A key issue that was faced by the New Testament Church Essay

Examine a key jazz that was faced by the New Testament Church (whoredom). Could these arguments used in the first century be used by the Church of immediately for this problem?Prostitution is the performance of internal runs solely for the purpose of sensible gain. Persons mistress themselves when they grant favours to others in exchange for m integrityy, gifts or other payments and in so doing use their bodies as commodities. In legal terms, the word defile refers only to those who engage overtly in much(prenominal) knowledgeable-economic transactions, usu e genuinelyy for a specific sum of money. Prostitutes may be of either sex, but throughout history, the majority bewilder been women, reflecting twain the traditional socio-economic dependence of women and the tendency to mould fe mascu specify sexuality.Although prostitution has much been characterised as the worlds oldest profession, the concept of women as property, which prevailed in most centuries until the end of the nineteenth century, meant that the profits of the profession most often ended up in the hands of the men who controlled it. Men obligate traditionally been characterised as procurers and customers, but during the latter half of the twentieth century, they argon increasingly being identified as kept womans themselves, who generally serve anthropoid customers and sometimes im soulate women.The Torah (Law) had little to say on the subject of blasphemous prostitution. It prohibited p bents from dedicating their children as sacred vilifys, but there is nonhing to regularize us whether its writers would have objected equally to the ideas of a master making his slave- adult female a secular prostitute or even a bugger off doing so with his lady friend.There are two references to secular prostitution in the aged Testament, which offer any details as to how it was regarded. In both cases, an undivided women is chthonianstood to have chosen this course of action on her let and thereby brought disgrace on her father. In one passage, a priests daughter who plays the harlot is condemned to be burned for having profaned her father (Leviticus 219). one and only(a) may think that she is part of her fathers household, either as non yet married or as a split or widowed woman. Her activity threatens the state of purity vital to the household, since its diet comes largely from the altar of the temple.In Deuteronomy (2213-21) a man charges that his wife was not frame to be a virgin on her wedding night. If this were true, she would be stoned for having played the harlot in her fathers house. In other words, she has engaged in sexual parley when she ought to have been guarding her virginity carefully in order to be a suitable bride.In the process, she has undecided her father to shame of having misrepresented her state in negotiating her marriage. It is not shed light on from the passage that she actually receives payment for her services the point seems to be, rather, that she has deprived her father and her nomineeive husband of their rights in her. What was wrong with prostitution, from the perspective of ancient Israel, was not so much the freehanded or receiving of payment for sexual intercourse as it was the removal of sexual intercourse from the framework of property and power structure which normally contained it and ensured that it was placed at the service of the family.Such an interpretation is do explicit in a more extensive critique of prostitution found in Proverbs. After warning the reader against the wiles of the loose woman, the author contrasts the positive ideal of possessing a wife with a negative prospect of wasting ones resources on a courtesan (Proverbs 515-23).Having said that, one cannot treat wisdom literature as if it were the very(prenominal) genre as legislation. It is clear that Proverbs turn backs with the Torah in understanding prostitution, as usurpation to Gods will, not merely as something t o be avoided for prudential reasons. Still, the justification offered for the bulwark is intrusive as to the ethical framework in which the prohibition itself belonged. Prostitution was wrong because it stood outside the normal patriarchal system in which the male head of the household owned one or more women as sexual partners. As such, it threatened the interests of the family. The man might feel that he had received full value for his expense, but the family gained nothing at all from his patronising of the prostitute. His action, therefore was a betrayal of his responsibilities, since he existed not to recreate his own desires but to maintain and enhance the fortunes of his fathers house.What the Torah and Proverbs agree upon then is the condemnation of those who place personal gratification fore of family duty. The Torah condemns the single(a) woman who prefers sexual pleasure above her obligations as a advantageously daughter of the household who essential preserve her marriageability, which is, indeed the familys coronation in her. Proverbs condemns the man who spends family resources on private pleasure. He should marry a woman and be content with the sexual pleasure he receives from her. Proverbs was have-to doe with to make the prostitute sound as unscrupulous and unattractive as possible. The Torah was speaking to the woman who was trying to behave as an unattached someone in pursuit of pleasure while still remaining under