself (John 13:1-4).

At first glance, this passage may not seem at odds with what we find in the Synoptics. John notes simply that it is “before” Passover, and that Jesus is eating “supper” with his disciples. Couldn’t this be the Passover meal?

John’s chronology becomes clearer when you look at what he writes after this Last Supper scene (which, incidentally, takes up the next five chapters of John’s gospel). In chapter 18, after Jesus has been arrested, John writes:

Then [the Jewish authorities] took Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate’s headquarters. It was early in the morning. They themselves did not enter the headquarters, so as to avoid ritual defilement and to be able to eat the Passover (verse 28).

It is now the following morning (Friday morning), and John tells us explicitly that the Passover meal is set to be eaten that evening. In the following chapter, John again reinforces this chronology: “Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. [Pilate] said to the Jews, ‘Here is your King!’” (John 19:14).

The day of Preparation for the Passover was the day before Passover. It was the day, mentioned above, when the Passover lambs were slaughtered in preparation for the evening meal. For John, this preparation day was Friday (or, more specifically, sundown Thursday to sundown Friday), and the Passover itself began at sundown Friday.

All this, of course, brings up an obvious question: Why the discrepancy? Someone must be wrong; it can’t be both ways. Jesus can’t have been executed on Friday, during Passover, and on Friday, before Passover. The Last Supper can’t have been both a Passover meal and a meal on the day before Passover.

My interest here is not to focus on the discrepancy itself. Rather than arguing about which account is historically accurate, or harping on the fact that the Bible is not inerrant, I’m far more interested in why John might have altered the chronology of previous traditions.

For anyone familiar with the Gospel of John, that his chronology of Passover week differs from the other gospels should come as no surprise. Much of John’s chronology is at odds with what we find in the Synoptics. The cleansing of the Temple, for instance, happens early in Jesus’ ministry in John, but happens during the last week of his life in the Synoptic gospels. In the Synoptics, the Triumphal Entry occurs on Sunday (thus “Palm Sunday”), but in John it happens on Monday. In the Synoptics, Jesus’ anointing in Bethany occurs on Wednesday evening before his execution on Friday, but in John it happens on the previous Sunday.

What could have been John’s reason for changing the chronology of the Passover? Why was it important for John to move the festival back a day? Surely it wasn’t a decision made willy-nilly.

Over the years, historians have tended to agree that the change occurred to fit John’s particular theological purposes. More than any other gospel in the New Testament, John focuses on Jesus’ symbolic representation as the sacrificial lamb of the Passover. Most Christians are familiar with the image of Jesus as the Lamb of God. This is a phrase that is used twice in John’s Gospel to describe Jesus – with both occurrences happening on the lips of John the Baptizer. It doesn’t occur in any other gospel, or in any other text of the New Testament. Anyone familiar with what we might call Christian Theology 101 recognizes that Christians believe Jesus’ blood atoned for the sins of humanity. Thus, “Jesus died for our sins.” For Christians, Jesus was the ultimate atoning sacrifice. This is a theology that is explicit and rife throughout John’s gospel in particular. For John, Jesus became the ultimate sacrificial lamb of the Passover, spilling his blood to save humankind from its sins.

This “lamb of God” theology is fairly unique to John’s Gospel. For Matthew and Mark, Jesus’ death wasn’t necessarily about becoming the sacrificial lamb of the Passover, but was instead part of the Suffering Servant model from Isaiah. Jesus would suffer and die, and through that suffering, bring salvation to the world. For Luke, Jesus died so that human beings would have an opportunity to recognize their sinfulness (which put Jesus on the cross) and thus seek repentance. Only in John’s gospel does Jesus’ death function explicitly as atonement – a blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity, like the sacrificial lamb of the Passover.

With this in mind, it is easy to see why John may have changed the chronology of Passover. Recall the discussion above about the festival of the Passover. It was inaugurated by a ritual meal wherein Jews would offer a blood sacrifice from an unblemished lamb, then consume the meat of the lamb. On the day before Passover, called the Day of Preparation, ordinary Jews would purchase an unblemished lamb, take it to the Temple, and have it ritually slaughtered by the priests. The blood would be offered on the altar, and the remaining meat would be cooked in preparation for the evening meal. All of this took place during the late morning and afternoon on the day before Passover. At sundown, Passover would officially begin, and the ritual Passover meal would be eaten.

