The Boston Globe published two pieces pushing the prevailing assumption that the Bible and the Qur’an are equally likely to inspire those who believe in them to commit acts of violence — or to act benevolently: “The other good book“ on March 6, 2009, and “Dark passages: Does the harsh language in the Koran explain Islamic violence? Don’t answer till you’ve taken a look inside the Bible,” by Philip Jenkins on March 8.
Since almost everyone takes this for granted nowadays, it is odd that the Globe would think it necessary to shore it up with not one, but two pieces making this case. On the other hand, it is such a patently absurd and false proposition that, despite its popularity, it does need constant propping up.
Jenkins’s thesis, of course, is that since there are violent passages in the Bible as well as in the Qur’an, and yet Jews and Christians are not committing acts of violence and justifying them with reference to their holy texts, therefore Muslims who commit acts of violence and justify them with reference to their holy texts must actually be motivated by something else.
It’s a common view that many others have previously enunciated. When confronted with material from the Qur’an that calls upon Muslims to wage war against unbelievers, Islamic apologists and their non-Muslim allies frequently claim that such passages from have been “cherry-picked” from a holy book that teaches peace, and that they only seem to incite to violence when ripped out of context. Usually accompanying such claims is the assertion that the Bible is just as violent, if not more so, than the Qur’an. The Lutheran theologian Martin E. Marty has written disdainfully of “people who selectively quote the Qur’an to show how it commits Muslims to killing ‘us’ infidels.” He then goes on to enumerate numerous violent passages in the Bible, quipping: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor’s God or Book, nor witness at all until thou comest clean on what thy book portrays, a holy warrior God.”
As Ralph Peters put it, “As a believing Christian, I must acknowledge that there’s nothing in the Koran as merciless as God’s behavior in the Book of Joshua.”
While not going as far as Peters’ assertion that the Bible is actually more violent than the Qur’an, Dinesh D’Souza suggests that the Qur’an and the Bible are at least equivalent in their capacity to incite violence: “the Koran, like the Old Testament, has a number of passages recommending peace and others celebrating the massacre of the enemies of God.” The problem is that some people focus on the wrong ones. He says: “I realize that you can fish out this passage or that passage and make it sound like the Muslims want to convert or kill everybody. But that would be like taking passages out of the Old Testament to make Moses sound like Hitler.” D’Souza even claims that Moses would have pursued an aggressive policy of religious imperialism, a la Islamic jihad, if he had had the chance: “Moses wasn’t exactly a believer in religious freedom. When he came down from the mountain and discovered the Israelites worshipping the golden calf he basically ordered a massacre. Don’t you think that if Moses could he would have imposed the laws of Yahweh on the whole world? Of course he would.”
But is all this really true? Are these two prominent conservative thinkers, who after all are only echoing a widespread opinion, right that the Bible and the Qur’an are at least roughly equivalent in their capacity to inspire violence?
This is an important question, for it goes to the heart of whether or not the actual teachings of either religion has anything to do with the violence committed in its name. After all, that is not a question that can be determined wholly by examining the historical record of each religion — for in every religious tradition the teachings of the religion are one thing and the way they are and have been lived out is quite another. No body of people has ever lived in complete fidelity to any set of principles, religious or otherwise, and there never will be such a group of people. Moreover, a central tenet of Christianity is that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). This is, as many have noted, one Christian dogma for which there is abundant empirical evidence: the dividing line between good and evil doesn’t run between one group and another, or one race and another, or one nation and another. Nor does it run between the adherents of one religion and those of another. It is said that the British writer and superlative wit G.K. Chesterton once responded to an invitation from the Times of London to write a piece about what is wrong with the world by writing: “Dear Sir, I am. Yours, G.K. Chesterton.” Chesterton wasn’t just being flip; he was expressing the fundamental Christian belief that the dividing line between good and evil actually runs through every human heart. With this as a core assumption, neither Christians nor anyone else should never be surprised by evil, even when it is perpetrated by Christians in the name of Christianity. That is the way human beings are.
