Tag Archives: Clay Jones

Difficult Bible Passages

Did Joshua Kill Innocent Canaanite Adults During the Conquest? Part 3

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Clay Jones, in this blog post, provides even more evidence that God, in the Old Testament, spares those who repent of their sin. Consider the story of Sodom and Gomorrah found in Genesis. Abraham asks God:

Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?

God offers to spare the cities if even ten righteous people can be found. We know how the story ends. Not even ten people could be found and both cities are destroyed. Jones writes:

The evil which seduced the people of Sodom and Gomorrah may have surprised Abraham and may surprise us, but it didn’t surprise God. Certainly we learn several things from this passage. One, Sodom and Gomorrah were completely depraved. Two, God knows hearts and therefore knows who will and who won’t repent. Three, God would allow entire cities to live if it meant that a handful of righteous wouldn’t die. Four, God was willing to give evidence of Sodom and Gomorrah’s wickedness so that He couldn’t be accused of killing the righteous with the wicked. And five, when God destroyed these cities, he only killed the wicked.

Jones then points us to the Book of Jeremiah.

The Lord warned Israel that if they let the Canaanites live that they would be seduced by their sin and then God would do the same thing to Israel. Well, we know that happened, and so the Lord sent prophets to warn them to repent—to no avail. Then the Lord said in Jeremiah 5:1-2: ‘Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem, look around and consider, search through her squares. If you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth, I will forgive this city. Although they say, “As surely as the Lord lives,” still they are swearing falsely.’

Then in verses 3-5 Jeremiah reports that he looked but that he couldn’t find anyone who would repent. So in v. 6 he concludes: ‘Therefore a lion from the forest will attack them, a wolf from the desert will ravage them, a leopard will lie in wait near their towns to tear to pieces any who venture out, for their rebellion is great and their backslidings many.’ Notice that, just as with Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord made sure that the world would know that He knows when there are no good people in a city.

Finally, Jones points to the Book of Ezekiel.

Consider also this passage from Ezekiel 14:13-14, ‘Son of man, when a land sins against me by acting faithlessly, and I stretch out my hand against it and break its supply of bread and send famine upon it, and cut off from it man and beast, even if these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they would deliver but their own lives by their righteousness, declares the Lord God.’ In the following verses the Lord says this is true when He kills with ‘wild beasts,’ or a ‘sword,’ or ‘pestilence.’

Then in v. 22 the Lord says, ‘But behold, some survivors will be left in it, sons and daughters who will be brought out; behold, when they come out to you, and you see their ways and their deeds, you will be consoled for the disaster that I have brought upon Jerusalem, for all that I have brought upon it.’ Why will the people who witnessed their destruction be consoled by seeing these survivors? In the next verse the Lord tells us: ‘They will console you, when you see their ways and their deeds, and you shall know that I have not done without cause all that I have done in it, declares the Lord God.’ Again, notice that the Lord cares that the people of that day realized that the people He had killed were depraved and deserved to die.

So what can we conclude? The Bible portrays the Canaanites as the most morally depraved individuals most of us could imagine. They are squatters on land that God has given Israel. God held Israel to the same standards as the Canaanites and He eventually pushed Israel out of the land when their sin reached a climax. Finally, we have very good reason to believe from several Bible passages that God would spare any individuals who repented of their sin and followed Him. Thus, no innocent Canaanites were killed by Joshua.

Bible Interpretation, Difficult Bible Passages

Why Does God Order the Killing of Canaanite Livestock?

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During the conquest of Canaan, the Israelites were sometimes commanded to kill all the domesticated animals living among the Canaanites. Why would God command this? The simple answer is this: the Canaanites were having sexual relations with their animals.

OK, I know this is totally disgusting to us moderns, but that is how it was in the ancient near east. Christian scholar Clay Jones writes about the issue of bestiality among the Canaanites in this blog post and in a paper called “We Don’t Hate Sin.”

Jones first provides evidence of ancient near east attitudes about bestiality:

Hittite Laws 199 states, ‘If anyone has intercourse with a pig or dog, he shall die. If a man has intercourse with a horse or mule, there is no punishment.’

