Father's Wife
We know that Paul entered into conflict with the Judaizers. They
explain this by saying these were concerns surrounding the
ceremonial law, which is defunct. Moses' law, as concerning morals,
we agree, is not defunct. What about the civil law? They say it is
operative, universally. Did Paul so understand it? You can ask the
question, was there ever an instance in one of Paul's churches where
a case came up, of a violation of Moses' civil code that would have merited capital punishment?
If so, how did Paul react?
Take 1 Corinthians 5:1, which describes a situation at the church
in Corinth. Rushdoony returns to this situation several times, from
completely different standpoints, because it is basically the end of
his theory:
"It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles—that a man has his father’s wife!
And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who
has done this deed might be taken away from among you."
(1 Corinthians 5:1-2).
That this is incest is spelled out in Leviticus 18:8,
"None of you shall approach anyone who is near of kin to him, to uncover his nakedness: I am the LORD.
. .The nakedness of your father’s wife you shall not uncover; it is your father’s nakedness."
(Leviticus 18:6-8).
The penalty specified being to be cut off from the people, "For whoever commits any of these abominations, the persons who commit them shall be cut off from among their people."
(Leviticus 18:29), a phrase which may
refer to death. This specific offense is also cursed in
Deuteronomy 27:20, "Cursed is the one who lies with his father’s
wife, because he has uncovered his father’s bed. And all the people shall say, ‘Amen!’"
(Deuteronomy 27:20). As some interpreters
point out, the women is identified as the father's wife, not
ex-wife, so this might have been adultery as well, another
capital crime under the law of Moses.
What happened to this man, and what did Paul want to happen to
him? Capital punishment? Some commentators see in 2 Corinthians 2:6
a reference to this same situation, "This punishment which was inflicted by the majority is sufficient for such a man, so that, on the contrary, you ought rather to forgive and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one be swallowed up with too much sorrow.
(2 Corinthians 2:6-7). In other words, the
church had voted to excommunicate this man, who had repented, and
Paul thought that was enough. He certainly did not want to see the
man dead, even though Moses did. Admittedly that can't be proven,
though; Paul might be referring to a completely different situation
about which we know nothing. Multiplying situations is not
parsimonious, but it cannot be proven incorrect.
So what did he want them to do?
"For I indeed, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged (as though I were present) him who has so done this deed. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus."
(1 Corinthians 5:3-5).
Apparently excommunication is exactly what Paul wanted, with the offender removed
from the sanctuary of the church and given over to the ruler of this world.
He may be visualizing excommunication is a sort of spiritual
death, paralleling the physical death penalty handed out by the
Mosaic law, but he is certainly not decreeing that, as even
Rushdoony must be aware. For the church order a 'hit' would have
been murder, pure and simple; they would have had no legal
immunity against a murder charge, which his another capital
crime.
And, coincidentally, the next letter in the series mentions
someone who was excommunicated. Paul does not say, such a one
ought to be killed, but unfortunately we cannot do that or we'll
get in trouble.
Did Paul and his associates actually want the church to pressure
the civic authorities to enact Moses' incest regulations as civil
law, to override whatever the already existing civil law was in
Corinth at the time? Were they disappointed when this did not
happen? The laws of the Gentiles regarding incest did not always
parallel the Mosaic law. For instance, bother-sister marriage was
legal in Egypt, even held in honor. Marriages between half-siblings
were allowed in some places. Which is not to say that the pagans
felt that anything goes when it comes to consanguinity; Oedipus
married his mother and killed his father, and you can inquire to
find out how well that went. The mad emperor Caligula was rumored
to have relations with his sisters, which was considered scandalous
if true. But a relationship with a step-mother was not necessarily
a criminal offense under the Gentile laws, and if it was,
it did not likely carry the death penalty. We are expected to
believe Paul felt frustrated by this, preferring to see the man done
away with.
Rousas Rushdoony believes that Paul was in effect
pronouncing a death sentence, which the church was, however, not
able to execute, lacking civil jurisdiction:
"Third, St. Paul orders them '[t]o deliver such an one
unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may
be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus' (1 Cor. 5:5). Craig is
correct in interpreting this as the death penalty. Thus, the
death penalty is clearly God's law for incest and/or adultery.
