I’m not saying nothing in Paul or Augustine comes from Jesus–‘the thought is as much as the deed.’  You may refrain from doing the wrong thing, but you’re still thinking about it.  (Well, I am.)  Augustine knows Jesus is saying we need to aspire to not even wishing to sin anymore.  But what he doesn’t understand is that Jesus doesn’t believe that he or anyone else can do this in the world we live in now–that comes with the Kingdom, and with the separation of the Sheep and the Goats.  Did Pelagius understand this?  If so, he’d have been well-advised not to say so out loud.  He was walking a dangerous enough tightrope as matters stood.

But yes, you do confess to your sins in order to humble yourself.  To remind yourself how much better you could be, as the Publican does, sitting in the back of the synagogue, while the Pharisee congratulates himself up front.  To believe yourself in a state of grace is an enormous temptation to sin–with the added danger that you won’t even realize you are sinning.  Augustine caused great harm to Pelagius with his attacks–he avoided making attacks on Pelagius’ character, which he said was good–but he knew very well what the result of accusing someone of heresy might be.  And much of the way he characterized Pelagius’ arguments was wrong.  He wanted to win–to triumph–to be the supreme influence of his generation.  He succeeded.  At what price?  He ended up being the Pharisee sitting in the front of the synagogue.  Pelagius was the Publican (well obviously, if he was Irish.)

Jesus believed in demonic possession, and probably temptation, but does not seem to have believed this was the primary source of human evil.  If a demon has possessed you, you are not responsible for your actions (anymore than when you are mentally ill, which is of course what people were referring then to when they said someone had a demon).  No, the problem is the world itself.  

The world is inhospitable to goodness, to selfless behavior, to putting others above yourself, to loving your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus never read Darwin, but Darwin, like every Victorian gentleman, read the gospels, and was deeply troubled by the notion he might be providing an excuse to ignore morality.  People who are never selfish are at a permanent competitive advantage.  Those who are selfish all the time often profit greatly by it.  While cooperative behavior exists (and did before humans evolved), it tends to be limited to those related to you in some way, which is merely a collective form of the same self-seeking behavior (‘selfish genes’).  

How did the Good Samaritan profit by helping a wounded Jew?  He did it because his conscience bade him to.  Because it’s better to live that way, even if it makes you poorer, exposes you to risk (since the bandits could still be nearby).  Because you are stronger in yourself, knowing that you can give without thought of personal gain.  And the more people who behave this way, the better a place the world becomes.  The world is only how we behave in the world.  And so, we can in fact make it better, simply by believing it can be better.  He did it because this is who he was.  And there are people like that in every race, every nation, every religion.  And Jesus saw that.  Hence the story.  

This is the underlying logic, but people didn’t need Jesus to know that–he didn’t discover the Golden Rule, though he expanded upon it.  He’s providing an impetus to behave well, and a reason for people to believe they aren’t suckers for doing so.  He’s seen people like this all his life, and they are, to him, a promise of something more.  He seized on Apocalyptic Judaism as the means whereby this promise could be redeemed.  

Sin comes from our desire to live longer and better.  From competition for limited resources.  From our desire to propagate–not the pleasure of the act, but its underlying purpose (hence he never talked about same sex behavior).  Sin is the natural consequence of nature.  

Now is this Pelagian?  Pelagius said nothing God created is inherently evil.  The world is good.  Life is good.  Death is good, much as we may not always think so.  It’s harder to be sure with Jesus.  It depends on what he thought the Kingdom would be.  And that’s very hard to determine.  Possibly because he didn’t know himself.  He was waiting to find out.

Well, Augustine wasn’t entirely wrong, you see.  The world we live in is conducive to sin–but sin can only exist where virtue is a concept, to be heeded or disregarded (hence animals are beyond sin, neither moral nor immoral–we have taken on an additional burden of choice, which makes us both more and less than them).  So metaphorically, by eating the Apple (the original meaning of the story, which like most myths, wasn’t meant to be taken literally), Adam and Eve gained the knowledge of good and evil, with the potential for both.  His understanding of the story, his explanation of how this affects all of us is necessarily crude and sexualized (because so was Augustine, a lot of the time–he named his illegitmate child ‘son of my sin’).  It doesnt matter if you think it happened because Adam ate the apple, or because apes evolved larger brains.  It amounts to the same thing, and the myth of the Garden is all the more amazing when you consider those who created it knew nothing of evolution.  

