15 "Woe to YOU, governing body, hypocrites! because YOU traverse sea and dry land to make one proselyte, and when he becomes one YOU make him a subject for Ge?hen′na twice as much so as yourselves.
The Governing Body are Governing Pharisees
by believingxjw 12 Replies latest jw friends
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Use another analogy the Pharisees were not the bad guys Jesus was.
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TD
There are quite a few scholars today who believe that Jesus was a Pharisee, albeit a maverick and reformer. The criticisms that rival Pharisees leveled at Jesus over associates, hand washing, etc. as well as the challenges posed vis a vis the Law's interpretation make little sense otherwise, because they are the objections of one Pharisee to another.
I really think most xJW's forget that the Law was not simply a code of moral conduct, it was a civil and criminal code with penalties that went all the way up to capital punishment. When you start comparing the 'freedom' of Christianity to Judaism of two thousand years ago, you're comparing apples to oranges.
What, for example, is murder? How do you define murder? How do you determine when a murder has occured?
Unlike ancient Judaism, Christianity did not concern itself with these messy details. Christianity condemns the crime of murder, but lets the State make the actual determination of when a murder has occured.
Western law recognizes different types as well as different levels of culpability when it comes to murder. It gets real complicated, real quick.
Similarly, desecration of the Sabbath was a capital offense throughout a good chunk of the time period covered in the Bible. The Oral Law didn't "err on the side of tradition," it erred on the side of life, or at least attempted to. The greater the penalty, the greater the level of detail there will be in defining the crime.