PILATE: A Brutal Bible Tale (Brutal Bible Tales)

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Mount Tabor had a history of religious practices and worship of the Israelite God and other gods. Northeast of the Valley of Jezreel lies the Sea of Galilee and its surrounding towns and villages.

It is also known as the Sea of Tiberias John 6: Due to the surrounding channels, sudden gusts can surprise fisherman with storms in minutes Matthew 8, Visitors can see a year-old boat discovered during a draught in and preserved at Yigal Allon Centre at the northeast side of the Sea. Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a village of ten to fifteen family caves. Most likely, Joseph moved his family to this out-of-the-way place both to stay out of the reach of the murderous son of Herod the Great, Archelaus, and to work at Sepphoris, where Herod Antipas recruited masons for large construction projects.

Early in his ministry, Jesus moved to Capernaum, one of the most important cities lining the shores of the Sea of Galilee Matthew 4: The centurion who commanded the garrison built a synagogue for the Jewish inhabitants Luke 7: One of the tax collectors at the customs office Matthew left his work to follow Christ Matthew 9: In Capernaum, Jesus taught in the synagogue, healed the sick such as the paralytic lowered through the roof by his friends , and performed miracles Matthew 8, 17; Mark ; Luke 4, 7; John 4, 6. Archaeological evidence shows that one particular house became a gathering place: Despite our ignorance regarding the contents of the jars, the hint that the room was put to some type of public use is confirmed by the great number of graffiti scratched in the plaster walls.

Some of them mention Jesus as Lord and Christ. Today, a church stands above it. Visitors can view the house through a glass floor. Capernaum also houses the best preserved synagogue from the Byzantine period as well as homes from the first century that can give contemporary Bible readers an idea as to the design and layout of village homes. The floors were made of cobbles, and branches covered with straw and dirt made up the roofs Mark 2.

Bethsaida, another town on the Sea of Galilee, had been a fortified city since BC. Most likely, Bethsaida was the capital of the Kingdom of Geshur. David married the daughter of the king of Geshur, and this marriage produced Absalom 2 Samuel 3: After Absalom killed Amnon, he fled to Bethsaida, where he spent three years 2 Samuel After the Assyrians conquered it 2 Kings Philip the tetrarch rebuilt the city and made it his capital.

It was a prosperous fishing city, but was conquered by the Romans during the wars of AD An earthquake in AD flooded the city, and part of the city sank into the Sea of Galilee. Archaeological digs, which began in , have discovered the house of a fisherman the house had over items connected with fishing, including nets, anchors and other fishing implements , a winemakers house where 13 jars of wine were found in the cellar , and a city gate dating to the Iron Age time of David.

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Archaeologists found wine jars imported from the island of Rhodes where some of the finest wine of the times was made in that house. Clearly, their fishing enterprise had been doing well. The city gates give modern-day readers a good idea as to the typical layout of a city. Between the stone walls are four chambers so that the gates had an E shape with two chambers on each side , where the city elders sat, meeting and talking with visitors and traders.

This information gleaned from the comings and goings enabled the elders to make wise economic decisions for the city. Stone tablets leaning against the walls served as the city gods. Inhabitants and visitors placed sacrifices to these gods in a shallow stone basin at the entrance. The path leading up to the city makes a sharp right turn a few feet before the gate. This gave inhabitants of the city an advantage if the city were attacked. Soldiers marching up the pathway, with their shield in their left arm, would be momentarily vulnerable as they turned right to enter the city.

From the 10 th century BC, when David established Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, to the 16 th century AD, the boundaries of Jerusalem expanded and contracted numerous times. Present-day Jerusalem houses hundreds of churches, synagogues, and mosques sometimes in the same building and pilgrimage sites, such as the Garden of Gethsemane, the Dominus Flevit church marking where Jesus wept over Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives , and the Via Dolorosa. Most of the sites are based on tradition.

