Transcription
Okay, so let's talk about this issue of abortion, all right? Let's see it. So we see here in Exodus, you know, 21, in verse, I think it's 22, where it talks about this idea that if somebody strikes a pregnant woman and there's not harm done, meaning that she doesn't, you know, that it causes her to give birth but the baby's not harmed, then there's not the same level of of retribution against that individual. But if the individual strikes a woman and the baby dies in the process and she miscarries, then you have what goes into effect the law of retribution, that is eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, and there would be a punishment that would be extracted upon that individual. So the Bible recognizes the death of the unborn or the death of the baby in the womb as an offense that required justice against it, because it didn't just view a baby as a clump of cells. The text says absolutely no such thing whatsoever. This is a flagrant misreading facilitated by a flagrant mistranslation, because the text does not address premature birth followed by no injury or miscarriage. The text addresses first, miscarriage, in which case the penalty is the fine, and second, the death of the mother, in which case it's talionic justice. And there are several reasons we know this. Uh, probably the most significant is the fact that the Covenant code is drawing their legislation directly from the laws of Hammurabi, and we find a very similar law in the laws of Hammurabi about a man striking a woman and causing her either to miscarry or to die, and we have the exact same two circumstances addressed in laws in other ancient West Asian law codes, like the Middle Assyrian laws, like the laws of Aramu, like others. There's never a law anywhere in West Asia that says if a man hits a woman and causes her premature birth, there's a penalty of any kind whatsoever. And the notion that uh the fine is for premature birth followed by no other injury to the baby violates the logic of punitive fines in the Hebrew Bible. They are always for material or monetary loss, and there's no material or monetary loss going on here. It's just an inconvenience, and the Bible never imposes fines for inconveniences. So this is a mistranslation and a misinterpretation of this passage, and I go into a lot more detail about this in chapter 7 of my forthcoming book, *The Bible Says So*.
We also see Psalms 139, this idea that you know, u, that you were knitted together in uh your mother's womb, that that there was a forethought that God was, you know, really uh, there was a purpose within uh uh the creative act of mankind that is taking place. So this is a retrospective bit of praise for God on the part of someone who is an adult, who is praising God for looking after them through the period of their gestation. This is a rhetorical flourish that in no way, shape, or form whatsoever indicates that the author or the society in which they lived considered a fetus to be a full legal and moral person. As we've already seen with Exodus 21, legally, a fetus was not a person; a fetus was a piece of the husband's property. Uh, we see that reinforced again in Jeremiah 1:5, this idea that you know, God God knows us, you know, "before I was formed you knew me," you know, sort of language that that there is an intentionality, a divine intentionality, to our creation. So this passage also does not in any way, shape, or form whatsoever indicate the author or the society they lived in understood a fetus to be a full legal and moral person. This is another piece of literary retrospection on the part of an adult, but this one is even more problematic because this rhetoric is just about when Jeremiah was called to be a prophet, and Jeremiah is one-upping the prophets who talk about their calls in adulthood or even in childhood. Jeremiah saying, "No, no, it was before birth, it was even before conception," because Jeremiah explicitly says that God knew him before he was being formed in the womb. So that would mean before conception, and ostensibly, God's supposed to know all people who will ever be born, even if their great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents have not even yet been conceived. That doesn't mean they're all right now full legal and moral persons. So Jeremiah is just engaging in a rhetorical flourish to one up the other prophets and say his prophethood is more valid than theirs, and again it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with asserting that they understood a fetus to be a full legal and moral person. The only clear description of their perspective on the legal status of a fetus comes from Exodus 21, where it is represented as a piece of the husband's property.
And then we put this together, you know, with Exodus 20, this idea that you know you shall not commit murder, and and we see here that there is uh if a if a child in the womb is struck and killed, that was treated as murdered, as murder, and the the the uh offending individual was punished as such. Once again, that is entirely false. According to Exodus 21:22-25, a fetus was the property of the father, and its value was determined by the father. We see this idea of foreknowledge uh of us in our uh you know before we were born. We see this idea that God intentionally created us and knitted us together, uh that it's not just a biological function, that there's divine purpose behind it. So according to my understanding of the doctrines of sovereignty and omniscience and omnipotence and omnipresence, God's knowledge and intention and oversight extends to uh every living organism that has ever lived or that will ever live, and there has never been a living organism that was conceived, that gestated, that was born, that lived, that died independent of or in contradiction to God's knowledge or intention or oversight. And we get rhetoric like this in the New Testament where Jesus talks about how God cares about the grass and how the least sparrow doesn't fall to the ground without God knowing about it. So the notion that this means something about the legal status of a fetus, to say that God had oversight of their gestation or that God foreknew them before they were conceived, is just bafflingly misguided.
