I am neither a Jew nor a Christian, but I find it ironic that many Christians insist that the Bible is the infallible Word of God, considering that Jesus did not teach that and indeed seemed to indicate that fallible MEN made some parts of it.
Matthew 19:3-9
3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”
4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?”
8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
This passage strikes at the very heart of fundamentalist dogma, that the entire Bible from the first verse in Genesis to the last verse of Revelation, was revealed by God and has absolute authority over men. Of course, if you are an Orthodox Jew, you would naturally take offense at anyone overturning a law of the Torah. But often Christian sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses also fall prey to excessive legalism, which Jesus denied! If certain laws in the Torah were made by Moses, not God, why not allow for the possibility that other passages, even in the New Testament, were also made by men for a specific time and people, not by God for all peoples and all times? How can we tell?
We can’t, which is why Biblical authority is a concept we need to discard.
What Jesus says here is a good example of the old testament law being faulty. Another good example is found in Hebrews 8 which talks about the “new covenant” verses the old which is the Old Testament law. Verse 7 says, “For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another.” Verse 13 then says, “By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.”
By that definition, there are “faults” with the Torah, and therefore there are faults in the Bible since the Torah is still included in Bible itself.
Another thing: The verse from Matthew that you give talks more about Divorce. Along with Jesus’s answer that Moses wrote out of the “hardness of their hearts,” and not because it was God’s plan, I would also like to point out that even the Old Testament prophets looked down on Divorce. — In Malachi 2: 16, God himself is quoted as saying, “I hate divorce.”
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