Some sites, however, have archaeological and historical support. The Philistines begins a war against Saul. David's wives Ahinoam and Abigail are taken in a raid on Ziklag , but he rescue them 1 Samuel The men of Israel flee before the Philistines, and three of Saul's sons are slain. Saul asks his armour-bearer to kill him, but is refused, so he takes his own life.

The armour-bearer also takes his own life. Saul's body is beheaded and fastened to a city-wall by the victorious Philistines, but it is retaken by inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead 1 Samuel A man tells David of Saul's death and that he himself killed Saul. David has him killed 2 Samuel 1. A long war starts between David and Saul's son Ish-bosheth 2 Samuel 3. David demands and is granted the return of his first wife Michal, despite the public grief of her new husband Palti. Two men assassinate Ish-bosheth, and David has them killed 2 Samuel 4. David wars victoriously with the Philistines.

While transporting the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, a man called Uzzah carelessly touches it and is killed by God 2 Samuel 6. David defeats and plunder several enemies, and "executed justice and righteousness unto all his people. The children of Ammon mistreat David's emissaries, and is defeated by his army 2 Samuel In order to make Bathsheba his wife, David successfully plots the death of her husband. This displeases God, and David is told that "the sword shall never depart from thy house. She then gives birth to Solomon. David conquers and plunders the city Rabbah 2 Samuel David's son Amnon rapes his half-sister Tamar.

Absalom , her full brother, in return has him killed 2 Samuel Absalom conspires and revolts against David. Absalom is finally defeated and dies in the Battle of the Wood of Ephraim , and David mourns him 2 Samuel Sheba son of Bichri revolts, but is ultimately beheaded 2 Samuel In 2 Samuel 21, David has seven of Sauls sons and grandsons killed, including "the five sons of Michal the daughter of Saul", though he spares Sauls grandson Mephibosheth. More wars take place. Characters like Phinehas Num. As a response to the violence of the wicked, numerous psalms call on God to bring vengeance on one's personal enemies, for example Ps.

In the Gospel of Matthew , Herod the Great is described as ordering the execution of all young male children in the vicinity of Bethlehem. There are sayings of Jesus where he states that he comes to bring fire or a sword. The earliest detailed accounts of the death of Jesus are contained in the four canonical gospels. There are other, more implicit references in the New Testament epistles. In the synoptic gospels, Jesus predicts his death in three separate episodes. His death is described as a sacrifice in the Gospels and other books of the New Testament.

Scholars note that the reader receives an almost hour-by-hour account of what is happening. The Book of Revelation is full of imagery of war, genocide, and destruction. It describes the Apocalypse , the last judgment of all the nations and people by God, which includes plagues, war, and economic collapse. Some other books of the Gospels also use apocalyptic language and forms. Scholars define this as language that "views the future as a time when divine saving and judging activity will deliver God's people out of the present evil order into a new order This transformation will be cataclysmic and cosmic.

Whenever Jesus calls people to a new vision in light of God's impending kingdom, judgment, or a future resurrection, he is using apocalyptic speech. Strozier, psychoanalyst historian says: Collins wrote a short book called "Does the Bible Justify Violence? The Bible has contributed to violence in the world precisely because it has been taken to confer a degree of certitude that transcends human discussion and argumentation.

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Such a selective reading, privileging the death of Jesus or the suffering servant, is certainly possible and even commendable, but it does not negate the force of the biblical endorsements of violence that we have been considering. The full canonical shape of the Christian Bible, for what it is worth, still concludes with the judgement scene in Revelation, in which the Lamb that was slain returns as the heavenly warrior with a sword for striking down the nations.

Regina Schwartz is among those who seek to reimagine Christianity and the Christian biblical canon in ways that reduce violence which she describes as arising from the ancient Israelite invention of monotheism and some of the ways that the ancient Israelites conceived of themselves in relation to that one god and to other peoples, which Christians inherited.