By changing the chronology of Passover and moving it to Friday evening, John is effectively having Jesus crucified on the afternoon of the Day of Preparation. In other words, while the priests in the Temple are busy slaughtering the sacrificial lambs in preparation for the evening Passover meal, Jesus is at Golgotha being crucified. Jesus, then, is functioning as a human sacrificial lamb; his blood is being spilled for the atonement of humanity’s sins.

This is why John changed the chronology we find in the Synoptic gospels. John, more than any other gospel writer, wanted to show that Jesus was the ultimate sacrificial lamb. He was crucified so that his blood could atone for the sins of humanity. For that reason, he was executed at the same time that the priests were slaughtering the ritual Passover lambs.

As a result, in the Gospel of John, the Last Supper is not a Passover meal, as it is in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Instead, it is simply an evening meal on the day before Passover. This is of particular interest in light of a recent study about depictions of the Last Supper in art over the centuries. Researchers have found that the portions depicted on the table have steadily increased over the years, reflecting the increase in our collective dietary habits (particularly in the West). Some folks have noted that the portions would likely have been large anyway, since it was a Passover meal, and thus a veritable “feast.”

In John’s gospel, however, it was not the Passover meal at all, and would instead have been a modest meal of bread, fish, and wine.

A Parable of American Politics

There was once a hired hand, a woodcutter, doing his daily work on a sprawling stretch of land. There was a tree on the land, an old, towering monolith that was home to countless mammal and insect life.

One day, the woodcutter took his ax and began chopping at the base of the tree. “I need kindling for my fire,” the woodcutter said to himself as he chipped away at the tree’s massive base. “This tree is 20 feet in diameter; it can easily absorb the loss of some bark and wood around its base. My ax won’t harm this tree.”

The woodcutter went about his work industriously. Bark and woodchips began to fly off the base. At the end of the day, the woodcutter gathered the wood and built a roaring fire that night, over which he grilled a sumptuous feast.

The woodcutter enjoyed the feast and the warmth of the fire so much that he decided to do it again the next night. “Just one more night of warmth and food,” the woodcutter said to himself as he dug his ax into the base of the tree.

On that second night, the roaring fire drew visitors to the woodcutter’s home. He shared his feast with them and everyone enjoyed the fruits of his labor. “We should do this more often,” his visitors told him. “The great tree is enormous; its base is twenty feet in diameter. We can feast every month and we won’t harm this tree.”

The woodcutter agreed, and his monthly feasts quickly became sprawling banquets, attended by dozens of local villagers. In time, dozens became hundreds, then thousands. Each month, the woodcutter would faithfully chip away at the base of the great tree, confident that the grand old monolith would withstand his petty, occasional interference. “What are a few chips of bark, a few chunks of kindling, to a tree as mighty as this?” the woodcutter reassured himself. “It has sufficient time to heal in between our banquets. A few chops of my ax each month isn’t going to harm this tree.”

After a few years, a hard winter struck the land. It was bitterly cold, colder than any winter in recent memory. “We need warm fires each night,” the woodcutter told himself. “We’ll freeze to death without them. I’ll have to cut wood more often. This tree is twenty feet in diameter; it’s large enough to sustain us. My ax won’t harm this tree.”

The winter raged on, and the woodcutter began cutting the base of the tree twice a month, then once a week, and finally every two or three days. Near the end of the winter, a massive blizzard struck, worse than anything even the oldest villagers could remember. Everyone huddled into their homes, cut off from the land, buried beneath the snow that would not stop falling.

In the midst of the blizzard, the woodcutter made one final trip to the base of the grand old tree. The snow and darkness was so heavy he stumbled on his way, and when he began chopping again at his familiar spot, he did it by rote, trusting his hands to find their way to the wood that would sustain the village. The woodcutter doled out the fruits of his labor to the villagers, then retired to his hut to wait out the storm. “We’ll have enough wood for the winter now,” he told himself. “I won’t cut the tree again this year. We’ll cancel our regular feasts. We’ll let the tree repair itself.”