And then of course we see this idea that to you know, uh, to take innocent life at any time is murder. This is what caused the early church to hold to the position that abortion um was was a vile act and that it was in fact murder. This is also entirely inaccurate. The appeal to scripture was secondary; it was proof-texting an ideology that developed because of the influence of Greek philosophical ideas about life about humanity, combined with the reaction against the ubiquity of things like infanticide and abortion within the Greco-Roman world. And there were debates about when it became murder, and we have folks like Tertullian showing that even in the early church there was disagreements. Uh, I mentioned in my previous video the three different main ideas about when the soul entered the body, and I also mentioned that while some of the earliest Christians seem to be leaning in the Pythagorean Epicurean notion that the soul entered the body at conception, Augustine is who established the consensus view that would be held until the 19th century, uh, that it happened at the quickening, and he even explicitly says it does not become murder until the quickening. So this is all negotiable and has all been negotiated before. This is not something that is in the Bible.
You know, it's interesting. I think there's a lot of people that it's almost like they think Jerry Falwell came up with this idea that you know that that abortion is wrong, or some sort of modern you know Christian that uh you know this is just some new Evangelical position. This has been the position of um the Christian from the beginning. So this is an accurate uh... Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich did not invent Evangelical opposition to abortion, but they popularized it, because most Evangelical leaders didn't have a problem with Roe v. Wade. They said, "This is really a Catholic concern; we don't have a big deal with this." And then Falwell and Weyrich decided, "Hey, we need to gin up an Evangelical right wing that can arrogate political power because the government is making us accept black students in our universities, and we got to put a stop to that." And so we have the documentation that shows they went on this calculated and intentional campaign to identify opposition to abortion as a new central identity marker for evangelicalism, and it took them almost the entirety of the 1970s to achieve that goal. Of course, it didn't help them overcome desegregation, but it did take something that was not a central Evangelical identity marker and turn it into a central Evangelical identity marker.
We have a book called the Didache. In Chapter 2 of the Didache, it says, "You shall not kill a child," um, and that's the Didache, chapter 2, verses 1 and 2. That was written in AD 70. So this is, this is essentially um at the close of the New Testament, one of the very first documents. The Didache was known as the the teachings of the Apostles. Uh, it was not written in 70 CE, but as I pointed out, there were absolutely early Christians who adopted a Pythagorean and Epicurean stance, and the Didache doesn't make that explicit, but I think it's fine that we assume that's the stance they take. Other early Christians disagreed, and as I pointed out, the consensus view that would be established by Augustine in the 4th Century CE was that it did not become murder until the quickening. The Christian position has always uniformly, um, unilaterally been that abortion is wrong, that it is a vile act, it is something that should be condemned and forbidden. It is absolutely true that the overwhelming majority of Christians have always condemned it as inappropriate and wrong. However, there have been different degrees of severity that have been imputed to the act, depending on when the individuals understood the soul to enter the body. Tertullian actually endorsed the same position that Augustine endorsed, that the soul enters the body at a later point in the conception. If we look at chapter 37 of his *Treatise on the Soul*, he points out: "The embryo therefore becomes a human being in the womb from the moment that its form is completed. The law of Moses indeed punishes with due penalties the man who shall cause abortion, in as much as there exists already the rudiment of a human being." What on Earth is he talking about? He's talking about the application of Exodus 21:22-25. As I've already pointed out, initially the idea was if there is a miscarriage, that's a fine; if the woman dies, that's talionic justice, life for life. The Greek translation changes it so that instead of the Hebrew word *ason*, which means tragedy, they understand it somehow to refer to the body. In other words, if there is no body, then it's just a fine; if there is a body, then it is talionic justice. In other words, if the fetus is fully formed, then that's a person and it's talionic justice, life for life; if there is no body, if the fetus has not yet fully formed, then it's just a fine. That's the Septuagint's philosophical perspective. We see it reflected in Philo, and Tertullian here endorses it as well.
But we we cannot bend the truth. We cannot twist these things. We cannot ignore uh the biblical position as well as the position of the early church on this issue. In this video, you have bent, twisted, and ignored both the biblical position and the early Church's position. If you are a calling yourself a Christian and you are holding to a pro pro-choice position, you have to know that you are standing against the testimony of scripture and you are standing against the testimony of 2,000 years of church history. You are alone in your perspective. That's the bottom line. So once again, this content creator is bending, twisting, ignoring the actual testimonies of scripture, the actual history of Christianity, all in an effort to try to arrogate the authority of the Bible to authorize, endorse, validate this 21st century Christian nationalist and right-wing authoritarian identity marker, so they can try to leverage it as a rhetorical bludgeon and say, "You can't be a Christian and be pro-choice at the same time." Time it's identity politics all the way down, and always in the interest of structuring power and values and boundaries in their own favor. The entire Bible is negotiable. Anyone who treats it as the authoritative, inspired, inerrant, historical, univocal word of God is negotiating with it, period. There is no other option. So you don't have to take seriously folks who tell you you cannot be a Bible believer, a Christian, or even a Jewish person and be pro-choice. That's just right-wing authoritarian identity politics, and it can be safely ignored. And the fit for this video is the original Hul.