Taking a literary critical view of the statements Jesus is purported to have made, you make a valid point. And your point will make fundamentalists everywhere (and many atheists) quite fatuous.

However, you must remember that theology in the last 300 years has been very busy developing ways to read the Scripture, or more to the point, understanding the Scripture in ways useful and relevant for our times. I realize that you wouldn’t know it by listening to AM radio here in the U.S., but Christianity has in good part left behind a literalist, all-or-nothing approach to interpreting God’s Word.

Of course, this is all rather moot since even the fundamentalists fudge on the Scriptures. It’s just that the liberal, modernist, radical, emergent, postmodern, Universalist, Humanist, Gay-friendly, Liberation, whatever Christians are honest about what they’re doing.

Which is fine, I could accept that – unless, unless they also say about other parts “this means what it says”. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t declare the parts you don’t like to be “figures of speech” unless you accept that the same may well be true of parts you would like to be literal; conversely, you can’t say “I think this is literally true” unless you’re prepared to accept that some of the parts you don’t like may also be literally true.

It’s astoundingly convenient the way that it’s apparently almost universally only the most inconvenient parts of the bible that are held to be figures of speech (or in some other way should not be taken to mean what they plainly say).

There’s a name for that. I wonder if you can guess what it’s called? Think on it a while. I’m sure it will come to you…

– -

“Okay, here, hate doesn’t mean hate. Actually, it means love, just not quite so much as someone else. But over there, well, it means hate.”

Even George Orwell didn’t imagine wordplay quite as sinister as that.

The problem with the “figure of speech” argument is that people of the time sometimes said similar things literally. There’s nothing in the bible to clearly say that the claim of “figure of speech” is in fact so.

It’s guesswork. Sometimes it’s educated guesswork, but sometimes it’s just a hopeful guess. Where does this supreme authority come from to know with certainty what is literal and what is not?

What if you guess wrong about what’s literal and what’s not? What could loving Jesus have in store for you? Well, he tells us – infinite torture. For guessing wrong, or believing someone else who claims their guess is right. So before you start casually declaring one bit not literal, and another bit literal, you better be damn sure you’re right. You better have a lot more evidence than is on display here.

Now if Jesus really did mean that bit about hating parents literally, you could be totally screwed, depending on which other bits are literally true. But then again maybe even Jesus’ tender Hell is also just a figure of speech.

I see lots of opinion, and precious little fact. Yet, you’ve got the unmitigated arrogance to be happily playing around with your apologetics, putting others in danger of infinite torture.

Fingers crossed, eh? Good luck with that.

Yes, that’s how I understand it. It’s what I’ve been saying all along, if not so explicit.

All of this demotes family loyalties, family duty and family obedience to a distant second which was exactly the point. Loyalty is to Jesus/the church and not to your family, as you say “complete loyalty–without divided interests”. It’s all fine and dandy when there’s no conflict but as we’ve seen with many religious groups today that get similar levels of obedience, it does translate effectively to “turn away from your family, neglect them and even hate them if they oppose the church.”

It seems that Donahue wants to only deal with the light and puffy cases where everyone’s on the same side and doesn’t want to deal with the real message of how to deal with conflicts.

That was what Jesus was referring to by his challenge to his disciples to “hate” their families. Jesus frequently used hyperbole in his teaching. It made a big impact, it stressed the seriousness of his subject, and it helped people to remember his sayings (it was a prevalent teaching style of Rabbis). To say that the disciple must hate his family for Jesus’s sake is a striking way to emphasize the level of devotion that a disciple must have for his master.

I take the point re spouses, but I am really struggling to see how an exaggeration can become its direct opposite. “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse” should not be interpreted as “I’m slightly less stuffed than if I ate a water buffalo” which is what you seem to be arguing. If you can turn ‘hate’ to mean ‘love’ then what can’t you do? What are you basing this on?

Incidentally, Weiss’s article mentions families several times, not just the one Hemant quoted. If he was supportive in some places, he seems dismissive or contemptuous in others.

If someone loved his or her spouse more than they loved his or her father or mother, would that mean that they were necessarily disobeying the commandment “honor your father and your mother?” I think not. One can have a preferential love for one’s spouse while still loving, honouring one’s parents and doing everything that the 4th commandment entails.

In a similar way, one can be a disciple of Jesus, who loves Jesus more than his or her father and mother, while still obeying the commandment “honor your father and your mother.”

The issue of how much value Jesus placed on family relationships is important. It involves looking at a wide variety of sayings of Jesus, interpreting them correctly, and understanding them in light of Jesus’ overall identity, message and mission.

In my post above I chose to specifically address the proper interpretation of Luke 14:26, in response to Mr. Mehta’s statement “I’m curious as to what their rebuttals would be.”

Finally, I think the issue is not so much “watering down” the statement of Jesus, but determining what its actual meaning is. This type of literary interpretation is a necessary step in understanding the meaning of any ancient text.

I addressed that in my first post. Even if it is an exaggeration or an expression, and I entirely expect that it is, the message is still that we should disobey the commandment to “honor your father and your mother”.

You’ve also ignored the issue that Weiss brought up in the main article, that of whether Jesus placed much value on family relationships. Even watering down the statement, the conclusion is clearly no, he did not.

If what you say about “miseo” is true, then it is just as I presumed from the Finnish translation. I also checked the Finnish translation of Matthew, and it pretty much the same as the passage you quoted. About loving one’s parents more than Jesus, I mean.

@ Larry:

Sorry, it seems I misunderstood you. I think I just went and assumed that you thought the word “millennial cult” necessarily had something to do with the turn of millennia, which is quite a common error. You are of course right about early Christianity being a personality cult, but this doesn’t exclude millenialism. The millennialism cannot, of course, precede Jesus, because he was the Head Honcho from the beginning, as they say. So, in other words, I agree with you.