The tying of identity to rejection runs counter to much of the drive that could be found elsewhere, both in the Bible and throughout religious myth and ritual, to forge identity through analogy, even identification Among all the rich variety, I would categorize two broad understandings of identity in the Bible: It would be a Bible embracing multiplicity instead of monotheism.

Stephen Geller notes that both the Deuteronomist and the Priestly authors working in the Axial Age were re-evaluating and reformulating their traditions, like their neighbors were, using the literary means available to them. The Deuteronomists expressed their new notions of the transcendence and power of God by means of ideas and associated laws around unity—the one-ness of God, worshipped at the one temple in Jerusalem, by one people, kept distinct from the rest of world just as God is; zealously and violently so. In Geller's reading the blood is not magical nor is the animal just a substitute for a human sacrifice; instead blood is at once an expression of the violence of the fallen world where people kill in order to eat unlike Eden and the blood itself becomes a means for redemption; it is forbidden to be eaten, as a sign of restraint and recognition, and is instead offered to God, and in that action the relationship between fallen humanity and God is restored.

The Priestly authors underline the importance of all this by recalling the mortal danger faced by the High Priests, through the telling of the deaths of Nadab and Abihu when God refused their "strange offering" and consumed them with fire. Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?

The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. Evan Fales, Professor of Philosophy, calls the doctrine of substitutionary atonement that some Christians use to understand the crucifixion of Jesus, "psychologically pernicious" and "morally indefensible".

Philosopher and Professor Alvin Plantinga says this rests upon seeing God as a kind of specially talented human being. Historian Philip Jenkins quoting Phyllis Trible says the Bible is filled with "texts of terror" but he also asserts these texts are not to be taken literally. Jenkins says eighth century BCE historians added them to embellish their ancestral history and get readers' attention. Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis is concerned by what she calls a "shallow reading" of Scripture, particularly of 'Old Testament' texts concerning violence, which she defines as a "reading of what we think we already know instead of an attempt to dig deeper for new insights and revelations.

Discussions of bible and violence often lead to discussions of the theodicy - the question of how evil can persist in the world if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and good. Philosopher Eleonore Stump says the larger context of God permitting suffering for good purposes in a world where evil is real allows for such events as the killing of those intending evil and God to still be seen as good.

Jon Levenson resolves the problem of evil by describing God's power not as static, but as unfolding in time: What the biblical theology of dramatic omnipotence shares with the theology of a limited God is a frank recognition of God's setbacks, in contrast to the classic theodicies with their exaggerated commitment to divine impassibility and their tendency to describe imperfection solely to human free will, the recalcitrance of matter, or the like. In Hermann Gunkel observed that most Ancient Near Eastern ANE creation stories contain a theogony depicting a god doing combat with other gods thus including violence in the founding of their cultures.

Hence, it seems that the account of God creating without violence in Gen. Canaanite creation stories like the Enuma Elish use very physical terms such as "tore open," "slit," "threw down," "smashed," and "severed" whereas in the Hebrew Bible, Leviathan is not so much defeated as domesticated. Most modern scholars agree that "Gen. What is more, in Gen. God "calls the world into being" These stories in Genesis are not the only stories about creation in the Bible.

In Proverbs 8, for example one reads of personified Wisdom being present and participant in creation. However, he also says the differences are more pronounced than the similarities. The intent of Genesis 1: Jon Levenson , writing Jewish biblical theology , asserts the creation stories in Genesis are not ex nihilo , but rather a generation of order out of chaos, similar to other ANE creation myths; the order allows life to flourish and holds back chaos which brings violence and destruction, which has never been obliterated and is always breaking back in.

He finds that the writers of the Hebrew Bible referred to God's actions at creation as a statement of faith in a God who could protect and maintain them, or who could also step back and allow chaos to rush back in, as God did with the Flood. He finds that the writers of the Hebrew Bible also held up God's actions at creation as a challenge for God to act, and a challenge for themselves to work in covenant with God in the ongoing work of generating and maintaining order. Preface In this, the Bible story is dissimilar to the both the Memphite story and the Babylonian in that the Hebrew Bible says the divine gift of working with God in creation is limited to humankind, meaning, for the Hebrews, humans alone are part of God's being.