Islam’s view of this is vastly different in some ways and identical in others. While acknowledging that any human being is capable of evil, the Qur’an says that Muslims are the “best of peoples” (3:110) while the unbelievers are the “vilest of creatures” (98:6). It is easy, if one takes such a worldview seriously, to see evil in others but have a harder time locating it in oneself. And that is indeed a recurring tendency in the Islamic world today — an unwillingness to engage in self-reflection and self-criticism, and to locate the source of all ills on a malignant outside force: “Zionists,” “the Great Satan,” and the like. Still, most Muslims, like most Christians, would acknowledge that the gap between theory and practice has sometimes been quite large, although that is an argument also made by jihadists, including those who in recent decades have spearheaded a revival of jihadist sentiment around the world by publishing material such as the tract “Jihad: the Forgotten Obligation.” In any case, the teachings of each religion — as those teachings have been understood by the mainstream sects of each faith — will make it clear whether those who claim to be acting in the name of Christianity and Islam have a creditable claim to do so in fact, or if they are actually transgressing against the teachings of the religion they are claiming to defend.
Joshua: God mandates ethnic cleansing?
So is Peters right that “there’s nothing in the Koran as merciless as God’s behavior in the Book of Joshua”? It certainly seems so. Besieging Jericho, Joshua announces that the city is “devoted to the LORD for destruction” (Joshua 6:17). When it falls, Joshua and his men “utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword” (6:21). And Joshua warned: “Cursed before the LORD be the man that rises up and rebuilds this city, Jericho” (6:26).
Later God tells Joshua: “You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king,” except that this time they shouldn’t kill all the animals: “its spoil and its cattle you shall take as booty for yourselves” (8:2). Joshua complied: “When Israel had finished slaughtering all the inhabitants of Ai in the open wilderness where they pursued them and all of them to the very last had fallen by the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai, and smote it with the edge of the sword. And all who fell that day, both men and women, were twelve thousand, all the people of Ai. For Joshua did not draw back his hand, with which he stretched out the javelin, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. Only the cattle and the spoil of that city Israel took as their booty, according to the word of the LORD which he commanded Joshua” (8:24-27). Joshua similarly kills all the inhabitants of a number of other cities: Makkedah (10:28); Libnah (10:29-30); Lachish (10:31-2); Eglon (10:34-5); Hebron (10:36-7); and Debir (10:38-9); as well as Madon, Shimron, Achshaph, and Hazor (11:10-11).
Nowhere in all this is there a hint of any disapproval on the part of the writer or anyone in the book. Instead, we are told that in carrying out these massacres Joshua was just being obedient to God: “So Joshua defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded” (10:40).
Not just Joshua
Nor is the Book of Joshua the only apparently morally problematic portion of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Chris Hedges says in his book American Fascists that many Christians “often fail to acknowledge that there are hateful passages in the Bible that give sacred authority to the rage, self-aggrandizement and intolerance of the Christian Right.” The behavior of Joshua himself is rooted in earlier behavior, and other commands of the Lord. The Book of Numbers recounts that after the Israelites defeated the Midianites, they presented the captives and spoils of war to Moses. But the prophet “was angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war. Moses said to them, “˜Have you let all the women live?– He reminded them that these women had earlier caused the Israelites to “act treacherously against the LORD.” Consequently, Moses told his men: “Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves” (31:14-18).
Later this command was extended to other enemies of the Israelites: “When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than yourselves, and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them; then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2). God also tells the Israelites: “When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace. If it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and shall serve you. However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. When the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword. Only the women and the children and the animals and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself; and you shall use the spoil of your enemies which the LORD your God has given you. Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes” (Deuteronomy 20:10-17).