Jesus did not believe in a permanent state of grace in this world.  Every day, you wake up, you make choices.  Every day, you live as if you’ll be judged at the end of it.  Augustine could never be satisfied with this.  Like Luther and Calvin, centuries later, he craved absolute certainty that he was saved, not damned.  There must be some way to know.   And Jesus, like Pelagius, says that knowledge is beyond us. Act as if you have faith, faith will be given you.  Believe that you can heal yourself, and you will be healed.

Like Gnosticism before it, and Jesus before that, Pelagianism has a certain individualist air to it.  You help others in order to help yourself.  But Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor has a point–what about all the people who can’t find the strength of will to be good?  What happens to them, in this world that refuses to transform itself into the Kingdom?  Don’t they need some kind of order, to hold their worst impulses in check?  An empire–or a church.  A system of manmade laws.  Which isn’t what Jesus wanted.  But Jesus thought all human systems would be gone less than a single human lifetime from when he was speaking.  And he was wrong.  

Nobody has all of the truth.  

I think you misunderstand that, but so do lots of people.  (Probably so did Matthew.)

A while back, I started a thread about the Pericope Adulterae–the woman taken in adultery.  Only in John’s Gospel, but most scholars believe the author of John never included it–it was added to later texts, perhaps originally as a marginal notation.  A story that was well-known to Christians, but had never been included in any gospel.  Why not?  Because it’s problematic.  For just about everyone.

Some Jews bring Jesus this woman, who they have caught ‘in the act’–the man isn’t there, though he should be considered just as guilty under Jewish law–probably because he wasn’t Jewish, but pagan–perhaps a Roman soldier or administrator–and they would be risking their own lives by laying hands on him.  The anger towards her may be less about her sin than her perceived disloyalty to her own people, in the heightened tensions of Passover, the rising tide of Zealot anger against Roman rule.   

You know the story–everyone does.  But the underlying context is usually missed.  The woman says almost nothing–there is no indication she ever becomes a follower of Jesus–she never even expresses remorse (we don’t know how she came to commit adultery–suppose she was selling her body to feed herself, or her children?)  This is very problematic for early Christians, who are already developing ideas that Augustine will state more emphatically and explicitly–salvation can only come through accepting Jesus as Messiah.  She doesn’t do that.  

How does Jesus stop these very religious Jews from carrying out their intended act?  Probably trapping him is only a secondary objective–they just happened to see him there, as they took her to the place of stoning.  They want to pin him down, make him commit himself, one way or the other.  But Jesus of Nazareth was never an easy man to pin down.  

He turns it back on them–he writes something in the dirt–perhaps (Roger David Aus has suggested) passages from the Old Testament, referencing an earlier time when Israel was subjugated by foreigners, and Jewish women gave themselves to non-Jews–and Jewish men were no better–so they had no right to judge the women.  And it was also an idea in Judaism (before Jesus) that wishing to commit adultery is sinful too.  He could have reminded them of that.  

He says to them–you know the words.  But in the context of the event, and what inspired it, and what the older men among them, the ones who know the Torah frontwards and backwards are made to recognize in themselves–we can hardly understand it.  He shames them.  He makes them understand they are no less guilty than she.  That they are making her the scapegoat.  That in supposedly upholding their traditions, they have violated them.  The elders walk away first–the young men, confused, drift away slowly.  Leaving Jesus, the woman, and the people who were already there listening to him.  

Why does he say “Neither do I condemn you”?  If he is without sin, shouldn’t he be flinging a stone at her?  He is confessing his own guilt.  We are all sinners in our hearts.  And the worst sin of all is to accuse others, while ignoring your own guilt.  Get the log out of your own eye.  

Jesus spoke very little about sexual sin.  It was an obsession for Paul, for Augustine, many others–not him.  But I think adultery was a serious sin for him, because it’s a sin of disloyalty, the breaking of a vow.  It’s a selfish act, putting your pleasures ahead of your duties to others.  And he was particularly angry at men who put their wives aside for younger women–the right to divorce couldn’t be equal if the men controlled most of the resources.  He cared much more about the rights of women than most men of his time.  He spent a great deal of time with women, talking to them seriously, and there may have been moments of attraction there.  (I am not talking about some supposed union with Mary Magdalene–nothing that specific.)

