Promoted to the front page. Originally Posted on October 14th, 2008.
I am going to kick off my blogging here with something perhaps unusual for a Muslim site. I'm not going to talk about anything explicitly Muslim at all.
The Jesus Seminar was founded in the mid-80s by scholars of religion to make a first stab at understanding the Gospels from a scientific perspective: that is to say, as a text, how could it be teased out? As a person who rejected the divinity of Jesus, I was fasinated over the years as they teased out of the Gospels those things that were likely the words of the mad rabbi (as I think of him) as opposed to those of his later followers of varied socio-religious persuasions. Under the Jamesite, Pauline and other accretions were pithy teachings that were unlike anything encountered in texts of the time, truly revolutionary and often counterintuitive things that reached down and touched me.
I want to share one of them with you today, one of the things that makes me love Jesus the man-teacher-messenger. It is in fact a famous saying, one that is not honoured in word or deed by those who spout it the most.
Turn the other cheek.
The whole narrative is that if someone strikes you, you turn the other cheek. But what does that mean?
Recent scholarship by the Jesus Seminar explains it as it would have been seen by people living at the time of Jesus. You can strike a slave or a woman, because they are property. You do so by backhanding them. To strike a man - a "real human being" - would be to invite murder. Jesus says if a man strikes you - which he would only do if you were, like the followers of Jesus, non-citizens, women and slaves - turn the other cheek. The cheek that, if he were to strike you again, he would be using his palm, a strike that is used only against equals to start a *serious* fight. This is what it meant in the time of Jesus.
So. He cannot strike you on the other cheek. To do so would be to admit you are his equal. It would also shame him in front of other "full citizens". It is a move that will shame him and by your resistance make you his equal: equal to a "real man", as you should be.
So that's the exegesis. Today's tafsiir. When you turn the other cheek, you force your enemy to recognise you not as someone less than him, but as his equal. He cannot strike you or admit it; if he does not, he is equally shamed.
That's my first post.
We've come to expect just about everything on this site except consensus. Another point about non-retaliation: your attacker then becomes the sort of person that would repeatedly attack someone who refuses to fight, which lowers him even further.
The saying regarding turning the other cheek is not about slaves, and slapping and what it means to slap a person male or female. It means simply to offer the other cheek.
In the days of Isa violence was rampant. People did not think twice about retaliation. Whether it be man to man, man on friend, or whatever for some given slight. Isa was about teaching another way. This was his pullling away from Halacha. Not following the letter of not just the law, but of everyday living that was counter to the Kingdom of God. Violence. How do you stop it? No resistance. Gandi taught this, and Martin Luther King.
"Offer the other cheek.... " Passive, and non aggressive and would certainly stop an aggressor. It would make a crowd bent on retaliation and violence stop and think. Why is that man doing the unthinkable? Isa believed we are all capable of doing the unthinkable...the unheard of, he walked away from the status quo, some think from wealth to walk in another direction, to "turn" from the common way.
The saying regarding turning the other cheek is not about slaves, and slapping and what it means to slap a person male or female. It means simply to offer the other cheek.
In the days of Isa violence was rampant. People did not think twice about retaliation. Whether it be man to man, man on friend, or whatever for some given slight. Isa was about teaching another way. This was his pullling away from Halacha. Not following the letter of not just the law, but of everyday living that was counter to the Kingdom of God. Violence. How do you stop it? No resistance. Gandi taught this, and Martin Luther King.
"Offer the other cheek.... " Passive, and non aggressive and would certainly stop an aggressor. It would make a crowd bent on retaliation and violence stop and think. Why is that man doing the unthinkable? Isa believed we are all capable of doing the unthinkable...the unheard of, he walked away from the status quo, some think from wealth to walk in another direction, to "turn" from the common way.
That is certainly the prevailing view, but one should not dismiss scholarship merely because it differs from what is en vogue.
Hi.
This is the first time I've commented - so hello.
This view is fairly well known and prevalant tin areas of the Christian church. There are those who would say this text inspired people such as Martin Luther King and ghandi in their passive resistance. It certinaly changes the flavour of the story, and appears to be factual in context, even if it can't be said for certain that's what the passage is about.
Cheers
Steve
I have to say that the JOB of those to whom Jesus directed much of his message was already to shut up and take it. Your owner/husband/father/etc. was ENTITLED to strike you as a slave. If you resisted, you could be put to death.
To turn the other cheek is truly a challenge. It's saying, "Go on, hit me like a REAL man." It's nonviolence, but it's not laying down to die. People already did that. Resistance was unthinkable, and punishable by draconian laws. Shame was the power you could use against your superiors, though - challenge him in public.
Sacred texts are timeless due to the nuances of meaning, and no single interpretation can contain its essence.
Hummm maybe. I think somewhere along the line we have to decide on the meaning of an interpretation or we will never get the full enjoyment of discovery and implementation.
Sacred text are timeless, The ancients were no slouches.