Besides passages apparently celebrating warfare and ethnic cleansing as sanctioned by almighty God, the books of Moses also contain other passages jarring to modern sensibilities. God commands, for example, that Sabbath-breakers be put to death: “And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Say to the people of Israel, You shall keep my sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the LORD, sanctify you. You shall keep the sabbath, because it is holy for you; every one who profanes it shall be put to death; whoever does any work on it, that soul shall be cut off from among his people’” (Exodus 31:12-14). So are idolaters. God tells Moses: “If there is found among you … a man or woman who does what is evil in the sight of the LORD your God, in transgressing his covenant, and has gone and served other gods and worshiped them, or the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven, which I have forbidden, and it is told you and you hear of it; then you shall inquire diligently, and if it is true and certain that such an abominable thing has been done in Israel, then you shall bring forth to your gates that man or woman who has done this evil thing, and you shall stone that man or woman to death with stones” (Deuteronomy 17:2-5).
There is more. The Book of Exodus contains some brief guidelines for occasions in which “a man sells his daughter as a slave” (Exodus 21:7). And there is more, here and there, that has raised eyebrows not only in modern times but throughout history.
“Kill them all,” says the Lord?
But is the Bible really enjoining violence, both against nonbelievers and believers who commit sins deemed worthy of capital punishment? This question cannot be answered by an evaluation of the text alone, for that text does [not?] now and has never in history stood apart from the way believers have understood it and acted upon it. From that perspective, the arguments of Peters and D”Souza, and the many others who have said essentially the same thing, founder primarily upon one central fact: there are no armed Jewish or Christian groups anywhere in the world today who are committing acts of violence and justifying them by referring to these texts. Indeed, throughout history, these texts have never been taken as divine commands that either must be or may be put into practice by believers in a new age. All these passages, after all, are descriptive, not prescriptive. They nowhere command believers to imitate this behavior, or to believe under any circumstances that God wishes them to act as his instruments of judgment in any situation today.
Biblical scholars have posited several ways in which passages such as those in the Book of Joshua that appear to depict God transgressing against his own goodness can be understood by people of faith who believe that this material is divinely inspired. Some Biblical scholars have suggested that the Bible depicts a process of moral evolution — a gradual advance out of barbarism to the precepts of the Gospel. Others have adopted a posture of cultural relativism, arguing that what was acceptable for, or even incumbent upon, the Israelites in their particular time and place only applied to that time and place, not to all believers for all time. There are weaknesses in those and other such interpretations, but they reflect the fact that throughout history, rather than celebrating such biblical passages, Jews and Christians have regarded them as a problem to be solved. While interpretations of these passages differ widely among Jews and Christians, from the beginnings of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity one understanding has remained dominant among virtually all believers: these passages are not commands for all generations to follow, and if they have any applicability at all, it is only in a spiritualized, parabolic sense.
This is clear from popular Scriptural commentaries and other popular treatments of this material. The Catholic edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible says that “the physical destruction of the enemy in obedience to the deity” was “practiced much less than a reading of Joshua might suggest” — and in any case, “it must be seen in light of the imperfect stage of moral development reached at that time.” Likewise the Navarre Bible, a Roman Catholic commentary series prepared by the theology faculty of the University of Navarre in Spain, calls the instructions to destroy whole cities “a policy which to us seems quite incomprehensible, savage and inhuman.” It says that “it needs to be seen in its historical context and to be set in the framework of the gradual development of revelation.” The commentary goes on to cite Jesus” words — “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44) — and a spiritualized interpretation of Joshua’s battles by the sixteenth-century mystic St. John of the Cross.
The evangelical Christians Andy and Berit Kjos reflect the near-universal tendency to spiritualize such passages in a series of study questions on the Book of Joshua. In connection with Joshua 6:17 they ask: “What might you ‘utterly destroy’ in your own life in order to fully live the holy and victorious life in union with Christ?” This is similar to a footnote on Joshua 6:26 in the 1609 Douay-Rheims Roman Catholic English translation of the Bible: “Jericho, in the mystical sense, signifies iniquity: the sounding of the trumpets by the priests, the preaching of the word of God; by which the walls of Jericho are thrown down, when sinners are converted; and a dreadful curse will light on them who build them up again.”