There should be no surprise that bestiality would occur for the Canaanites since the god they worshiped practiced it. From the Canaanite epic poem, The Baal Cycle we learn:

Mightiest Baal hears; He makes love with a heifer in the outback, A cow in the field of Death’s Realm.

He lies with her seventy times seven, Mounts eighty times eight; [She conceiv]es and bears a boy.

Further records from the ancient near east mandate that animals be tied to the bed before intercourse: “At my head a buck is tied. At my feet [a ram is tied]! Buck caress me! [Ram], copulate with me!”

From the Egyptian dream book, Jones notes that it is a bad omen for a woman to dream about sex with various rodents, birds, and reptiles, but it is a good omen for a woman to dream about having sex with a baboon, wolf, and goat.

In short, scholars have confirmed that bestiality was rampant among the nations surrounding Israel. In contrast, the God of Israel mandated the death penalty for anyone caught having sex with an animal (see Lev 20:15). The animal itself also must be killed.

Therefore, since the Israelites would be pushing out the people of Canaan (and killing those who refused to leave), the sexualized animals left behind also had to be killed. These animals, who were used to having sex with humans, could not possibly be allowed to remain around the Israelites, both for practical reasons, and for spiritual reasons.

Jones records the fact that even the ancient Hittites recognized the problems that sexualized animals could cause.

They also needed to point out when humans might not be at fault: ‘If an ox spring upon a man for intercourse, the ox shall die but the man shall not die…. If a pig spring upon a man for intercourse, there is no punishment.’ Notice that even the Hittites, who engaged in sex with animals, realized that oxen who tried to mount people had to die.

Is it the animals fault that humans were having sex with them? No, but Jones argues that the innocent are always impacted by the sins of the guilty. It is a ridiculous notion to think that one person’s sin can be contained and not harm others. Sin always harms others.

Bible Interpretation, Difficult Bible Passages, Top Ten Posts of 2012

Are You Worried About the Unpardonable Sin? Part 1 – #3 Post of 2012

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If you are worried, then it’s likely that you have not committed the unpardonable sin.  This sin is first mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 12, verses 31-32, in the context of Jesus’s healing of a demon-possessed man.  As always, when reading the Bible, we need to look at the surrounding verses before we can draw any conclusions about the meaning of verses 31-32.

In verse 22, a demon-possessed man who is blind and mute is brought to Jesus.  The text says that Jesus heals him, but some religious authorities who are Pharisees, instead of acknowledging that Jesus’s miraculous healing was of God, accuse him of using the power of Satan to drive out the demons.

In response, Jesus makes four rejoinders in verses 25-29.  First, he says that it is illogical for Satan to be casting out his own demons.  Second, among the Pharisees themselves there were exorcists, so Jesus asks if they also cast out demons by the power of Satan.  Of course they would deny this.  Third, Jesus explains that if he is driving out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has arrived.  Fourth, Jesus explains that in order for Satan’s forces to be cast out, someone stronger than Satan must be acting – the Spirit of God.

After refuting the Pharisees’s accusations, Jesus gives a most serious warning in verses 30-32:

He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.  And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.  Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.

So what is this blasphemy against the Spirit that will not be forgiven?  In context, it appears Jesus is referring to the Pharisee’s denial that Jesus’s miraculous healing was of the Spirit of God.   The blasphemy of the Spirit, according to J. F. Walvoord, is: “attributing to Satan what is accomplished by the power of God.”  Clay Jones puts it this way: “They attributed the undeniable, unambiguous, healing work of the Holy Spirit – in this case He freed a man from being ravaged by a demon that resulted in the man’s being blind and mute – to the power of Satan.”

Now that we have a better understanding of what the unpardonable sin is, we need to dig into why Jesus chose this time and this group of people to issue his dire warning.  We will tackle that in part 2.

Textual Criticism, Top Ten Posts of 2012

How Do Other Ancient Texts Compare to the New Testament? #10 Post of 2012

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

When considering the trustworthiness of the New Testament (NT) documents, the first question we need to ask is, “Have these documents been accurately transmitted to us since they were originally written?”

