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| Church of Saint Ignazio in the Olivella (Palermo, Sicily, Italy; c. 1600) |
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| Έξοδος 17:14, ΒΑΜ (1833) Then the LORD said to Moses, "Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven." Exodus 17:14, NIV |
* Wikipedia:
- "Yimakh shemo"
- "Damnatio memoriae"
«DISCIPLINE FOR THOSE WHO HAVE FALLEN AWAYReligious groups have long practiced forms of internal discipline for members who have strayed. Within the early Christian tradition, discipline could involve public abasement or exclusion from the Christian community. Relying in part on biblical passages, a few groups continue to practice particularly rigorous forms of discipline and exclusion, revealing wrongs publicly and avoiding excommunicated former members to a much greater degree than they avoid other nonmembers. As Carl Esbeck summarizes [Carl H. Esbeck, "Tort Claims against Churches and Ecclesiastical Officers: The First Amendment Considerations", 89 West Virginia Law Review 1 (1986-1987), pp. 40-62] the view of Menno Simons, “[T]hose who are excommunicated are to be avoided completely, not merely treated as strangers.”
Shunning of Insiders
When members of a religious group together avoid contacts with a member or former member, the practice is usually called shunning. Even though any individual is free legally to avoid contacts with another individual, people who organize together to refrain from contact may commit a civil wrong. In many states, organizing a boycott of a business is a tort. In regard to marriage, even one person’s urging another to avoid contact with his spouse may constitute a civil wrong. And whether or not shunning amounts to a more specific tort, a shunned person may claim he has suffered the intentional or reckless infliction of emotional distress.
For the churches that isolate members who stray, including groups in the Mennonite tradition and Jehovah’s Witnesses, shunning aims at repentance and restoration, increasing the offender’s shame and preventing the faithful from becoming contaminated. In some modern churches, all members shun their former associates in business and social affairs, and married partners avoid both physical and social contact with wayward spouses. Those joining churches whose discipline includes shunning usually are aware of the practice from the outset.
Courts considering complaints that religious shunning is wrongful may adopt one of three broad approaches. They may treat religious motivation as irrelevant, as did Employment Division v. Smith; they may turn religiouspractice into a virtually absolute defense; or they may somehow weigh religious practice against public need. Whatever the precise import of Smith in respect to religious shunning, common-law doctrines that forbid it can burden corporate religious life. For this reason, state courts, by common-law or constitutional interpretation, should impede shunning of members and former members by religious groups only if the government establishes a strong interest in doing so.
Various state decisions support this conclusion, but reach divergent practical results. In 1975, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, although using compelling interest language then embodied in the federal constitutional standard, took a view favorable to the shunned former member. Church officials argued that even if Mr. Bear’s claims that he was shunned by church members, including his wife, were all true, the Free Exercise Clause provided a complete defense. The court responded that “the shunning may be an excessiveinterference within areas of ‘paramount’ state concern, i.e. the maintenance of marriage and family relationship, alienation of affection, and the tortious interference with a business relationship.” The court’s opinion implied that the state’s interests against shunning were powerful enough to allow Bear to recover if he could show at trial that church officials had acted as he asserted.
In 1987, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit also used compelling interest language but reached substantively different conclusions. Paul, who had been “disfellowshipped” [sic] from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, claimed he had suffered emotional disturbance, alienation of affections, and harm to reputation. The Ninth Circuit said, “We find the practice of shunning not to constitute a sufficient threat to the peace, safety, or morality of the community as to warrant state intervention.” It continued, “Intangible or emotional harms cannot ordinarily serve as a basis for maintaining a tort cause of action against a church for its practices—or against its members.” The Alaska Supreme Court, in 2001, quoted from Paul and determined that the emotional harm to an individual from shunning “as such is not a threat to the public.”
The Bear and Paul courts diverged over a fundamental issue: Does the state have a compelling interest in the quality of life of a few individual adult members of society, when any impairment will have only a slight influence on the larger culture? Without doubt, protecting a few individuals can constitute a compelling interest, in American legal understanding. When the lives of children are at stake, courts may require medical procedures their parents do not want, a topic we take up in chapter 21. And Yoder assumes that educational impoverishment of even a few children is something the state can avoid. But what about adults who suffer harms less severe than death or bodily injury?