Not only are such texts spiritualized; the literal sense is often directly rejected. The Rev. David Holwick of First Baptist Church in Ledgewood, New Jersey quotes the billionaire Andrew Carnegie: “I picked up the Bible just the other day and was reading the story of the times of Samuel. All sorts of ghastly incidents are related, and some passages are simply revolting to a mind accustomed to feel toward humanity as Christ felt. And the thing is that God is pictured as directing and helping it all. It is God who leads in the slaughter and He even inspires His children to the most unmerciful acts. Do not teach these parts to boys and girls as heroic deeds, to be admired and copied.” Holwick maintains that the God of the Old Testament is the same as that of the New, but agrees with Carnegie that such tales have no exemplary value for modern believers. “Too many atrocities have been done in God’s name,” he said, adding: “God doesn’t need human armies or politicians to win.”
In short, the consensus view among Jews and Christians for many centuries is that unless you happen to be a Hittite, Girgashite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, or Jebusite, these Biblical passages simply do not apply to you. The Scriptures records God’s commands to the Israelites to make war against particular people only. However this may be understood, and however jarring it may be to modern sensibilities, it does not amount to any kind of marching orders for believers. That’s one principal reason why Jews and Christians haven’t formed terror groups around the world that quote these Scriptures to justify killing civilian non-combatants.
Violence in the New Testament?
Christopher Hitchens, in his entertaining atheist apologetic god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything , surveys what he terms the “nightmare” of the Old Testament and then entitles his next chapter “The ‘New’ Testament Exceeds the Evil of the ‘Old’ One.” When it comes to backing up this assertion, however, all Hitchens offers is thin gruel: “Abraham,” he points out, “is ready to make a human sacrifice of his own firstborn.” Then he notes “a rumor” that “a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,” concluding: “Gradually, these two myths begin to converge.”
How? In large-scale calls for human sacrifice? Even Hitchens at his most biting and indifferent to distinction and nuance doesn’t claim that. In his Old Testament chapter, he asks about the Ten Commandments: “Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exactingly ‘in context’ to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended?” One might expect after that kind of buildup that the New Testament, since it exceeds the evil of the Old, must contain positive references not only to genocide and slavery, but also kicking puppies and pulling the wings off flies. Yet most of Hitchens’ New Testament chapter is taken up with disquisitions on the historicity, or lack thereof, of various portions of the narrative — including one which Hitchens seem rather to like, the story of Jesus showing mercy to the woman who is about to be stoned for adultery (John 7:53-8:11).
This is no accident. Those who comb the New Testament searching for incitement to violence come away disappointed. Nevertheless, in the spirit of the fisherman who stops off at the market to buy a fresh fish so as to mask his failure at the lake, some Islamic apologists and non-Muslim purveyors of moral equivalence claim to find even in the New Testament passages that exhort believers to commit acts of violence. They most often point to two passages:
• “I tell you that to everyone who has, more shall be given, but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. But these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them in my presence” (Luke 19:26-27). Of course, the fallacy here is that these are the words of a king in a parable, not Jesus” instructions to His followers, but such subtleties are often ignored in the modern communications age.
• “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. I am sent to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Matthew 10:34-35). If this passage is really calling for any literal violence, it would seem to be intra-familial jihad. To invoke it as the equivalent of the Qur’an’s jihad passages, which number over a hundred, is absurd: even the Crusaders at their most venal and grasping didn’t invoke passages like these.
Also, given the completely peaceful message of Jesus, it is clear that he meant “a sword” in an allegorical and metaphorical way. To interpret this text literally is to misunderstand Jesus, who, unlike Muhammad, did not take part in battles. It fails to recognize the poetry of the Bible, which is everywhere. But historically, even when they have committed violence in the name of God and the Church, Christians have not invoked such passages to justify what they were doing. These passages have never been taken as marching orders.
Nor have the passages of the Revelation to St. John that paint a bloody end times scenario of death and judgment; four angels “kill a third of mankind” (9:15); three plagues kill another third; and “the rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot either see or hear or walk; nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their immorality or their thefts” (9:18, 20-21). Jesus himself is depicted as a leader of armies: “He is clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him on white horses. From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty” (19:13-15).
