David Madison - Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadnt Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words

D evout followers of Jesus pay special attention to his words, and many love a special edition of the Bible in which the words of Jesus are printed in red. Bible editors use this technique to reinforce confidence that Jesus actually spoke the wordsand it works. I know what Jesus said in the Bible, because its written in red, said one woman to her new pastor.

When I was a kid growing up in a conservative Methodist Church in rural Indiana, some of these words in red didnt sound quite right to me. For example, to one man who wanted to follow Jesus but said he had to go bury his father first, Jesus replied, Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God. That seemed rude to me, but Jesus was our Lord and Savior, so I couldnt let it bother me too much. But the problem of questionable Jesus sayings didnt go away. In fact, it got worse the more I read the gospels carefully as I got older.

In Part 1: Ten Troublesome Teachings, Ill direct your attention to ten Jesus teachings that are far more troublesome than his one-off comment about burying the dead. Even if you attend church regularly, its possible you might not have noticed these teachingsor youve noticed, but it makes you too uncomfortable to dwell on them.

The obvious question here is: How could I be so presumptuous that I would claim to know that Christians wish Jesus hadnt taught certain things, and if so, what those things might be. Its a fair question. The answer is simple.

When large numbersperhaps the majority of Christiansignore a teaching of Jesus or insist that its meaning is something dramatically different from what his words clearly communicate, it is logical to assume these Christians would be more comfortable if Jesus had never said such a thing.

Im calling out a silent rebellion by followers of Jesusincluding many of his most devout disciplesagainst some of his key teachings. One characteristic of these teachings is that if they were uttered by anyone other than Jesus, these same believers would reject them immediately and openly instead of pretending they must mean something else or are too mysterious to grasp.

As my ideas for this book were coming together, I reread the gospels carefullyfor the umpteenth time in my 78 yearsand this time built a chart listing the problematic Jesus sayings in the gospels. In making this list, I went along with the common Christian assumption that the gospel authors captured the real words of Jesusthat we can pick up the Bible and find out what Jesus really saidan assumption that makes all these words fair game for careful and critical scrutiny.

Just how did I determine which sayings belonged on the chart? I had a few standards in mind. One was moral value. Another was distance from magical thinking and superstition. But another issue guided me as wella bit of wisdom from my childhood. In attorney Joseph N. Welchs famous 1954 encounter with Senator Joseph McCarthynow so long ago and far awayWelch asked him: Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency? I was looking for decency in Jesus. When I came across sayings that failed the decency test, I added them to the list.

The total count of problematic quotes by Jesus came to 292. But I didnt want my readers to get bogged down in an endless discussion of them all, so I decided to focus on ten teachings of Jesus that Christians themselves appear to agree are problematic.