Jesus was Open Minded

This is my response to the thread: Jesus was Narrow Minded

In that thread, I stated that to attempt to prove Jesus was narrow-minded on a specific issue, one would need to demonstrate, firstly, what a given verse or phrase means in the context of the period, and then, secondly, that it is evidently less tolerant or accepting than was the norm for Galilean or Judean preachers of that time (by referencing other near-contemporary literary works, for instance, the Talmud, Josephus, Philo or the Qumran texts) or indeed for people in the Roman Empire as a whole (i.e. Aristotelians, Platonists, Stoics, Pythagoreans etc.)

So I have selected one issue to focus on in this post and will explore it in some detail - relying on primary and secondary source material.

On the side of his 'open-mindedness' relative to his time and place, I would point to Jesus's inclusiveness towards, and compassion for, people with disabilities and degenerative illnesses - as is apparent from all four gospels and the Pauline epistles, the latter of which refer to the acknowledged "meekness and gentleness of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:1), which must have formed part of the early churches' biographical knowledge of Christ's life, according to scholars.

Sharing meals - meant to create bonds of friendship - with “outsiders” and inviting, as well including them, was for Jesus key to breaking down barriers:



Walter Burkert defines a quite-different kind of meal - the Greco-Roman Symposium - with deep roots in the history of Hellenistic culture, one that was explicitly exclusionary:


As the scholar John P. Meier explains:


https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V30N04_13.pdf




From a different scholarly perspective, Marcus Borg:


Marcus Borg: Jesus the Man of the Spirit




In Matthew 21, after his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on a donkey and cleansing from the Temple courtyard of the money-changers, Jesus welcomed the blind and crippled out in the streets into the Temple, and we are told that upon seeing these things the priests became enraged (21:14-15).

The sequence of events goes as follows:



Matthew 21:12-15 reads,



Why were the religious leaders angry at Jesus that blind and lame people were invited into the Temple? What could possibly be offensive about that? To most modern readers, this would seem a bizarre thing to get annoyed about. What was Jesus’ purpose, starting from the procession in the triumphal entry until the welcoming of the blind and lame in the temple?

First, using the approach to this question that I outlined earlier, let's consider how these classes of society tended to be treated in Judaea and the Roman Empire.

The ancient Jewish "Qumran literature" - otherwise known to the public as 'the Dead Sea Scrolls' - is contemporary with Jesus (dating from the 2nd century BCE to the late first century CE) and has provided scholars with an invaluable insight into the world of Second Temple Judaism.

While the texts have traditionally been attributed to the Essenes, some scholars have challenged this in recent years, given the Sadducee orientation of a few of the fragments, the fact that there is no trace of celibacy at Qumran (whereas all the ancient accounts of the Essene sect, from Josephus and Pliny, refer to their celibacy as a key distinguishing feature) and the inclusion of both sectarian and non-sectarian texts (indicating a diverse 'library' in the true sense of the term).

For these reasons, it has even been suggested that the scrolls were originally salvaged from the library of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, by Judaeans fleeing the fall of the city. Whichever interpretation one adopts, however, the Qumran scrolls are indispensable for our knowledge of the religious, cultural and social milieu of the era.

How were disabled people and the chronically ill dealt with in these texts? They are frequently referenced, but certainly not in a positive or sympathetic way.

While the written Torah had restricted cruel acts towards blind and deaf people (i.e. "You shall not curse the deaf nor place a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God - I am your Lord." (Leviticus 19:14)) as part of its wider concern for social justice, it becomes readily apparent when one reads the Qumran literature that by the first century CE, the exclusionary mindset typified by the ritual purity laws outlined by Moses in Leviticus 21 (i.e. "“The LORD spoke further to Moses: No man of your offspring throughout the ages who has a defect shall be qualified to offer the food of his God. No one at all who has a defect shall be qualified: no man who is blind, or lame, or has a limb too short or too long; no man who has a broken leg or a broken arm; or who is a hunchback, or a dwarf, or who has a growth in his eye, or who has a boil-scar, or scurvy, or crushed testes...but he shall not enter behind the curtain or come near the altar, for he has a defect. He shall not profane these places sacred to Me, for I the LORD have sanctified them.” (Leviticus 21.16–23 JPS)) had been significantly extended to make these people subject to onerous social stigmas, ostracization and discrimination.

