Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
And how does that fit with a commandment of "thou shalt not kill?"
|
Well, that's actually a (probably deliberate) mistranslation. The original wording is "
You shall not murder."
Murder and
kill being rather different things.
Regarding your allusion in post #534 that Jesus said he only came to the Jews, that's a context problem as well. What he said was that he was
sent to the Jews, and other remarks he made (as well as the epistles) clarify that he was sent
first to the Jews. For example: "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him." (
John 3:17) Note that Jesus said "the world" not "the Jews." Later in John he said: "I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd." (
John 10:16) Another reference to non-Jews -- the context here was speaking to the Jewish religious leaders.
Anything can mean anything if the context is sufficiently removed.
For example, I could claim that "
what God has joined together, let no man put asunder" means that splitting wood is sacrilegious. That would be beyond ridiculous, of course, since the passage hasn't the faintest connection with wood, split or otherwise, but it goes to show that the context of a statement is extremely important to what that statement really
means.
A lot of hostility toward God that I've encountered has a fairly firm rooting in what people have "heard" the Bible says. Often the words (or something close) really are in there, but they've been totally divorced from their context and made out to mean something else entirely, sometimes something completely opposite of what was originally meant.