The church, however, cannot execute a man; the death penalty does not belong to
the church." (Rousas Rushdoony, Institutes of
Biblical Law, Volume 1, page 564).
This rather incoherent view of the matter leaves us with the church having pronounced a death sentence it
unfortunately cannot execute, while meanwhile regretting its excessive
severity in a completely unrelated case, where excommunication
should have been accompanied with mercy and a path to restoration. Or
was it a completely unrelated case? We have two of Paul's letters to
the Corinthians. It could be that the Corinthians were so prone to
get into trouble that the trouble described in the first letter was
a matter entirely unrelated to the excommunication described in the
second letter, where Paul urges them to relent, "Therefore I urge
you to reaffirm your love to him." (2 Corinthians
2:8). If just a moment ago they were trying to have the man
killed, it seems strange that Paul is concerned about his hurt
feelings. It puts one in mind of the old Music Hall song, if there
ever was such a Music Hall song, whose lyrics ran, 'I know you were
right to dissemble your love, but why did you kick me downstairs?'
It could, of course, be an entirely different man in a different
situation. But as a general rule the most parsimonious explanation
is to be preferred. This is what William of Ockham was getting at in
his rule forbidding us to multiply entities needlessly. If one
offense, with two different time windows offering us a peek into the
evolving circumstances, can cover the known facts, then supposing
two offenses is unnecessary and to be deprecated. Of course, one
cannot prove to a forensic standard that there were not two
unrelated offenses; there might have been. It's just that there's a reason why
the commentators prefer to identify the two cases rather than
distinguish them.
It seems more likely to me that it's one and the same case, and the
culprit was restored upon repentance, and not "as someone with a
recognized death sentence over him" (Rushdoony,
Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume 1, p. 564). Was the women taken
in adultery, forgiven by Jesus, treated "as someone with a
recognized death sentence over" her? According to Rushdoony, "The
early church had a serious problem, its duty to uphold the law in a
lawless age. Men whose offenses required the death penalty, as with
the case in the Corinthian church, remained alive. . ."
(Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law,
Volume 1, p. 566). People remaining alive is more a problem for
him and his problematic interpretations than it ever was for the
early church, which does not seem to have regretted when the
membership continued to draw breath.
For that matter, the fact that
David continued to draw breath in the aftermath of his adultery with
Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah need not be a matter of offense,
though perhaps it was one of the engines driving the continuous
rebellions that plagued
his reign in the latter years of his life, whatever his court prophet
might say to the contrary. From the human perspective, what the
rationale for that policy was I can't say. The Mosaic constitution
respected the rule of law; the King was subject to the law, like
anyone else. Perhaps Nathan and David
felt that, just as Richard M. Nixon thought, if the President does it,
it's not a crime, so the King cannot be judged by an inferior
tribunal. David did deserve death, on several counts, but skated. Is
Rushdoony really going to tell us that Nathan is a secular humanist?
Rushdoony is drawing the wrong lesson from the law if he thinks
it is actually injustice to allow a wrong-doer to survive. His concept
is that, if the governor gives a last-minute pardon and reprieve to
a convict whose time is running out on death row, he has done
something wicked. It is
true that adultery and the restoration of an adulterer to fellowship
would prove a contentious issue for the church. One of many
complaints against Callistus I, the bishop of Rome, was the cheap and
easy grace he dispensed in readmitting believers to communion after
doing brief penance for serious wrongs like adultery. Purists thought
those persons should either be readmitted never, and left in the
hands of God, or readmitted only after a decent interval had elapsed. Callistus was in fact greatly
exaggerating the power of the priesthood to forgive sins. It is
partly owing to Callistus' exaggerations that the church would drift
into the kind of ceremonialism and sacerdotalism that it did. The faction that wanted to see
those persons executed, as supposedly Paul did, did not exist.
At times in Roman history, adultery had been, not only a private
wrong, but a criminal offense. But the penalty for it was not
generally execution. Augustus's daughter Julia was convicted
and banished to the island of Pandateria for flagrant and open
adultery. Were such laws reinstated when Christianity became the
majority religion, and death made the penalty? No, because the idea that this is what the early
church wanted to see is entirely fanciful. There was no constituency
looking for that, nor any reason why there should be.