the protection of her father. According to the Torah, prostitution, though a slightly less serious crime than adultery, was wrong insofar as it represented the triumph of case-by-case gratification over against the principle of subordination to the family.The matter of prostitution receives very little attention from the Gospel writers, but it appears in a prodigious pronouncement of Jesus. The tax collectors and the prostitutes, he said, were entering the Kingdom of God ahead of respectable religious leaders (chief p riests and elders) because they believed the preaching of caper the Baptist (Matt 2123-32). Since John preached repentance (Matt 32) one may suspect that prostitutes ceased to be such when they came to believe the message. It proves difficult, however, to be certain. The tax collectors presumably did not cease to be tax collectors (In Luke 191-10, the tax collector Zacchaeus, upon his conversion, gave half of his property to the poor people and made amends to those he has defrauded). A prostitute would have found it singularly difficult to emerge from her low place in the community.We hunch little about them in Jewish times. In the contemporary hedonist world, however, most of them were slaves, who could not legally abandon their status. Even free prostitutes, if poor, would have had only the most limited of options, since they would not have been acceptable as wives. Our own presuppositions, then, may perhaps dictate whether we think of these women as giving up prostitution or n ot. Luke 736-50 sees Jesus anointed by a public sinner. While she is not labelled as a prostitute, it is one conclusion that could be possibly said about her.Jesus accepts her intentions, contrasts them favourably with those of her host, the Pharisee, and finally says, Her sins, many as they are, are forgiven because she has loved much (747). This does not tell us what Jesus preferred prostitutes to do, but it does suggest that he did not make grace conditional on prostitutes escaping her place in society. The most significant thing is that Jesus held them up to the religious leading as a model of repentance for them to follow, thus implying that the respectable are not unlike the prostitutes in respect to sin. Since Jesus held them up as a religious example, we may guess that although he took prostitution to be ethically wrong, he followed the example of Proverbs in appointing blame to the man who visited the prostitute more than to the prostitute herself.Paul has little to say a bout sexual ethics in his main doctrinal statement, the Epistle to the Romans, except the forceful naming of sexual immorality with humanities alienation from God (Romans 124-27). However, in his letters to the other churches he is forced to address the topic because of the deportment of certain individuals in those churches, particularly at Corinth.The Christians at Corinth produced highly diverging interpretations of what the Gospel demanded in the way of sexual ethics, ranging from libertinism to a complete rejection of both marriage and sexual intercourse. It is probable that the libertine party at Corinth had follow slogans such as All things are permitted and Food is for the swell up and the belly for food (implying that sexual intercourse is as uncomplicated an expression of inwrought desire as eating is). Paul argues that the body of a Christian belongs to Christ. Therefore, all sexual expression, then, must take Christs self-command into account.Sex with a prostitute might seem to establish no kin at all beyond the brief one inevitable for the sanctification of desire. Paul claims that every sexual act between man and woman established a union of flesh, like that of marriage. In other words, the prostitute and the man, who has used her, actually belong to each other for the duration of their sexual intercourse, though not beyond. In Pauls own language, the relationship thus established is one body but in the terminology of Genesis, it is a relationship of one flesh. Paul insisted that the man who had intercourse with the prostitute was not unchanged by that act. However, it was destructive of ones tone of voice the relation to Christ and to GodEvery sin that a person commits is outside the body, but the man who uses harlots is sinning against his own body. (1 Corinthians 18-20)It is evident that where Proverbs discourages a man from using prostitutes because he belonged to his family, Paul discouraged it because he belonged to God. The body, the person as a whole, is the spirits temple, into which other forms of worship must not be introduced. One might well ask, then, whether the implication of this line of reasoning is not, finally, to forbid sexual intercourse altogether.1From whichever interpretation or opinion one adopts, as a Christian, or more to the point, as human beings, it should be understood that the use of prostitutes or the actual act of prostitution is both morally and ethically wrong. It is a sin against God, in that it undervalues the gift of love, through intercourse, given to us by God, and moreover, it shows a deficiency of respect for the body and minds of others.BIBLIOGRAPHYCave, S The Christian Way, Nisbet and Company Limited, 1963Countryman, L.W Dirt, Greed and Sex, safeguard crusade, 1988Hays, R.B The Moral Vision of the New Testament, Harper Collins Publishers, 1996Manson, T.W Ethics and the Gospel, SCM Press Limited, 19601 Countryman, L Dirt, Greed and Sex p205