After endless weeks huddled down from the storm and its aftermath, spring came to the land and began to thaw the snow. The villagers and the woodcutter emerged from their homes like mice from their winter nests. Shock and dismay overtook them when they saw the tree. It was still standing, but only by the slimmest of margins. The woodcutter’s final frenzy had left only a few inches of wood nestled in the center, between the body of the tree and the stump. It teetered so precariously that it seemed even a slight breeze in either direction might tip it over.

“We must take great steps to repair this,” the woodcutter said. “This is a fantastic old tree, we cannot let it collapse.” As he said these words, the woodcutter noticed angry stares around him. He backed away. “You can’t blame this on me,” he said. “We all enjoyed the feasts. I cut this tree with your approval. No one could have foreseen the bad winter or the blizzard!”

His defense was no good. The villagers ran him out of town, banishing him from the sprawling land they all shared. From among their ranks, a new woodcutter was chosen. “You must repair our tree,” the villagers told him. “It seems hopeless to all of us, but we are putting our faith in you.”

The new woodcutter spent weeks evaluating the tree. “How can I possibly fix this old monolith?” he thought to himself. “Its entire twenty-foot diameter has been nearly cut completely through. A strong wind from any direction will blow it clean down.”

But the woodcutter thought it out as best he could and finally decided on a solution. When the villagers came out to see the fruits of his labor, they were scandalized. “What have you done!” they exclaimed. The new woodcutter had let the tree fall, then cut it up into firewood.

“We couldn’t just sit back and expect this tree to heal itself,” the new woodcutter told them. “It was too badly damaged. It was beyond hope. The only option was to salvage what was left for firewood, and plant a new tree in its place.”

As the new woodcutter finished speaking, a murmur went through the crowd. Someone was coming up from the rear, and the people were backing away to let him through to the front. It was the old woodcutter, returned from his banishment.

“You must be insane!” he said, pointing a finger at his replacement. “Are you happy to just hack our tree up without a thought in the world? What a hypocrite you are! How dare you kill this tree!”

The new woodcutter paused a moment, a curious look on his face. “I didn’t kill this tree. I salvaged a tree that was already dead, destroyed by the blade of your own ax.”

Inalienable Rights

Several recent conversations have gotten me thinking: Do Americans really believe in “inalienable rights”?

That phrase, of course, is familiar to most Americans from the Declaration of Independence. A friend of mine – who is, ironically enough, an atheist – recently noted that the wording of the Declaration of Independence substantiates the argument that the USA is a nation founded on what he called “Christian principles.”

As a way to begin, here’s the famous passage in question:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men…

What, exactly, is Thomas Jefferson saying here? Have you ever paused to think about it? Here’s my analysis (and you’ll note that I interpret “men” as referring to humankind): For Jefferson, there are at least two self-evident truths that can be ascertained. First, all people are born equal. Race and national origin, gender and social status, have no bearing on a person’s inherent human worth. Second, the “Creator” of the world has bestowed upon human beings three “inalienable rights” – namely, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

By Jefferson’s account, governments are created in order to protect these self-evident truths, these basic human rights. Thus, the government’s job is to ensure that these rights are not taken away, trampled on, or ignored.

The phrase about how humans are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” is the one I want to focus on here. Many (like the friend I mentioned above) use this phrase to argue that we are a nation founded “under God,” based on basic Christian principles. “Under God” may be a phrase inserted into our Pledge of Allegiance only in 1953, but the Declaration of Independence itself includes similar language, referencing the basic human rights that have been endowed on humanity by the Creator of the universe and for which the government is charged in protecting.

That Jefferson’s language is Deist in nature, and not Christian, is not my focus here. In fact, I’m not even attempting to argue that religion in general didn’t play a role in the founding of America, because it most clearly did. Instead, I want to look more deeply at that phrase about the “Creator” and the “inalienable rights” and take it out to its ultimate conclusion.

For Jefferson, and thus for anyone who agrees with Jefferson’s belief (which most Americans say they do), God has given certain basic rights to humanity. These are God’s gifts to us. We didn’t invent them and no human being has bestowed them upon us. They are ours by virtue of being human creatures created by God. As another good friend of mine pointed out, the very thrust of Jefferson’s argument here was that the “Rights of Man” are not bestowed by the British Monarchy or anyone else. Basic human rights are the domain of God, not of kings and emperors, presidents and parliamentarians. This, of course, is the whole theme of the 18th century revolutionary period in America.