It isn’t the natural instinct that constitutes the sin, but how you express it–even if it’s only expressed in your imagination.  Sex isn’t sinful, except that sometimes we want it to be, because that makes it more exciting, more illicit.  And the reason he says that is that he wants men who condemn lust in others to acknowlege it in themselves.  To stop projecting their own sinfulness onto others.

And there is nothing Augustine of Hippo was more guilty of than that.  He made a career out of it, really.  

Well, much as I think the quote from Matthew represents something Jesus was remembered to have said, there’s quite a lot of context missing.  If he thought sexual desire in itself was such a huge problem, why does he hardly ever mention it?  And when he does, more in terms of what people think about doing, not about what they actually do.  There are no parables about sex at all.  He’s far more concerned with greed for money, hypocrisy, thinking yourself better than others, failing to help others–sex is so low on his list, it’s hardly even there.   And yet we know it was a big deal for John the Baptist, who got himself beheaded for commenting on the sex life of Herod Antipas.  

We spend a lot more time overall obsessing over the sex lives of others than we do having sex.  I can’t think of a single instance of Jesus condemning fornication, per se.  But Paul did it constantly.  Jesus seems less concerned with the act itself, than with the emotions it provokes.  

Truthfully, most firebrand preachers like to talk about sexual sin.  Draws a crowd, in any country, in any century.  But Jesus seems to have mainly steered clear of it.  Maybe because he was thinking that condemning libidinous behavior is just another way of enjoying it vicariously?  You know Augustine’s Confessions was one of the best-selling books in all history, right?  C.B. DeMille used to say that he got around the censors and the religious groups by having people in his films do all kinds of sinful things, then get punished for it in the end.  If the thought is as much as the deed, thinking in a condemning way about sex is–um–never mind.  

And I don’t know what you’re apologizing for here.  I know very well the PA is saying nobody is without sin, and therefore no one should condemn the sins of others.  Go and apologize no more.  😉

You know, there’s plenty of modern secular condemnation of male lust these days.  We don’t need Jesus for that.  What is interesting is that he never has anything critical to say about female desires, acted upon or not (which is hardly true of the Torah).  

They bring him a woman who has committed adultery, and he knows nothing about the circumstances–nor does she offer any explanation or apology–and he turns it back on her accusers, saves her life.   Whatever she has done, what her accusers have done is worse, and he will not stand in judgment of her.  

So is it really all about power?  

Who was this man?  What did he see, when he looked at the world?  Idol worship?  I don’t assume he cared about that.  Yes, Judaism is the only true religion to him, and his mission is primarily to fellow Jews, but his vision tells him that many Jews will not reach the Kindom, and many gentiles will.  Even if they are idol worshippers.  It’s all about how you treat others.  The outer forms of worship matter very little to him.  If he had talked much about such things, we’d have some record of it.  It wouldn’t be edited out.  Christians went around smashing pagan idols once they had the power to do so.  But the only pagan deity Jesus went after was, you might say, Mammon–in the temple–by overturning those tables.  

Now there is the Samaritan woman at the well–in John, and I’m skeptical of any story in John that isn’t in the other gospels.  (The Pericope Adulterae was added to John’s gospel later, and is clearly not a story the author of John would have approved of, so I’m much less skeptical of that.)  But ‘John’ probably had access to some stories the other evangelists didn’t have, or chose not to use. And would John have written “Salvation comes from the Jews”?  He was interested in Jesus’ relationship with the Samaritans (is is possible that ‘John’ was a Samaritan?)

You could say he’s critical of the woman at the well–for having five husbands, and living with a man out of wedlock.  But he doesn’t seem angry, merely amused.  Interested in her.  And she in him.  I believe there were many such conversations between Jesus and women he encountered.  He at no time condemns her.  He merely opens her eyes to other choices she might make.  

This is a story that has captured the imaginations of people all over the world.  Sometimes in the stories that grew out of this story, the figure representing Jesus is a bit more–spooky.  And the woman is more complex.  

