Lash wrote:I can't speak for Jesus, as the word 'abortion'isn't found in the Bible--though one could easily make their own judgement of other things He said-- but dauer's post about the early Jews agreeing with abortion was incorrect, as these writings will prove--
-------------
*that the first Christians, including all but one of the New Testament authors, were Jewish Christians with an essentially Jewish morality. Hence, if there was a Jewish consensus on abortion at the time, the early Christians most certainly would have shared that consensus.
*that early Judaism was, in fact, quite firmly opposed to abortion. As Michael Gorman points out in his excellent article "Why Is the New Testament Silent About Abortion?" (Christianity Today, Jan. 11, 1993), Jewish documents from the period condemn the practice unequivocally, demonstrating a clear antiabortion consensus among first century Jews:
-- The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides (written between 50 B.C. and A.D. 50) says, "A woman should not destroy the unborn babe in her belly, nor after its birth throw it before the dogs and vultures."
-- Sibyline Oracles: includes among the wicked those who "produce abortions and unlawfully cast their offspring away" as well as sorcerers who dispense abortifacients.
-- I Enoch (first or second century B.C.) says that an evil angel taught humans how to "smash the embryo in the womb."
-- Philo of Alexandria (Jewish philosopher, 25 B.C. to A.D.41) rejected the notion that the fetus is merely part of the mother's body.
-- I Josephus (first-century Jewish historian) wrote, "The law orders all the offspring be brought up, and forbids women either to cause abortion or to make away with the fetus." (A woman who did so was considered to have committed infanticide because she destroyed a "soul" and hence diminished the race.)
No contradictory texts exist! Given this consensus, the most logical conclusion is that the Jewish Christian writers of the New Testament shared the anti-abortion views of their Jewish heritage -- even if they never expressly mention the word "abortion" in their writings.
*that the theology of the New Testament is primarily task theology written to address specific issues in specific churches. In other words, the New Testament as a whole does not constitute a comprehensive code of ethics (although we certainly can derive certain principles of right and wrong from what's written), but rather each document deals only with those moral issues which had become problems. For example, the Apostle Paul seldom mentions the historical career of Christ, but this does not mean that he was ignorant of it or questioned its validity. Rather, it means that a discussion of this sort never became necessary. Writes theologian George Eldon Ladd:
"Many studies in Paul have worked with the implicit assumption that his letters record all his ideas, and when some important matter was not discussed, they have assumed it was because it had no place in Paul's thought. This is a dangerous procedure; the argument from silence should be employed only with the greatest of caution. Paul discusses many subjects only because a particular need in a given church required his instruction .... We would never know much about Paul's thought on the resurrection had it not been questioned in Corinth. We might conclude that Paul knew no tradition about the Lord's supper had not abuses occurred in the Corinthian congregation. In other words, we may say that we owe whatever understanding we have of Paul's thought to the "accidents of history" which required him to deal with various problems, doctrinal and practical, in the life of the churches" (A Theology of the New Testament, EErdmans, 1974, pp.377-8. Emph. added).
Likewise, the New Testament's silence on abortion does not mean that its authors approved of the practice, but that a discussion of the issue never became necessary. In other words, there was no deviation from the norm inherited from Judaism. The early Christians simply were not tempted to kill their children before or after birth.
*that many of the texts used by early Christians did condemn abortion. Although these early Christian works eventually lost their bid for canonicity, they do express how the first Christians felt on a variety of issues -- including abortion. As Gorman points out, these early writings were read and preached in many congregations throughout the Roman Empire up until the fourth century. Examples include:
-- The Didache: "You shall not murder a child by abortion nor shall you kill a newborn."
-- The Epistle of Barnabas: "You shall love your neighbor more than your own life. You shall not murder a child by abortion nor shall you kill a newborn."
-- Apocalypse of Peter [describing a vision of Hell]: "I saw women who produced children out of wedlock and who procured abortions."
These texts, writes Gorman, "bear witness to the general Jewish and Jewish-Christian attitude of the first and second centuries, thus confirming that the earliest Christians shared the anti-abortion position of their Jewish forebears."