Yet here again, nowhere does any of this amount to a call to action. While God is depicted as exacting judgment and punishing the wicked, nowhere does he order Christians to enforce his commands on his behalf. Likewise the popular Left Behind series, which dramatizes the events recounted in Revelation from an evangelical Christian perspective, doesn’t either depict Christians killing their non-Christian neighbors or order them to do so. But that isn’t enough for Chris Hedges, who insists that “Church leaders must denounce the biblical passages that champion apocalyptic violence and hateful political creeds.” Yet since he does not and cannot produce any evidence of Christians either preaching or perpetrating violence and justifying this with reference to the hateful apocalyptic texts he invokes, the necessity for Christian leaders to “denounce” these passages of Scripture is perhaps less urgent than the necessity for Muslim leaders to confront the jihadist use of Islamic Scripture, and to formulate positive ways these texts can be reinterpreted so that they no longer have as much power to incite to violence as they do today.
But the Bible has made people commit violent acts — hasn’t it?
Any believer in the Christian doctrine of sin will agree that no human endeavor can be free of base actions and base motives. And certainly Christians have committed violent acts in the name of Christianity. But have they done so in obedience to Christian Scripture and the teachings of the various Christian sects, or in defiance of those Scriptures and teachings? During the Crusades, it became customary for those who joined the effort to be referred to as “taking up their cross,” echoing Jesus” statement: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
But on its face, of course, this says nothing about war or violence of any kind, and has been understood throughout history as referring primarily to the Christian’s struggle to conform his life to the demands of the Gospel. And so it is with all Biblical passages that the Crusaders and Crusader theologians invoked: they often performed a reverse of the spiritualization we saw in connection with the Book of Joshua, taking what are clearly spiritual passages as if they were referring to physical warfare. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), extends St. Paul’s New Testament exhortation to “take the whole armor of God … having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness” (Ephesians 6:13-14), which clearly refers to spiritual warfare, in physical terms, and militarizes Paul’s longing to be with Christ, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain … My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:21, 23). He also refers to Paul’s insistence that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39) and “whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” (Romans 14:8):
He indeed is a fearless knight, and one secure from any quarter, since his soul is dressed in an armor of faith just as his body is dressed in an armor of steel. Since he is well protected by both kinds of arms, he fears neither the demon nor man. Nor is he afraid of death, since he longs to die. Why should he fear whether he lives or dies, since for him life is Christ and death is a reward? Faithfully and freely does he go forth on Christ’s behalf, but he would rather be dissolved and be with Christ: such is the obviously better thing. So go forth in safety, knights, and drive out the enemies of the cross of Christ with fearless intention, certain that neither death nor life can separate you from God’s love, which Jesus Christ embodies; in every moment of danger, fulfill through your own actions the principle: “Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”
St. Bernard goes on in language reminiscent of that used in his day and today to exhort jihad warriors to fight on all the more valiantly, for their rewards will be great on earth if they are victorious and in heaven if they aren’t:
How glorious the victors returned from battle! How blessed those martyrs who died in battle! Rejoice, brave fighter, if you live and conquer in the Lord; but rather exult and glory, if you die and are joined to the Lord. Life can be fruitful and victory can be glorious; but sacred death is properly to be preferred to either, for if “˜they are blessed who die in the Lord,” are they not much more so who die on the Lord’s behalf?
Perhaps those who believe that any holy text can be used to justify anything will find support for their views in St. Bernard’s usage of St. Paul here. However, while Bernard is able to marshal Scriptural passages for the idea that God rewards martyrs, and that God is the Lord of both the living and the dead, he does not and cannot adduce any Scripture in support of his central assumption: that warfare in the name of Christ is justified. The fact that he must instead resort to the physicalization of passages about spiritual warfare only makes more obvious the fact that can have no recourse to any Christian martial tradition, or doctrine of warfare against and conquest of unbelievers.
In Islam, however, the situation is quite different. [see HolwickID #65188 for the conclusion of the article]