Found an interesting article titled "Women in Islam vs. Women in the Judeo-Christian Tradition".
http://twf.org/Library/WomenICJ.html
One issue with it: all verses are taken from the Old Testament or the Catholic Bible. Does anyone know of a similar article where the comparative verses are taken from the New Testament and Jesus' teachings?
I think I might look up all the verses used here and see how many are pretty accurate in their interpretation, and how many were taken out of context. You ladies know how often that occurs. One religion wants to look better than the others, so they take more negative verses out of context from the other holy books and then pick the most positive ones from theirs.
It makes studying religion objectively rather difficult to do, but religion is such a deep-seated thing that I doubt anyone could ever actually BE objective in discussing it.
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I can't help you with finding a similar article written using only NT, though isn't there a comparison on the attitudes towards women of Jesus and Mohammed in the book 'Jesus and Muhammad'? I read it a little while back and I think there was.
ReplyDeleteJust glancing through the article, the verses taken from the 'Catholic Bible' are all from the Wisdom of Sirach, which is in the Old Testament, and is, I have seen, a book that some love to rip verses out of context. It's actually a very beautiful book, full of advice and wisdom, similar to Proverbs.
They did only use Sirach...that will paint a very inaccurate depiction of the Christian and Jewish veiwpoint of women. They didn't even use the NT. How odd. Jesus and Muhammad had similar views about women so the article would be less in favor of Islam only if they used some context from the NT. They'd be relatively equal. That is probably why they didn't since the article is clearly arguing that Islam is the fairest of them all toward women according to its holy book.
ReplyDeleteThey also picked weird ways to argue their point, like focusing on Eve first...you'd think you'd focus on women being allowed to have property or receiving a dowery. Those were revolutionary concepts. At least that is what I would have started with. Instead they left that out till the end.
The article does quote from the New Testament, though not much. I saw I Corinthians and Matthew quoted. The "Catholic Bible" is the same as a Protestant one except for 8 "extra" books in the Old Testament (called the apocrypha among Protestants) that Catholics kept and Martin Luther removed. Those books would have been in the Torah (Old Testament) that Jesus used. I would assume the reason most of the verses used in that article are from the OT is that those issues aren't discussed as much or in as much detail in the NT. Also, Jesus' teachings would have been in harmony with the OT since he was a product of it and the Messiah. He quoted the OT often as recorded in the Gospels.
ReplyDeleteHeather, Torah is strictly speaking only the first five books of the Bible. If you want to use the Hebrew name for the entire Old Testament, it is called 'Tanakh'. I think it is misleading to say that those books would have been in the Bible that Jesus used. Those books have never been part of the Hebrew Bible - only the Septuagint - which is, as I understand, much of the reason why they are not included in Protestant editions of the Bible.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I have never seen any article from any source, Christian or otherwise, that gives a really accurate picture of what the New Testament teaches about women, and why it teaches that. The only way to find out is the hard way - by reading the whole thing yourself, not just the parts that have to do specifically with women.
Christianity comes out light years ahead of every other religion in terms of purity and justice. But unfortunately educating yourself and then forcefully if need be adhering to what is really there, is the only way to protect yourself against elements who are engaged in backward thinking that baptizes their own fears and ambitions, calls them the 'clear teaching of Scripture' and then informs anyone (especially a woman) who does not want to 'obey this clear teaching of Scripture' that they are 'not filled with the Holy Spirit', or something to that effect.