Need to know

Here is a picture that needs to be seen.

Orthodox Jews from the Naturei Karta group protesting IDF operations in Gaza during a march in Jerusalem on Wednesday.

Not everyone in Israel supports their country’s policy on Palestine or the current invasion. Make of that what you will.

Values

I just wrote a short paper on the values of the New Testament world, and why readers of the New Testament would benefit from a better understanding of those values. Though i’m talking about something pretty specific, I think that it holds true for any number of other situations, entirely unrelated to Theology.

                Understanding the key values of the world in which Christ lived and taught, and in which His Apostles and the people through whom His life and ministry have been transmitted to us would grant a greater understanding of the books of the New Testament because it would allow the reader to place him or herself more firmly in the place of the intended audience of the New Testament. The books of the New Testament were written by people living a particular culture with its own value system, for other members of that same culture. The values and unspoken assumptions of the authors of the New Testament books form the underpinning of the message they were intending to communicate when they wrote about Christ. To look at the New Testament through the lens of our modern, technologically advanced, individualistic, consumptionist culture, or through the religious lens of the modern Christian community is to read the New Testament outside its proper context.

                For instance, the need for Christ to assert His own honour before teaching is a nuance of the Gospel narratives that would elude the modern reader. Because Christ stood outside of the natural groupings of the people to whom he was speaking, his honour was necessarily suspect in their eyes. When Christ says “Verily, I say to you…” before his teachings in the Gospel narratives, he is not making an assertion of the truthfulness of His teachings or the validity of His wisdom and promises of salvation, he was communicating to his audience that He was treating as persons of honour, worthy of the truth, and they should treat Him as though he posses and deserves the truth. The modern reader may only understand that Christ is assuring His audience of His truthfulness, the all-important underpinning of honour, a pivotal value of Christ’s listeners, may be totally lost. And thus the implications, that Christ felt that He would not regarded as honourable in the eyes of others, that He had to demand of them a grant of honour before he could teach, and just how alien that demand must have been, would not be understood.

                Because Jesus was speaking to a collectivistic society, his message relates largely to the dyadic mindset of that society. Rather than speaking directly to individuals, Christ was addressing natural and optional groups, people rather than persons. Our modern individualistic society means that we are not at all inclined to hear Jesus’ message the same way as the people to whom it was originally addressed. Christ was addressing a group to whom the expression of individuality was highly undesirable, and group conformity was the ideal, since people defined their individual identity entirely in relation to others. Today this dyadic paradigm is completely alien; it is contrary to the values and the structure of our modern society. When we, as persons shaped by an individualistic outlook read Christ’s message, and those of the other New Testament writers, we are reading them from outside a fundamental part of the frame of reference in which they are written. We must consciously remember to whom what we are reading was originally addressed, and try to consider the message from within the dyadic, collectivist paradigm.

The universal and communal message that Jesus taught was even more at odds with the society in which He preached than it is with our own. Though our modern Western culture and paradigms has been informed by that message, though they do not always follow that message, there was no such frame of reference in Jesus’ world nor in the world that surrounded the writers and compilers of the New Testament. When we read the Gospels today we are unconsciously informed by their message to begin with. Christ’s ideals shape, in large part, those of our society, and thus their revolutionary nature is not necessarily apparent. In so far as we assume, even before reading, that Christ’s teaching on loving one’s neighbour is the proper thing to do, we will not feel its impact on a society in which one’s neighbour is, at best, a potential challenge to one’s honour, and at worst one’s enemy simply because that neighbour is not of your own natural grouping.

                Though both our own society and that of the New Testament hold (held) envy to be a negative, to what degree it is thought to be a negative differs. Whereas today envy can be positive if it leads to drive and ambition, inspiring one to achieve what one sees others having, to the people of the New Testament to act upon envy was to dishonourably achieve success at the expense of another’s possession of the limited good. Envy, since it was directed only to persons of equal status, violated the rule of honour which maintained the cohesion of the all-important group. And even if envy is non-productive, in our society it is entirely inward – those around the envious individual are not involved. However in the world of the New Testament, envy sullied the entire group, as the shame it brought about was as communal as every other aspect of self and identity. This shared shame would make envy totally unacceptable. Because this is never stated explicitly in the books of the New Testament, the modern reader would be completely unaware of the extreme nature of the cultural perception of envy of the people they are reading about. The extreme and fundamental nature of envy makes it a pivotal, but alien value which colours the New Testament writings as much as honour and collectivism.

                The values of the world of the New Testament, and the groups that populated it, form the unspoken underpinning of the entire New Testament. While one can certainly read the books of the New Testament today and derive meaning and understanding from, with an understanding of those values, one can develop a deeper understanding of the meaning, and be the wiser for it.