That shunning can be truly devastating for the individuals who suffer it is a reason for the state to intervene. But the fact that individuals separately are undoubtedly free to do what their leaders encourage them to do together casts doubt on whether the encouragement should lead to liability. Shunning differs from physical assault, slander, and other torts that are wrong even if committed by an isolated individual. That the wrongs committed by shunning do not impinge on vital state interests is shown by the infrequency of recovery for group boycotts that are not motivated by economic gain, and by the widespread abolition of recovery for alienation of a spouse’s affections.
At least when adults have voluntarily become members of a religious group that they know engages in shunning, the state lacks a compelling state interest in protecting them from the financial and emotional consequences of that practice. It is not that their joining the group binds them legally to accept any penalties the group may inflict, or eliminates the state’s interest in their welfare vis-a`-vis that of the group. Rather, their voluntary acceptance of membership reduces the urgency of the state’s interest, so that it does not override the group’s fundamental freedom to exercise a form of religious practice whose historical pedigree is extensive, however unpalatable it may be to modern sensibilities.
Of course, shunning does reduce the freedom of individuals who face that sanction to practice religion as they see fit. A man aware that his family will shun him if he rejects the church has a powerful incentive to remain faithful, at least in outward appearance. Although this inhibiting effect is disturbing, most of a group should not have to forego what it believes is vital religious practice so that individual dissidents will have maximum freedom of choice at a particular moment.We need to remember that deciding what maximizes freedom over time is no simple exercise. Individuals may wish to join religious groups with strong cohesiveness and discipline. If the law undermines forms of discipline, as by forbidding shunning, it eliminates or erodes the liberty of individuals to join groups whose cohesiveness rests partly on stringent discipline. Within a liberal democracy, the government’s aim, as I have argued in the last chapter, should be to allow freedom of religious practice, not to encourage the religions that most recognize individual autonomy in the realm of religion. The law should not be designed to favor religious groups with little discipline over those with strong discipline.
Should a privilege to shun be limited to religious groups or extended to other groups? We could imagine that an organization devoted to political and social principles might feel so betrayed by a member that expulsion and shunning would seem an appropriate response. A group advocating animal rights might learn that a member continues to participate in fox hunting or to model fur clothing, for example. Although it may have more difficulty than a religious group in showing that shunning is related in some crucial way to its associational identity and purposes, a nonreligious expressive group should have the same privilege, if it can make this showing. That result could be achieved under the common law or as an aspect of free speech.
One argument for a privilege for expressive associations is that their internal discipline should itself count as an expressive activity. The religious message that a church projects to nonmembers is affected by the behavior of its members and by its disciplinary practices, and the same might be true about the nonreligious message of an organization for racial justice or environmental quality. However, forms of discipline, especially those otherwise amounting to civil wrongs, should not generate privileges unless an extra ingredient is present, a way in which a particular form of discipline carries forward the group’s self-understanding.
Any privilege to shun should probably be limited to groups. Isolated individuals who act on their own to insist that others avoid contact with someone should not be given a defense to a civil suit, even if their motivation is religious and the victim is a former associate. Allowing such a defense would place some individuals too much at the mercy of others who have idiosyncratic religious missions or use religion as a cover to conceal more malign motives.»
* Kent Greenawalt,
See also / Βλέπε επίσης:
Was it possible to Pronounce the Tetragrammaton itself
during Bible reading at Jesus' time?
An LXX indication /
Ήταν δυνατή η Προφορά του Τετραγράμματου καθαυτού
κατά την ανάγνωση της Βίβλου την εποχή του Ιησού;
Μια ένδειξη από την Ο'
= = + + = =
The Hebrew Tetragrammaton & Divine Titles
transcripted or transcribed in Greek LXX
used at Greek magical papyri & amulets /
Το Τετραγράμματο & Θεϊκοί Τίτλοι στα Εβραϊκά
που μεταγράφηκαν ή μεταφέρθηκαν στα Ελληνικά
στη μετάφραση των Εβδομήκοντα
σε χρήση σε ελληνικούς μαγικούς πάπυρους & φυλαχτά
= = + + = =
«Here’s my own ad hoc list of what I think are major developments in the study of NT/Christian origins over the last century or so. [...] These are developments in the historical study/approach to the NT and earliest Christianity, so other matters don’t appear (e.g., hermeneutical/theological issues). [...]