This sense of honoring or empowering humankind is not in any of the Mesopotamian or Canaanite myths. Warfare represents a special category of biblical violence and is a topic the Bible addresses, directly and indirectly, in four ways: To understand attitudes toward war in the Hebrew Bible is thus to gain a handle on war in general In the Bible God commands the Israelites to conquer the Promised Land , placing city after city "under the ban" -which meant every man, woman and child was supposed to be slaughtered at the point of the sword.

Hans Van Wees says the conquest campaigns are largely fictional. Crouch compares the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah to Assyria, saying their similarities in cosmology and ideology gave them similar ethical outlooks on war.

Violence against women appears throughout the Old Testament. Many have attributed this to a patriarchal society, while some scholars say the problem stems from the larger context of a male dominated culture. Women are treated in differing ways in the Bible.

For example, the Book of Judges includes the judge Deborah , who was honored, as well as two of the most egregious examples in the Bible of violence against women: Scholar author Phyllis Trible looks at these instances from the perspective of the victim making their pathos palpable, underlying their human reality, and the tragedy of their stories.

O'Connor says women in the Old Testament generally serve as points of reference for the larger story, yet Judges abounds with stories where women play the main role. O'Connor explains the significance of this, saying: Beginning with the larger context and tracing the decline of Israel by following the deteriorating status of women and the violence done to them, which progresses from the promise of life in the land to chaos and violence, the effects of the absence of authority such as a king Judges The ancient Israelites did not worship the dead, sacrifice to them, or hope to reunite with them in an afterlife; a concept of hell as a place of punishment in the afterlife arose in Second Temple Judaism and was further developed in the Christian tradition; Judaism subsequently moved away from this notion.

For example Isaiah The word Sheol appears 65 times in the Hebrew Bible and the term "Tartaros" appears frequently in Jewish apocalyptic literature where it refers to a place where the wicked are punished. All the references to gehenna except James 3: A literal interpretation involves violence. According to a statement by the publisher of "Four Views on Hell", Zondervan , "probably the most disturbing concept in Christian tradition is the prospect that one day vast numbers of people will be consigned to Hell.

Lewis argued that people choose Hell rather than repent and submit to God. Miroslav Wolf argues that the doctrine of final judgment provides a necessary restraint on human violence. Tim Keller says it is right to be angry when someone brings injustice or violence to those we love and therefore a loving God can be filled with wrath because of love, not in spite of it.

Oliver O'Donovan argues that without the judgment of God we would never see the love in redemption. As the early Christian Church began to distinguish itself from Judaism , the "Old Testament" and a portrayal of God in it as violent and unforgiving were sometimes contrasted rhetorically with certain teachings of Jesus to portray an image of God as more loving and forgiving, which was framed as a new image.

Marcion of Sinope , in the early second century, developed an early Christian dualist belief system that understood the god of the Old Testament and creator of the material universe, who he called the Demiurge , as an altogether different being than the God about whom Jesus spoke. Marcion considered Jesus' universal God of compassion and love, who looks upon humanity with benevolence and mercy, incompatible with Old Testament depictions of divinely ordained violence.

Accordingly, he did not regard the Hebrew scriptures as part of his scriptural canon. Supersessionist Christians have continued to focus on violence in the Hebrew Bible while ignoring or giving little attention to violence in the New Testament. From this foundation arose notions of flourishing of the nation as a whole, as well as collective punishment of the ancient Israelites and their enemies. Scholar Nur Masalha writes that the "genocide" of the extermination commandments has been "kept before subsequent generations" and served as inspirational examples of divine support for slaughtering enemies.