Hngerhman said

I bring up idol worship (properly defined) – not as something to tarry upon – but as something that is easily derivable (perhaps even strictly deducible) from Jesus’s first most important commandment. So, (a) it strikes me he’d almost certainly have been against it, (b) he’d highly likely have run into it in gentile locales at some point, and (c) unless he was uncharacteristically reticent to voice his opinions on the matter, he probably said something about it to his disciples, even if only in passing. Just like he highly probably voiced an opinion about his favorite wine (Chateau de Cana!), or his least favorite Galilean village for hummus. We can assume he talked a lot about a lot of things that didn’t make it into the record. If that weren’t the case, then the record we have would suggest he was amongst the most laconic personages in history. So, in my mind, silence (when alone; but not when attached to supporting arguments, like you parallel embarrassment test in the burial conversation) is only strong enough an argument to demonstrate that whatever was or was not said, there is no written record of it.

 

And yes, he seems to have viewed that keeping the commandments would get one admission into the kingdom, even if not ethnically Jewish. It’s definitely neon-sign clear that he meant that these pagans (wittingly or unwittingly) had to follow the second most important commandment. I’m not sure it follows from his general silence that we can be confident that he meant that the pagans could also be idol worshippers (at least in their hearts). Perhaps he meant only staunch god-fearers (not to get into a controversial topic). I don’t know, and I’m not sure one can.
While piquant, I’m not intending to pick on sexual desire per se, even less any gendered version of it. I selected it because (a) the mention of it in your evolutionary discussion, and (b) to your point it is attention-grabbing. But, let’s go with Matt 5:22 – Jesus seems to treat anger, even when unacted upon, as a mindcrime. It’s not the specific sin I’m meaning to target, only that at least two are involuntary mental states (which we two moderns would attribute to evolutionary history). 

 

Does he or does he not think these are indeed sins? Not whether he condemns the sin, whether he counts them as sins.

 

At the least, he thinks they are sufficiently sin-adjacent. The prima facie read is that he thinks they are sins. Despite their involuntary and only-mental nature, still sinful. Which, if this is correct, smells like Augustinian original sin.

 

One possible emergency off-ramp is to deny he meant these mindcrimes are sins per se, but I don’t know what argument besides a hand-waving, aesthetic one there could be (but I’m open). One could also deny that he thought these mental states were voluntary. I have a hard time motivating the argument, too. But I’d love to see if someone could get it aloft. 

 

I have no real dog in this fight, I’m just enjoying the conversation and the dialectic. And I am not familiar enough with Pelagius to argue for/against – so I’m unfortunately stuck picking up the Augustinian side of the (fun false) dichotomy.  

Jesus certainly was guilty of ‘mindcrime at times’–he is often wrathful in the gospels.  He recognizes that no one is perfect, and in this world we live in, no one can be.  

When he says of John the Baptist, that no one born of woman is greater (meaning that John is equal to or greater than Jesus), but the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater–that’s because when you enter the Kingdom, your imperfections are left behind.  Therefore, you can reach the Kingdom as a sinner, or nobody would be in it.  The Kingdom is a realm where sinful thoughts no longer have a grip on us.  (One is moved to wonder what people do there.)

Of course Jesus must have said many things that aren’t in the gospels, but I think if he’d spent any great amount of time talking about idol worship, that would be mentioned, since discouraging pagan worship was a big part of Christianity, from the very start.  Maybe he just figured it went without saying, and he is mainly ministering to Jews.  Samaritans are also monotheists, and the difference between them and Jews has to do with religious practice, not underlying beliefs.  Jesus may have had some idea of an ecumenical movement reuniting Jews and Samaritans.  But mainly I think he took people one at a time, and didn’t worry so much about labels.  

It would be fascinating if we had any descriptions of encounters between Jesus and ardent pagans–and there were many.  But the pagans he meets never seem interested in plugging their own gods.  Pilate is depicted as some kind of Epicurean or Stoic, asking ‘what is truth?’   But nobody wants an answer to a rhetorical question.  

We certainly do have much condemnation of polytheistic beliefs in both the Old and New Testaments–not in the gospels.  Because, again, Jesus wasn’t that focused on the outward expressions of belief.