Of all the misrepresented passages where Jesus expresses moral ideas, one of the places in the Bible where the greatest number of misunderstood claims are found all together is Matthew 5. There are already a host of popular errors about what Jesus says concerning murder and anger, adultery and lust, and Lex Talionis in this chapter. Some add to these errors by interpreting what Jesus says by the time he gets to the subject of Lex Talionis differently than they interpret what he says on the prior topics--even though he uses the same phrases in an identical way! No, Jesus is not setting Lex Talionis aside in favor of something new, not that "eye for eye" ever Biblically had the scope that most people assume [1], yet that is exactly what many people think he says even though they interpret the earlier verses of the chapter differently.
Consider Matthew 5:21-22. Contrasting what people of his day had heard with something they seem to have ignored or never thought about, Jesus references the command to not murder and then touches upon unjust anger. Jesus is not saying that murder is no longer sinful and that avoiding anger without cause is now the replacement moral obligation to not murdering people. He is very plainly elaborating on the implications of the command to not murder and remaining consistent with the obligation described in the original command. Only a fool would read this and actually think Jesus is unbinding people from one obligation and giving them a new one. In actuality, he is describing something that is not contrary to the command to not murder in any way. Likewise, in saying "You have heard that it was said 'You shall not commit adultery'" in Matthew 5:27, Jesus is not nullifying a core command of Mosaic Law and replacing it with the obligation to not lust.
The vital issues of how Matthew 5:28, the very next verse, is misunderstood to mean that men are more sexually inclined or depraved than women and how lust is just coveting (and not sexual attraction, which is sometimes involuntary, or intentional sexual fantasies) aside, Jesus is not "correcting" or abandoning Mosaic Law's condemnation of adultery. He is clarifying that wishing to take someone's spouse for oneself, or coveting their spouse, is immoral if the act of adultery is morally wrong. In fact, coveting is also prohibited in Mosaic Law, so while the link between the two is addressed very directly here, the link was already there in the Old Testament, and the conceptual link would have been there even if coveting was not mentioned in the Old Testament. Nothing he is saying requires some special additions to the Old Testament to realize them, and Jesus is not contradicting, trivializing, or departing from Mosaic Law in any way.
When evangelicals read Matthew 5:38-42 and see a reference to Lex Talionis, which never had anything to do with the punishments for most Biblical crimes as it is and is thus irrelevant to punishments for things like rape [1], they suddenly think that Jesus uses the phrases "You have heard that it was said" and "But I tell you" to mean that the Lex Talionis command of God was flawed or now outdated. However, why would this phrasing all of the sudden mean that what Jesus quotes from Mosaic Law is evil or subpar when it did not mean this in the previous examples given in the exact same chapter? There is no hint of evidence that one part of Matthew 5 using these phrases is meant to be understood differently than the others.
In one way or another, most readers of the Bible make easily avoidable assumptions for the sake of some preconceived bias for or against an idea. The vast majority of what theological conservatives and liberals alike claim the Bible teaches are contradicted by the texts they allegedly stand on. When they do get something right about Christian theology, it is often by accident, arrived at through sheer selective bursts of rationality or even at the expense of everything but correctness on a single isolated point. Matthew 5 is just one of many places in the Bible that they distort for the sake of traditions and preferences. The words of Jesus as presented in the Bible are rarely sought in order to identify what the Bible actually says. It is far more common for people in general to seek a superficially misleading kind of "affirmation" of what they already assumed the Bible teaches.
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