Mediaite.com:
Former Democratic president and born-again Christian Jimmy Carter declared today that he believed that Jesus would embrace gay marriage. In support of this belief, flying in the fact of 2,000 years of scriptural and historical scholarship, Jimmy Carter cited noted theologian Jimmy Carter.Great piece and Jimmy Carter is obviously old and senile. Meantime I'm still surprised that a leftist site like Mediaite would hire a really good conservative writer like Alex Groswold.
Let’s take a look at some of the language Carter and host Marc Lamont Hill used:
All of which seems be a tacit admission that Carter realizes there’s basically no textual or historical support for his assertion. He just believes that he’s right. And feelings, as the modern left will tell you, trump all.
- “I believe he would, I believe Jesus would.”
- “I don’t have any verse in scripture…”
- “No no no, just intuitively, yeah.”
- “I’m not– that’s just my own personal belief.”
There are two major and popular perceptions of Jesus, the divine Jesus Christ and the so-called “Historical Jesus,” historians’ attempt to reconstruct Jesus’ life without making any claims of divinity. Either way you conceive of Jesus, it’s extremely unlikely he was a gay marriage supporter.
If Jesus was just a man, he was a peasant in 1st century Galilee. He was a member of a religious community with extremely strict, patriarchal marriage laws and that believed homosexuality should be punished with death. The notion that he would have positive beliefs towards gay marriage literally millennia before any of the world’s brightest minds even considered that marriage could exist outside of a man-woman marriage… well, it’s more than a little far-fetched.
If there are any atheists or skeptics who do believe that Jesus was so incredibly prescient and ahead of his time, I earnestly suggest you might as well embrace His omniscience and divinity. But of course, you’d have to believe that the same disciples who copied down Jesus’ radical claims of divinity and complete equality of the sexes, races, and classes accidentally forgot to add the gay thing.
As for the notion that the Jesus of the Gospels — the Messiah and Son of God that Carter has worshiped for a lifetime — would support gay marriage… well, Carter was right to admit he didn’t have any scripture to quote. The kindest interpretation is that the Gospels are silent about gay marriage. At worst, they are explicit that marriage is intended to be between man and woman.
“Have you not read that He Who made them in the first place made them man and woman?” Jesus told the religious leaders of the day, “It says, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and will live with his wife. The two will become one.’ So they are no longer two but one. Let no man divide what God has put together.” How heterocisnormative, am I right?
RELATED: Jimmy Carter: ‘I Believe That Jesus Would Approve of Gay Marriage’
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