- The “de-throning” of the textus receptus and the turn to a critically-based NT text. Westcott & Hort (1880s) were crucial (though they built much on the work of earlier scholars). Today, all scholars agree that our editions of the NT must be based on sound critical principles and the best evidence subjected to critical analysis.
- The discovery & publication of early NT papyri. In particular, the Chester Beatty biblical papyri (which includes both NT & OT) in the 1930s had profound effects thereafter on scholarly notions about the early history of the NT writings. The Bodmer biblical papyri (1950s-1960s) furthered this. We now have copies of NT writings (often partial/fragmentary) that take us back to ca. 200 CE, and so allow us to peek back into the second century. This evidence still needs to be mined further, but has already generated significant shifts in scholarly views (e.g., the demise of the “Caesarean text” of the Gospels, and theories of a 3rd or 4th century “recension” behind the “Alexandrian” text of the Gospels).
- Methods in text-critical analysis. These include more soundly-based quantitative methods (prompted particularly by E.C. Colwell in the 1960s) for establishing textual relationships of manuscripts. Now, with the development of computer-applications, there are further developments, esp. the Muenster-based “Coherence Based Genealogical Method” for attempting to map the “textual flow” of the transmission of NT writings.
- A greater sophistication in our handling of the Gospels: In particular, the recognition that the Gospels incorporate (1) Jesus-tradition that stemmed from Jesus, then (2) passed through a few decades of circulation and adaptation in early churches, and also (3) the editorial and authorial work of the individual authors of the Gospels. This development really captures scholarly work across several decades.
- The growing recognition that the apostle Paul was firmly Jewish in formative background and remained so in his life as apostle to the Gentiles. From Schweitzer, Machen, W.D. Davies, Munck, and then E.P. Sanders and others more recently, this has now become the general stance for Pauline scholarship (a shift from some early 20th-cent views of Paul as a “radical Hellenist”). Controversies remain, but the debate is now conducted on this premise.
- A more vivid sense of early Christian diversity. It should have been clear all along from the NT texts and early church fathers, but for many it took the publication of various extra-canonical texts (e.g., the Nag Hammadi corpus) to realize this.
- A much more sopisticated understanding of the Jewish context of earliest Christianity. The Qumran scrolls are crucial, of course, generating changes on many issues (see the new Oxford Handbook on the Dead Sea Scrolls). But also key work by Liebermann, Bickerman and Hengel (in particular), built on by others subsequently, has crumbled earlier tight compartments of “Palestinian-Jewish” and “Hellenistic” used then to shape views of earliest Christianity.
- A more accurate sense of the social composition of earliest churches. Correcting earlier notions of earliest Christianity as almost entirely comprised of slaves and peasants, it is now clear that, e.g., Paul’s churches were made up of a more diverse collection of people, and that the local leaders were more often small business people and others with some property, schooling, and experience in leadership. Edwin Judge’s 1960 classic is probably the turning-point: Edwin A. Judge, The Social Pattern of Christian Groups in the First Century (London: Tyndale Press, 1960). Also, of course, there is now a far greater sense of the important place of women in earliest churches.
- The early eruption of Jesus-devotion. To cite a more recent development (i.e., of the last 20 yrs), it has become clear that a remarkable devotion to Jesus emerged astonishingly early in the aftermath of Jesus’ execution, so early that in Paul’s letters it is already presumed as characteristic of Christian circles, both Jewish and Gentile. (I immodestly note that I’ve had a hand in bringing this awareness more to the fore, but a growing number of scholars have made important contributions too.)»
«Όπου αίρεται η εσχατολογική ένταση μεταξύ της σωτηρίας και της κοσμικής ιστορίας, τότε νομοτελειακά σχετικοποιείται και η ιστορία της σωτηρίας, με αποτέλεσμα η θεολογία να χάνει την ικανότητά της να ενεργεί ως προφητική κριτική της συγκεκριμένης ιστορίας της ανθρώπινης δράσεως. Η Εκκλησία με άλλα λόγια όχι μόνο δεν πρέπει να ενεργεί ως θεσμός του κόσμου τούτου, αλλά και κριτικά να αντιμετωπίζει τους θεσμούς του κόσμου τούτου και προφητικά να καταγγέλει τις άδικες δομές του».