Given this overwhelming consensus against abortion by early Jewish Christians, our "visitor" would reason that what Jewish morality condemned, the writers of the New Testament never intended to legitimize.
The error I see hear is that your first reference is Pseudo-Phocylides, but this is the work of a Hellenized Jew, a Jew who had been assimilating. For evidence of this, there is this page:
http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/pseudophocylides.html
The sybiline oracles are a Christian document:
"Raymond F. Surburg writes: "Book 1 begins with creation and relates the history of the human race till the exit of Noah from the ark. This is followed by the history of the life of Christ, a portrayal of His miracle of the loaves, His crucifixion, and the destruction of the Jews. In this book, Hades is derived from Adam [Thomson]. "
You can read more about it on this page:
http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/sibylline.html
Of the book of Enoch I find:
James Charlesworth writes: "This pseudepigraph has evoked divergent opinions; but today there is a consensus that the book is a composite, portions of which are clearly pre-Christian as demonstrated by the discovery of Aramaic and Hebrew fragments from four of the five sections of the book among the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of these fragments, moreover, Hena, was copied in the second half of the second century B.C. The main question concerns the date of the second section, chapters 37-71, which contains the Son of Man sayings. J. T. Milik (esp. no. 755) has shown that this section, which is not represented among the early fragments, is probably a later addition to 1 Enoch...
The earliest portions display impressive parallels with the nascent thoughts of the Jewish sect which eventually settled at Qumran
Of Philo I can show:
"Philo (20 BCE - 40 CE) was an Alexandrian Jewish philosopher born in Alexandria, Egypt. The few biographical details concerning him are found in his own works (especially in "Legatio ad Caium," and in Josephus ("Ant." xviii. 8, § 1; comp. ib. xix. 5, § 1; xx. 5, § 2)...
Philo included in his philosophy both Greek wisdom and Judaism, which he sought to fuse and harmonize by means of the art of allegory that he had learned from the Stoics. His work was not accepted by contemporary Judaism. "The sophists of literalness," as he calls them (De Somniis, i. 16-17), "opened their eyes superciliously" when he explained to them the marvels of his exegesis. Philo was enthusiastically received by the early Christians, some of whom saw in him a Christian.
http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/p/ph/philo.html
There a big section on there about how Hellenism influenced him.
Josephus
"The historian known to posterity by the Latinized name Josephus was a member of Jerusalem's priestly aristocracy who, at age 30, was taken hostage in the great Jewish revolt against Rome [66-70 CE] & spent the rest of his life in Roman circles as a protégé of three emperors [Vespasian, Titus & Domitian]...
Taken to Rome after the war, Josephus was declared a freed man, granted Roman citizenship, provided a pension & lodging on Vespasian's estates. He adopted the family name of his imperial patrons & was thus known to Romans as Flavius Josephus. He was near the top of Vespasian's "civil list" of Roman citizens. He witnessed first-hand the rebuilding of Rome after Nero's fire [65 CE] & the erection of the Flavian monuments [Colosseum, the temple of Peace, the forum of Vespasian & the arch of Titus, depicting the conquest of the temple in Jerusalem]. He used his position both to support the cause of the Flavian emperors & to defend his own place as a fixture in their court. Though he gave his children gentile names, he remained dedicated to his Jewish heritage, spending years writing voluminous works to explain & glorify those who championed the laws of Moses to Romans who, in the wake of the Jewish revolt, regarded all Jews as lawless riff-raff & bandits."
http://religion.rutgers.edu/iho/josephus.html
So you have presented
1. The text of a helenized Jew.
2. An early Christian document.
3.A book of fragments that agrees most with the views of a cloistered sect.
4.A quote from a helenizer.
5. A quote from a helenizer.
These may be the views of Jews, but they are not necessarily "Jewish" views. Certainly the book of Enoch may reflect the early ideas of the Essenes, if that line is not a later edition, but that speaks nothing for the Jewish populace. And the helenized Jews had left Jewish thought and begun to deal in other things, like the views of the Stoics and philosophers. So that's really not adequate. What we need is the views of some of the Jews who were actually thinking and acting in normative terms for the general population, as dictated by Jewish laws, and who were also not separating themselves from the majority and increasing greatly the number of laws of purity.
Dauer
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace