Former christian here. Every once in a while, I catch myself about to—or worse, in the middle of—recounting an explanation like the one you just gave for which I have no evidence other than some pastor’s word. On more than one of those occasions, the recalled explanation was just wrong. I haven’t googled your explanation here, so it’s possible that there’s lots of evidence for it, but my prior for that is fairly low (it seems like a really specific piece of cultural information, and it pattern matches against “story that reinterprets well known biblical passage in a way that makes the inconvenient and obvious interpretation incorrect”).
I’m incredibly pessimistic about the abilities of the average christian pastor at weighing the evidence for multiple competing historical hypotheses and coming up with the most correct answer (it’s basically their job to be bad at this). I know that reversed stupidity is not intelligence, but as a rule I no longer repeat things I “learned” in a church setting unless I’ve independently verified it.
(Oh, and: my apologies if you came by that story via a more rigorous process.)
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/9385 has more of the argument and says “resist not evil” is a biased or incorrect translation invented by King James’ bible translators.
From the above page (by Walter Wink): “Jesus did not tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. His entire ministry is at odds with such a preposterous idea.”—I had noticed that a lot of his behaviour described in the bible was inconsistent with this doctrine. He makes more sense without it.
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/9385 has more of the argument and says “resist not evil” is a biased or incorrect translation invented by King James’ bible translators.
This seems strange. I don’t know Greek so I can’t look at the closest to original text, but I can read some Latin. So I looked at the Vulgatus which is both a) Catholic and b) predating the KJV by many centuries. That uses the phrase here “Non resistere malo” means something like “don’t resist the bad” but might be closer to “don’t fight bad things”.
Alright, wikipedia has better evidence than I expected, although I’m also not going to read the referenced book.
Wink’s piece is coherent and well-put, but doesn’t seem like great evidence—I cannot tell if he mentally wrote his conclusion before or after making those arguments, and I can’t tell which elements are actual features of ANE culture identified by historians and which are things that just sounded reasonable to him.
I’m incredibly pessimistic about the abilities of the average christian pastor at weighing the evidence for multiple competing historical hypotheses and coming up with the most correct answer (it’s basically their job to be bad at this).
There are specific things that pastors are required to be wrong about yet when it comes to adding mere details for the sake of little more than curiosity there is little reason to believe they would be worse than average. For most part, of course, they will be simply teaching what they were taught and theological college—the evidence weighing is done by others. This is how most people operate.
What you say is true for competent pastors. I’ve probably been exposed to more than my fair share of the incompetent ones.
...I noticed a long time before I deconverted that when pastors said something about a subject I knew something about, they were totally wrong some ridiculously high percentage of the time. Should have tipped me off.
What you say is true for competent pastors. I’ve probably been exposed to more than my fair share of the incompetent ones.
I’ve been fortunate in as much as several of my pastors and most of my lay preachers had science degrees. Mind you I suspect I’ve selected out most of the bad ones since I do recall I used to spend time with my family absolutely bagging the crap out of those preachers who said silly things.
I didn’t learn that in a church setting, I read it on the internet in a page that claimed this to be the result of some scholar. What I liked most about the explanation is that it makes sense of the weird examples: cheek slapping(usually men use their fists if they mean to be aggressive) and forcing someone to walk a mile(makes sense if you assume the roman occupation context). So it is the best explanation I heard up to date, sigh.
I think I have heard a garbled version of this story before, which probably contributed to my skepticism (which, if you squint just right, makes my prior comment an example of the thing I was protesting).
Anyway, I’ll retract the accusatory nature of my prior comment. I’m still pretty skeptical, but I don’t care enough to read the book wikipedia references. :)
I encountered an identical explanation on the History Channel a decade ago (this was back when the history channel was actually about history beyond Nostradamus and Hitler).
Former christian here. Every once in a while, I catch myself about to—or worse, in the middle of—recounting an explanation like the one you just gave for which I have no evidence other than some pastor’s word. On more than one of those occasions, the recalled explanation was just wrong. I haven’t googled your explanation here, so it’s possible that there’s lots of evidence for it, but my prior for that is fairly low (it seems like a really specific piece of cultural information, and it pattern matches against “story that reinterprets well known biblical passage in a way that makes the inconvenient and obvious interpretation incorrect”).
I’m incredibly pessimistic about the abilities of the average christian pastor at weighing the evidence for multiple competing historical hypotheses and coming up with the most correct answer (it’s basically their job to be bad at this). I know that reversed stupidity is not intelligence, but as a rule I no longer repeat things I “learned” in a church setting unless I’ve independently verified it.
(Oh, and: my apologies if you came by that story via a more rigorous process.)
I was interested enough to google, and found some relevant links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_the_other_cheek has (unlinked, presumably offline) references for an explanation like that.
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/9385 has more of the argument and says “resist not evil” is a biased or incorrect translation invented by King James’ bible translators.
From the above page (by Walter Wink): “Jesus did not tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. His entire ministry is at odds with such a preposterous idea.”—I had noticed that a lot of his behaviour described in the bible was inconsistent with this doctrine. He makes more sense without it.
This seems strange. I don’t know Greek so I can’t look at the closest to original text, but I can read some Latin. So I looked at the Vulgatus which is both a) Catholic and b) predating the KJV by many centuries. That uses the phrase here “Non resistere malo” means something like “don’t resist the bad” but might be closer to “don’t fight bad things”.
Alright, wikipedia has better evidence than I expected, although I’m also not going to read the referenced book.
Wink’s piece is coherent and well-put, but doesn’t seem like great evidence—I cannot tell if he mentally wrote his conclusion before or after making those arguments, and I can’t tell which elements are actual features of ANE culture identified by historians and which are things that just sounded reasonable to him.
There are specific things that pastors are required to be wrong about yet when it comes to adding mere details for the sake of little more than curiosity there is little reason to believe they would be worse than average. For most part, of course, they will be simply teaching what they were taught and theological college—the evidence weighing is done by others. This is how most people operate.
What you say is true for competent pastors. I’ve probably been exposed to more than my fair share of the incompetent ones.
...I noticed a long time before I deconverted that when pastors said something about a subject I knew something about, they were totally wrong some ridiculously high percentage of the time. Should have tipped me off.
I’ve been fortunate in as much as several of my pastors and most of my lay preachers had science degrees. Mind you I suspect I’ve selected out most of the bad ones since I do recall I used to spend time with my family absolutely bagging the crap out of those preachers who said silly things.
I didn’t learn that in a church setting, I read it on the internet in a page that claimed this to be the result of some scholar. What I liked most about the explanation is that it makes sense of the weird examples: cheek slapping(usually men use their fists if they mean to be aggressive) and forcing someone to walk a mile(makes sense if you assume the roman occupation context). So it is the best explanation I heard up to date, sigh.
Hm, as Caspian says it shows up on wikipedia.
I think I have heard a garbled version of this story before, which probably contributed to my skepticism (which, if you squint just right, makes my prior comment an example of the thing I was protesting).
Anyway, I’ll retract the accusatory nature of my prior comment. I’m still pretty skeptical, but I don’t care enough to read the book wikipedia references. :)
I noticed after posting that roland had linked to the same wikipedia page I did with nearly the same URL in his earlier comment http://lesswrong.com/lw/9p/extreme_rationality_its_not_that_great/6gc
Looks like we both missed it.
Huh. I recall reading the rest of that comment. Joke’s on me, I guess.
I encountered an identical explanation on the History Channel a decade ago (this was back when the history channel was actually about history beyond Nostradamus and Hitler).