Mark 3:1-6
Jan. 16th, 2013 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackMy gospel readthrough is falling very behind. I skipped the end of chapter 2, which I didn't have anything to say about, and here's the beginning of chapter 3. Not all of this is in Mark, I'm taking some of it from the description of the same incident in Matthew.
This is related to the "picking grain on the sabbath" thing. Jesus goes to a synagogue where some proto-Rabbis who disagree with him hang out. It's not clear if this is coincidence, or he's deliberately letting them have a swing at him in order to win the argument.
There's a man with a shrivelled hand. Reading between the lines, it seems the proto-Rabbis, as told by one of Jesus' disciples in a story designed to make Jesus look good, deliberately draw this to Jesus' attention. Presumably it destroys Jesus' mystique if he refuses to heal someone who needs it, but if they can trap him into breaking the sabbath laws they can denounce or possibly arrest him.
It must be really frustrating it some chav[1] turns up in the cathedral and disrupts all the services and tells you you're doing it all wrong. Even if he's right, it's unsurprising people didn't like it.
Unsurprisingly, Jesus heals him anyway, and gives a short homily of halacha-fu which convinces the crowd Jesus is (a) channelling miracles (b) devout law-follower and (c) quick-thinking and turns them to his side, continuing the popular insurrection. The pharisees go off to plot Jesus' downfall (presumably this was written by someone who knew the crucifixion story[2]).
Analysis
So what do we know?
Implicitly, healing (or related things) were forbidden on the sabbath. Anyway with a greater talmudic knowledge want to comment?
In Matthew, Jesus draws a parallel with pulling a sheep out when it's stuck in a ditch. So implicitly, humanitarian acts of that sort were accepted at the time. But this changed?
If I recall correctly, in modern Judaism, anything life-saving is almost always allowed, and people who keep Sabbath laws generally interpret the exceptions fairly broadly to include any urgent medical activity. Anyone want to expand on that? Do most people apply it to sheep?
Footnotes
[1] I debated saying "yokel", but I feel class prejudice is more alive against "chav" than "yokel" these days, and I want to put the disagreeable view the people in charge might have had about Jesus in terms modern people would have a visceral reaction to.
[2] Freudian slip of the week: "crucifiction".
This is related to the "picking grain on the sabbath" thing. Jesus goes to a synagogue where some proto-Rabbis who disagree with him hang out. It's not clear if this is coincidence, or he's deliberately letting them have a swing at him in order to win the argument.
There's a man with a shrivelled hand. Reading between the lines, it seems the proto-Rabbis, as told by one of Jesus' disciples in a story designed to make Jesus look good, deliberately draw this to Jesus' attention. Presumably it destroys Jesus' mystique if he refuses to heal someone who needs it, but if they can trap him into breaking the sabbath laws they can denounce or possibly arrest him.
It must be really frustrating it some chav[1] turns up in the cathedral and disrupts all the services and tells you you're doing it all wrong. Even if he's right, it's unsurprising people didn't like it.
Unsurprisingly, Jesus heals him anyway, and gives a short homily of halacha-fu which convinces the crowd Jesus is (a) channelling miracles (b) devout law-follower and (c) quick-thinking and turns them to his side, continuing the popular insurrection. The pharisees go off to plot Jesus' downfall (presumably this was written by someone who knew the crucifixion story[2]).
Analysis
So what do we know?
Implicitly, healing (or related things) were forbidden on the sabbath. Anyway with a greater talmudic knowledge want to comment?
In Matthew, Jesus draws a parallel with pulling a sheep out when it's stuck in a ditch. So implicitly, humanitarian acts of that sort were accepted at the time. But this changed?
If I recall correctly, in modern Judaism, anything life-saving is almost always allowed, and people who keep Sabbath laws generally interpret the exceptions fairly broadly to include any urgent medical activity. Anyone want to expand on that? Do most people apply it to sheep?
Footnotes
[1] I debated saying "yokel", but I feel class prejudice is more alive against "chav" than "yokel" these days, and I want to put the disagreeable view the people in charge might have had about Jesus in terms modern people would have a visceral reaction to.
[2] Freudian slip of the week: "crucifiction".