A question

[tober]

I was having a discussion about the Old Testament (and its importance to Christianity) with a religious Christian yesterday and I asked her "Why do Christians not keep kosher?" and she said "Because Jesus said we didn't have to." So, I ask you, lazywebs... is that true and, if so, is there a citation for where Jesus said that? If it's not true

Comments

[benndragon]

I can't answer, since the only relevant citation I know about (not where and quotes, but the gist) goes along the lines of "Christians don't need to follow *anything* in the Torah". Sometimes I wish they had tossed the Torah, started from scratch, and never referred to it ever again.

However, a lot of the laws of kashrut come from the Talmud, not the Torah. The Christian attitude toward the Talmud is precisely my sometimes-wish above - most of them don't even know it exists. But while that excuses the cheeseburgers it sure as hell doesn't explain why they eat pork and shellfish. . .

[csbermack]

As I understand it, when Jesus came along, he renewed humanity's contract with God, fulfilled the old prophecies, and replaced it with getting to god through jesus.

Historically speaking, it was the resolution of a conflict between early christians, some of whom were jewish and some were not. those who were not did not want to adopt jewish traditions. Instead of running with "jesus is jewish so we are too" and face a schism, they went with "we're an all new shiny thing and the old rules don't apply, yay."

[benndragon]

Which leads to another obvious question: why do they cling so heartily to certain Old Testament rules while completely ignoring the existence of others? I mean, no one gathers at the statehouse demanding the outlaw of poly-cotton blends. . .

[csbermack]

I think your question has a flawed basis: religions are not actually about the fundamental texts. They're as much tradition and practice and local adaptation as the fundamental texts; some acknowledge this explicitly but most don't. It's important to most religions to claim they are acting according to the text because the text is a source of authority. But people don't act that way.

So it's not important or useful to notice the gotchas about how people actually practice, unless you're planning a schism or something. Periodically fundamentalists of whatever sect it is come out and say "no way man we need to get back to basics" of whatever they think their basics are... but even those are very rarely actually literal interpretation of source texts.

It's just how people are.

It's not important to them to care about poly cotton blends, so they don't, and no amount of pointing at texts is going to change that.

[geekpixie]

I care about poly cotton blends, damnit... but not in a religious context ;)