In order to answer this question about the textual transmission of documents of the ancient world, historians look at the number of existing manuscript copies (MSS) of the original text and they look at the time gap between the earliest existing MSS and the date when the original document was written.  The more MSS, the better we are able to reconstruct the original.  The shorter the time gap, the better we are able to reconstruct the original.  This is referred to as the bibliographical test.

Christians have pointed out for decades that the NT documents are far superior in both dimensions of the bibliographical test.  There are more existing MSS and the time gap for those MSS is the shortest when compared to other documents of ancient history.

Clay Jones, professor at Biola University, has recently updated the data that compares the Greek NT documents (as a group) to other documents of ancient history in an article published in the Christian Research Journal.  Below are the results of his research:

Author Work Date Written Earliest MSS Time Gap Number of MSS
Homer Iliad 800 BC c. 400 BC 400 1757
Herodotus History 480-425 BC 10th C 1350 109
Sophocles Plays 496-406 BC 3rd C BC 100-200 193
Plato Tetralogies 400 BC AD 895 1300 210
Caesar Gallic Wars 100-44 BC 9th C 950 251
Livy History of Rome 59 BC-AD 17 Early 5th C 400 150
Tacitus Annals AD 100 AD 850 750-950 33
Pliny, the Elder Natural History AD 49-79 5th C fragment: 1; Rem. 14-15th C 400 200
Thucydides History 460-400 BC 3rd C BC 200 96
Demosthenes Speeches 300 BC Some fragments from 1 C BC 1100+ 340
Greek NT AD 50-100 AD 130 40 5795

The table illustrates that the Greek NT does extremely well with both the time gap (40 years) and the number of MSS (5795), as compared to all the other documents in the table.  But the situation is even better for the NT because we haven’t yet mentioned all the MSS of the NT in other languages.

Jones reveals that there are over 2000 Armenian, almost 1000 Coptic, 6 Gothic, more than 600 Ethiopian, more than 10000 Latin, more than 350 Syriac, 43 Georgian, and more than 4000 Slavic manuscript copies of the NT.

The only conclusion one can reasonably reach is that we have more confidence in the textual transmission of the NT than in any other document of ancient history.  To question the transmission accuracy of the NT texts we have today is to question all of ancient history.

Bible Interpretation, Difficult Bible Passages

Are You Worried About the Unpardonable Sin? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this post, we learned what exactly the unpardonable sin is – attributing to Satan what is accomplished by the Spirit of God.  But what caused Jesus to give this stern warning to this particular group of people?  It is important to understand so that we can know how to apply Jesus’s warning today.  For the answer, we just continue reading Matt. 12 to get an idea of the kind of people Jesus is admonishing:

Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.  The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him.  But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken.  For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.

Clay Jones summarizes Jesus’s words for us: “The Pharisees’ blasphemy wasn’t a hastily uttered slip of the tongue or simply a mistaken apprehension of reality.  Rather, it was a knowing, deliberate, and final rejection for which they will give an account of themselves on the Day of Judgment.”

Craig Blomberg adds: “Even if all the details are unclear, we should observe that in this text only Jesus’ enemies are in any danger—those who have never professed any allegiance to him and, at least in the pages of Scripture, never do. Instead, they intensify their opposition to the point of crucifying him.”

To further illustrate how hard-hearted the Pharisees are, we should note that even after Jesus issues his warning, this same group of people asks Jesus for another miraculous sign in verse 39!  Clay Jones comments, “It was as if they said, ‘Even though you have healed a blind and mute man in our presence, demonstrated your dominance over spiritual beings, and have refuted our arguments – we still need more proof that what you do is of God.”  Jesus aptly responds, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign.”

You can now see that the unpardonable sin does not apply to a Christian living today who utters some hasty or angry words toward God that he later regrets.  As Jones explains, “The very fact that a person would be concerned about his or her relationship with Jesus is evidence that he or she isn’t hardened against the Holy Spirit.”

But for those who persist in rejecting any and all evidence that Jesus is from God, his warning stands.  At some point, a line is crossed.  “By your words you will be condemned.”