So, according to Jefferson, and agreed upon by countless Americans for the last 225 years, God has given us certain “inalienable” rights. That word – “inalienable” – is familiar to most people simply because of its prominent place in the Declaration of Independence. What does it actually mean? According to dictionary.com: not transferable or capable of being repudiated. According to Merriam-Webster: incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred.

In other words, an “inalienable right” is a right that cannot be taken away by any human being because human beings didn’t invent or bestow the right in the first place. What human beings didn’t give, human beings can’t give away. More pointedly, and more in line with Jefferson’s wording: what God gave, human beings can’t give away.

I think most Americans would agree, and agree profoundly, with that analysis. What I want to do now, however, is take that analysis out to its logical conclusion – a conclusion I have a feeling will be met with some resistance.

Jefferson tells us that among our God-given “inalienable” rights is the right to life. The very phrase “right to life” is a familiar one – it’s most often used in discussions about abortion. All humans have a right to life, given by God and affirmed in one of our most treasured American documents, and thus abortion is not only sinful, it’s also un-American. Without going into a lot of detail about an issue that is anything but simple, many of my readers may be surprised to find that I generally agree with this sentiment. While I consider myself pro-choice for a variety of reasons that are far too numerous to go into here, I also consider myself profoundly anti-abortion. For me, “pro-choice” is a political and social stance, while “anti-abortion” is a moral and ethical and religious stance.

But the phrase “right to life” also has other implications. I’m specifically thinking of capital punishment. I’ve often argued that one can’t be pro-life and pro-death penalty without being hypocritical, just as one can’t be pro-abortion and anti-death penalty without being hypocritical. I consider myself anti-abortion and anti-death penalty. I believe in the right to life and in affirming life, and that belief is consistent across my various political opinions.

Here’s the crux: if we agree with Jefferson that human beings have basic inalienable rights – rights, which by their very divinely-given nature, cannot be taken away by human beings – and if we agree that one of these rights is the right to life, then how can we affirm capital punishment without being inconsistent with what we claim to believe?

The primary argument against this is the one that is most obvious: capital punishment is a totally different ball of wax. Capital punishment isn’t “murder.” Capital punishment is justice meted out against those who have committed violent acts against other human beings. As the Christian Old Testament affirms, murder is a terrible sin, but “killing” in war or as punishment for sin is not the same as “murder.”

By the standards of this argument, one might say that capital punishment doesn’t equate to taking away a person’s inalienable right to life. Instead, the criminal in question voluntarily gave that right up when he or she chose to commit murder. This is an extremely common argument in discussions about capital punishment – capital punishment isn’t murder, nor is it unethical, because the right to life was already surrendered by the perpetrator in the very act of committing their crime.

You may already see where I’m going here. If not, recall the discussion above about the meaning of the phrase “inalienable rights.” An “inalienable right” is a human right which, by its very definition, cannot be taken away, transferred, or surrendered. It is “inalienable.” It is bestowed by a power greater than any human being or human institution. What human beings did not give, human beings cannot give away. What God gave, human beings cannot take away and cannot surrender. If a right can be either taken away by others or surrendered by an individual through an act of violence, then it is not, by definition, an “inalienable” right.

For that reason, I am arguing that capital punishment is inconsistent with American principles, as outlined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Most Americans say they believe in those principles – those inalienable rights – yet most Americans also support capital punishment.

And so we return to the question that opened this discussion: Do Americans really believe in “inalienable rights”? Or is that just something that sounds good on paper, sounds good in a political debate, and sounds pretty to our imaginations, but which we don’t really believe in practice?

If you genuinely believe in the “inalienable rights” that Thomas Jefferson asserted in the Declaration of Independence, and you understand what the word “inalienable” actually means, then I don’t see how you can support capital punishment – regardless of what your personal religious beliefs happen to be.

If the right to life is “inalienable,” and if that belief is a deeply American one which our government is charged with protecting, then capital punishment can only be deeply un-American.