Noncompliance
To what extent was the Mosaic law observed in
Jesus' day? To listen to the Jewish apologists, like Josephus and
Philo Judaeus, you would think it was observed punctiliously at all
times and places. Yet there is some reason to think that some
aspects of it were not observed at all, like the Jubilee provisions
respecting land ownership. When Israel occupied the land, it was
divided by lot and farmed by the recipients. Naturally, some were
more productive than others, and land tended to accumulate in the
hands of the more productive farmers. Every forty-nine years,
however, this process was broken up and the land reverted to the
original ownership. At any rate, that was the plan.
In the wild, uncontrolled way he reads scripture, Rushdoony
veers between assuming that Jesus and the apostles must have
observed the law down to the very last jot and tittle,— they were
"old-fashioned," you see, versus the "humanist" and "modernist"
Pharisees,— and a realization that, given the vicissitudes of history
in that part of the world, some aspects of the law had probably
fallen into desuetude. In the case of the woman taken in adultery,
even Rushdoony, crackpot as he is, is aware that the law was probably
not observed in its entirety in Jesus' day: ". . .the lawless cannot
enforce the law, and they were lawless." (Rousas
Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume 1, page 563).
One case in point is the law respecting land ownership. Jesus, in
His parables, is speaking to people who were expected to be familiar
with large landed estates whose proprietors might even be absentee.
The land was worked by slaves or day laborers. Was that system land
tenure even legal under Moses' law? Shouldn't Israel have been a
land of family farms adjoining one another, each man resting under
his own vine? Incidentally, the Rome that conquered the world had
drawn its military, who were citizen-soldiers, from the sturdy
family farmers of Italy. But that situation was changing, too.
It's a myth that slavery enriches a nation. Allowing slavery
drives nations into poverty. While there were economies of scale to
be realized by joining field to field, the family farmers of Italy
were not driven into landlessness and dispossession so much by
inefficiency as by lack of access to credit. As large landed estates
worked by slaves took over the countryside, the political class
realized this was not good, and took prudent counter-measures. The
Gracchi pushed for land reform.
In our own country, we used to see it
that way. How did land ever come into the possession of individual human
beings? Does land belong to us simply in the manner of, say,
giraffes, who use the land and might defend a territory? By
occupying and improving the property, some said; the farmer owns the
land because he farms it. And so we in this country used to think. Though I get the impression that nowadays most people are
simply mystified by the concept of squatter's rights, adverse
possession, long continued, delivers the title into your hands,
under our law.
I'm old enough to remember when the United States used to push
our third world clients to conduct land reform. The Shah of Iran,
for example, got into trouble with the Islamic religious
establishment over land reform. Much of the arable land in Iran
belonged to the religious establishment, just as, recall, much of
the land in France on the eve of the revolution belonged to the
church. The serfs, feeling in their bones
that land belonged to the cultivator, wanted it for themselves. Did they want what was not theirs,
or did they want justice?
This should not have been an issue in Israel if the land
ownership provisions had been in force. But were they? Proselytes to
Judaism are not second-class citizens in Israel, but they do not
receive title to any land. Israelite history, of both Northern and
Southern kingdoms, involved dispossession, forcible resettlement,
and large population movements. Judah returned from Babylonian
captivity to the holy land, as the ten 'lost' Northern tribes did
not. So, by Mosaic standards, who actually owned the land in the
northern part of the holy land? To whom should it be returned?
Should it be held in trust until the eventual return of the
'rightful' owners?
But Galilee was not a foreign country; it had been forcibly reconquered by
the Hasmoneans and brought back into the Jewish fold. What was the
status of the land heritage of the ten northern tribes? Are those
tribes 'lost,' i.e., not currently in occupation? The current population
of the Galilaean countryside probably did have at least some line of
physical descent from the original occupiers. If the current
occupiers had physical descent from the initial occupiers, could
they document it? If a Jubilee were held, to whom would the land
revert?
This is a thorny question, difficult to resolve, even if we
assume the questioners are acting in perfect good faith. Do we look
at the Mosaic law in a broad perspective and point out that the
evident intent is for each farmer to own the land he is farming? Or
do we take the microscopic perspective and point out that this
individual cannot prove he is the rightful heir?:
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