The blemished or disfigured condition of the disabled was understood to profane the Temple's holiness.

This trend started in the Old Testament itself, outside the Torah, for example in 2 Samuel 5:8, in which King David prohibits the disabled from entering God's Sanctuary and expresses his hatred for them:




Saul M. Olyan, Professor of Judaic Studies at Brown University, explain in his study, The Exegetical Dimensions of Restrictions on the Blind and Lame in Texts from Qumran:


(continued....)

Characteristic examples are the Qumran Community Rule, which forbade the disabled from the congregation and placed them alongside "fools, madmen" and "imbeciles":


And the so-called 'Messianic Rule', which says that the Messiah of Israel will sit at the head of a table of the whole people of Israel but excluding the disabled again:

6 - The Messianic Rule



We know from the Talmud that such views were not limited to Essenes and priestly Sadducees, for the Mishnaic passage (representing the views of the Pharisees) about the exclusion of blind and lame from the temple is found in Hagigah 1.1:


The first century Roman Jewish historian, Josephus, also tells us that at least by his time: 'Anyone who touches or lives under the same roof [with a leper] is regarded unclean' (Contra Apionem 1.281) and that such people were kept away from normal society (Antiquitates Judaicae 9:74). 'As an attack on the skin [...] leprosy threatens or attacks [...] integrity, wholeness and completeness of the community and its members' (Carter 2000:199; cf. Pilch 1981:113).

OK, so that was the common Judaean understanding at the time. What about the Greco-Romans? Infanticide of disabled people was very common in their civilization.

The Twelve Tables, the constitution of Rome which underpinned its legal system, included a law that said disabled or deformed children should be put to death by their own fathers, usually by stoning:



Despite this some disabled did live into adulthood, and indeed the Emperor Claudius had a pronounced limp. But they were the exception to the rule. If the Romans didn't kill the disabled or deformed, then they often kept them as amusements to entertain guests.

In this respect, the Roman first century historian Plutarch (46 - 120 CE) tells of a separate area in the slave market which he calls the τεράτων ἀγορὰν, or the “monster-market”, a sale of deformed and disabled slaves to be used by wealthy Roman patrons for entertainment purposes, to amuse guests:



Another passage describes the practice of confining slaves in cages with the painful result of deformed limbs and shrunken bodies:



Neither the Greeks or the Romans had a word for ‘disabled’ but the term that they often use is ‘teras’ (for the Greeks) and ‘monstrum’ (for the Romans). These are the same words they used to describe mythological monsters, which I think says it all."

The great Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC – AD 65), a contemporary of Jesus Christ, condemned the mocking of people with disabilities that was common at the time, as part of his wider teaching about never mocking another person and treating others as we would want to be treated (Seneca Minor, Epistulae Morales 47.11).

However, he also said that a man called Vatinius who suffered from gout and swellings on his face, "was born to be derided and hated" (Seneca, De Constantia 17.3) and contradicted himself by writing an entire political satire called "the gourdification of the Divine Claudius" in which he depicted the Emperor Claudius as a human monstrum (monster) and extensively mocked his physical disabilities, as did other authors of the time such as Suetonius (Claudius 30), indeed calling him 'a thing': "at the first glimpse he got, he was really much taken aback, although not all the monsters in the world could frighten him; when he saw this kind of object, when he looked closer the thing seemed to be a kind of man" (Seneca, Apocolcyntosis divi Claudii 5).

Elsewhere, Seneca defended the morality of the Roman constitution's command to kill disabled infants, referring to it as a practice of reason intended to sift the sound from the worthless:



In terms of the ancient Greeks: Plato and Socrates thought that the government should care for the health of the strong, the weak should be left to die and those with little intelligence could be killed, to quote from Plato's Republic:


Based on the evidence, therefore, I think it is fair to argue that Jesus was considerably more progressive and open-minded than the vast majority of his contemporaries when it came to including and caring for the disabled.

Wow, that's a mouth-full-- but well done, imo.