εκδ. Επίκεντρο, 2007,p./σ. 87.
«The central term Χριστιανοί is bafflingly peculiar. It is a Graeco-Latin hybrid, and must therefore have been coined by Latin speakers in response to the currency of the Greek word Χριστός. Since Acts 11:26 says it was first used at Antioch one must think of members of the Roman administration, army or business community in the Syrian capital. They will have coined it as part of their Latin vocabulary (not for use when speaking Greek, which would have called for Χριστίται or some other χριστο- compound). The suffix -ianus constitutes a political comment. It is never attached to the name of a god, unless one counts the associations of Herculani, whom I assume to be wrestlers. The Roman Jewish synagogues are Αυγουστησιοί, Αγριππησιοί, etc. but never -ιανοί. This is because the devotees of a god do not engage in the type of activity connoted by the suffix.»
[«Ο κεντρικός όρος "Χριστιανοί" είναι εξαιρετικά ιδιόμορφος. Αποτελεί ελληνορωμαϊκό υβρίδιο και πρέπει κατά συνέπεια να επινοήθηκε από Λατινόφωνους σύμφωνα με την τρέχουσα χρήση της ελληνικής λέξης "Χριστός". Εφόσον το Πράξεις 11:26 αναφέρει ότι χρησιμοποιήθηκε για πρώτη φορά στην Αντιόχεια, αυτό υποδεικνύει στα μέλη της ρωμαϊκής διοίκησης, τον στρατό και την εμπορική κοινότητα της συριακής πρωτεύουσας. Θα την επινόησαν ως μέρος του λατινικού λεξιλογίου τους (που δεν χρησιμοποιούνταν όταν μιλούσαν Ελληνικά, οπότε και θα αναμενόταν ο όρος Χρηστίται ή κάποιος σύνθετος όρος με το πρόθημα χριστο-). Το επίθημα -ianus (-ιανός) αποτελεί πολιτική αναφορά. Ποτέ δεν συντίθεται με όνομα θεού, εκτός από την περίπτωση των εταιριών των Ηρακλειανών, οι οποίοι θεωρώ ότι ήταν παλαιστές. Οι ιουδαιορωμαϊκές συναγωγές είναι "Αυγουστησιοί", "Αγριππησιοί", κλπ αλλά ποτέ -ιανοί. Αυτό συμβαίνει επειδή οι λάτρεις ενός θεού δεν τελούν κάποια δραστηριότητα οι οποία υπονοείται από το επίθημα».]
«The rejection of military service on the part of the early church was not however derived from any explicit prohibition in the New Testament. The attitude of the Gospels to the soldiers' calling was neutral. The centurion was commended for his faith rather than for his profession, but was not called upon to abandon his profession. The pacifism of the early church was derived not from a New Testament legalism, but from an effort to apply what was taken to be the mind of Christ. Christianity brought to social problems, not a detailed code of ethics or a new political theory, but a new scale of values. The quality of Christian love transcended the highest in Judaism and Hellenism. Christian agape was utterly other-regarding love».
[«Η απόρριψη της στρατιωτικής υπηρεσίας από μέρους της πρώιμης εκκλησίας δεν απέρρεε όμως από κάποια ρητή απαγόρευση της Καινής Διαθήκης. Η θέση των Ευαγγελίων προς την κλήση του στρατιώτη είναι ουδέτερη. Ο εκατόνταρχος επαινέθηκε για την πίστη του μάλλον παρά για το επάγγελμά του, αλλά δεν του ζητήθηκε να εγκαταλείψει το επάγγελμά του. Ο φιλειρηνισμός της πρώιμης εκκλησίας δεν απέρρεε από κάποιον νομικισμό της Καινής Διαθήκης, αλλά από την προσπάθεια να εφαρμόσει αυτό που κατανοούσε ως νου του Χριστού. Ο χριστιανισμός κόμισε στα κοινωνικά προβλήματα, όχι έναν λεπτομερή ηθικό κώδικα ή μια νέα πολιτική θεωρία, αλλά μια νέα κλίμακα αξιών. Το είδος της χριστιανικής αγάπης υπερέβαινε τα μέγιστα του Ιουδαϊσμού και του Ελληνισμού. Η χριστιανική αγάπη ήταν εντελώς ανιδιοτελής αγάπη».]
