Yes, Christians Pick & Choose ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/E6BDZrTFKyk/maxresdefault.jpg) But scriptures also says that you can't wear mixed clothes, you can't tattoo yourself, you can't dye your hair, you can't have vanity. >> Well, when you pull the scriptures like that, we're pulling we're talking about the No, we're not picking and choosing. We have to read things in context. >> All right, let's see it. But the Bible is written to Jews for believers, right? I'm a white American male. That's not a Jew. But in Leviticus, you have three different types of laws. You have moral law, like do not murder, do not steal. You have ceremonial law. And you have Mosaic law. So the claim here is that Christians are not picking and choosing which laws to follow and which laws to get rid of. And that's a false claim. The reality is that Christians have absolutely no option but to pick and choose. And the claim that there are three different types of laws in Leviticus is false. That is something that Christians came up with centuries after the completion of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. And this content creator has misrepresented the classical tripart division of the laws. It's not ceremonial, moral, and mosaic. They're all mosaic. It's supposed to be ceremonial, moral, and civic or having to do with the running of the state. But again, that is a tripartite division that was created centuries after the Bible had been completed. closer to the completion of the Bible, but still after the completion of the Bible, Christians came up with a bipartite, a two-part division of the law into ceremonial and moral. But this is also not a division that is inherent to the Hebrew Bible as a whole. This is also picking and choosing. But it gets even worse because if we look in Leviticus, we can actually find a kind of fuzzy division of the laws into ritual and moral laws. And you can look at Jonathan Clawins's two books from 2009 on purity and impurity for an academic case for this. The problem is it's only in a specific literary layer. it's only within the priestly stratum and then the prophetic literature that follows in the priestly uh tradition and particularly the book of Ezekiel. And so in P and specifically in H in Leviticus, you can discern a bit of a division into ritual and moral. Now there are problems with saying okay well that's the division we're going to highlight. One of those problems is that that is only in P and it does not have anything to do with the legislation that occurs outside of P. And so to say this division is going to govern our interpretation of all of the legislation in the Hebrew Bible is precisely to pick and to choose. It is to give priority to and center this division as it occurs in P and to say we're going to subordinate everything else to the particular stratum that we have picked and chosen to be in charge. It is picking and choosing quite literally. But there's an even bigger problem because even if you say fine I'll pick and choose and I'll say this division in P is going to govern everything. You're not doing that. You're picking and choosing which parts of that division in P you're going to honor and which you are not. Because even within P, even within H, within these specific laws where they divide moral from ceremonial or ritual legislation, you are moving things from the moral designation over to the ceremonial designation. So, for instance, in Leviticus 18 and 20, when we're rattling off all the abominations that are sexual acts that are immoral, that violate the moral law, sex with a menrating woman is very clearly listed among them in both Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20. That is an abomination that merits cutting off just like all of the other sexual indiscretions listed in Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20. So that is a moral law. We don't care about that anymore. We have picked and chosen and we have moved that moral legislation over to the ceremonial pot because we're picking and choosing. Any way you slice this, you are picking and choosing. That's just an inevitability because the Bible is not consistent. The Bible is not univocal. any attempt to try to reduce it down to any kind of systematic juristprudence or legislative uh sifting of the laws cannot be done without picking and choosing. You are picking and choosing. You need to just find a way to deal with that and be honest about that. Pretending you're not picking and choosing is just you lying to yourself and to everybody else. You need to do better. >> According to the ceremonial law, you had things like no markings on your body, no mixed clothing, no things like that. Like right now, I'd be going to hell on the 50% cotton, the 50% polyester. >> No, because hell is not a thing in that legislation. The punishment is being cut off or the punishment is some kind of temporal physical punishment. There was no concept of hell when this legislation was being written. Again, we're picking and choosing and deciding which interpretations of which prioritized passages are going to govern the rest of the Bible. The context of the scripture here is particularly in those things back in that Levitical time period, Jesus was warning the Israelites, >> uh, Jesus has nothing to do with this, but again, to read Jesus into it is picking and choosing which parts of the Bible you're going to center and give priority to as interpretive lenses for renegotiating how you understand other parts of the Bible. That again is picking and choosing. Hey, there's a lot of surrounding lands around the promised land that are worshiping Bal and Molech. Nobody worshiped a deity named Molech in ancient West Asia. Molech was just a noun that referred to a specific type of sacrifice. And then centuries down the road with the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagent, and then early Christianity, they misunderstood that noun as a name and created a deity that never existed in anybody's mind in the ancient world named Molech. There was no deity named Molech anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. And >> things like that, I need you to stay away from that because they're marking their skin to thinking that their prayers are going to get answered quicker when they're worshiping B. Don't do that. It's a pagan ritual back in that time period. >> Uh it really had nothing to do with answered prayers. The marking in the skins and the tattoos that are being referenced in that part of Leviticus have to do with mourning rituals with ways that they honored the dead. Uh it had nothing to do with getting prayers answered. >> Obviously today I got all these tattoos after I was a Christian. That can be controversial in the Christian space and there's a lot of Christians that don't agree with me. >> Now that's the end of this video. But the reason that there are a lot of Christians that don't agree is because everybody has to pick and choose. And some Christians pick and choose differently than other Christians. Everybody has no possible option but to pick and choose. Pretending that you are not picking and choosing is just lying to yourself and to everyone else. And if you're going to get on social media and pretend to speak down to anybody or correct anybody or lecture anybody about what's going on in the Bible, you should at least comprehend what's going on with your own approach to the Bible. And this content creator doesn't have the foggiest idea how they are actually approaching and negotiating with the text because they're not thinking critically. They're just trying to validate their identity politics and they need to do so much better. And the fit for this video is The Man Without Fear., Yes, Christians Pick & Choose, YouTube, 01kfw0fjt8gdbz1x1kw8yn6bsq.