Arthur Grenke quotes historian, author and scholar David Stannard: He points to sections in Deuteronomy in which the Israelite God, Yahweh, commanded that the Israelites utterly destroy idolaters whose land they sought to reserve for the worship of their deity Deut 7: According to Stannard, this view of war contributed to the It was this view that also led to the destruction of European Jewry. Accordingly, it is important to look at this particular segment of the Old Testament: Sociologists Frank Robert Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn question "the applicability of the term [genocide] to earlier periods of history, and the judgmental and moral loadings that have become associated with it.

Historian and author William T. Cavanaugh says every society throughout history has contained both hawks and doves. Cavanaugh and John Gammie say laws like those in Deuteronomy probably reflect Israel's internal struggle over such differing views of how to wage war. Arie Versluis says, " This is shown by the example of Te Kooti Glick states that Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, such as Shlomo Aviner , consider the Palestinians to be like biblical Canaanites, and that some fundamentalist leaders suggest that they "must be prepared to destroy" the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not leave the land.

Philosopher, sociologist, theologian and author Jacques Ellul says: It always contests political power. It incites to "counterpower," to "positive" criticism, to an irreducible dialogue like that between king and prophet in Israel , to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion in other words, of all things political Throughout the Old Testament we see God choosing what is weak and humble to represent him the stammering Moses, the infant Samuel, Saul from an insignificant family, David confronting Goliath, etc.

Paul tells us that God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the mighty From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Tanakh Torah Nevi'im Ketuvim. Authorship Dating Hebrew canon. Pauline epistles Petrine epistles.

The Bible and violence

Hermeneutics Pesher Midrash Pardes. Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church. Westminster John Knox Press. Humanity, When Force is Justified and Why. New York, New York: The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Retrieved 23 December The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 1 A Christian Case for Non-Violence. Peace and Violence across the Testaments. A Reexamination of Deuteronomy Journal of Biblical Literature. Johannes Botterweck; Helmer Ringgren Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament.

Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermann, ed. Is the Bible Fact or Fiction? This question has been debated for centuries. So far, no definitive answer has been given -- here are some of the more contentious issues in the Bible that may or may not stand up to historic and scientific scrutiny. The question has been debated for centuries by archaeologists, religious scholars and historians. So far, no definitive answer has been given.

Science and archaeological discoveries have supported the Bible in some instances while refuting many of its most popular tales. Read on to discover some of the more contentious issues in the Bible that may or may not stand up to historic and scientific scrutiny. Noah's Ark in Its Many Forms.

Camels play a central role in Genesis and are mentioned as pack animals in the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph and Jacob. But according to newly published research by Tel Aviv University based on radiocarbon dating and evidence unearthed in excavations, camels were not domesticated in the Land of Israel until the 10th century BC -- several centuries after the time they appear in the Bible.

However, several scholars believe the study, by archaeologists Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen, adds little to our knowledge. Eisenman contends that many of these materials are based on oral tradition. A number of studies have questioned the historicity of the Bible's first couple.

The fossil record indicates that humans did not appear suddenly, but evolved gradually over the course of six million years. Israeli Wine Cellar Predates the Bible. However, "Y-chromosome Adam" and "mitochondrial Eve," the two individuals who passed down a portion of their genomes to the vast expanse of humanity, may have lived around the same time. According to a recent, extensive genetic study by Stanford University School of Medicine, the man lived between , and , years ago, and the woman lived between 99, and , years ago. However, attempts to reconcile genetics with Genesis are unlikely to succeed.

Biblical Theories, Conjectures and Other Heresies. Indeed, they weren't the only man and woman alive at the time, or the only people to have present-day offspring. Hundreds of archaeological excavations have attempted to find evidence of an apocalyptic flood such as is described in both the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, but none succeeded.

There is no trace anywhere on the archaeological record of a devastating global flood. Likewise, expeditions to find the ark Noah built to save himself, his family and pairs of animals from the great deluge left archaeologists at a dead end. According to Genesis, after the flood killed nearly everything on Earth, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat in Eastern Turkey.

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