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Number One: “You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.” Matthew 5:38-39

As a former federal prosecutor who trains future prosecutors, this teaching challenges all that I do. Law enforcement is the very enterprise of resisting evildoers, and Jesus’s express rejection of retribution guts much of our purpose in sentencing criminals. How does a society survive if its citizens are committed to this directive?

These teachings scare some people more than others, of course. The Christian faith is an exercise in interpretation. Its primary text, the Bible, often contradicts itself if read as an undifferentiated whole. The need to interpret was emphasized by the teaching method of Jesus, who often spoke in parables and left it to his audience to divine the meaning.

Christians often disagree about even the rules that should be used to interpret this text. However, I would like to suggest one bedrock tenet, particularly in regard to the Gospels: When he was teaching through literal direction, Jesus never meant the exact opposite of what he actually taught. When he said “feed the hungry,” he did not mean “don’t feed the hungry.” This simple interpretive rule is what makes the five teachings described above so threatening. Unless we turn them upside-down, they upend some of the things we most want to believe. That, though, is what Christ promised: not an easy way, but a narrow path full of challenges.

Number Two: “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Matthew 10:34-36.

We want our faith to be pro-family, but it is clear that Jesus saw the faith as a cause of division. This is tough to swallow, but also abundantly clear. In other parts of the Gospels, he promises eternal life to those who leave their families to follow him, and we see him reject his own family when they come to visit, turning instead to his followers and saying that they are his mother and brothers. It wasn’t nuanced, and it wasn’t hypothetical– Jesus’s apostles really did abandon their families. For example, we know that Peter was married, but his wife probably was left impoverished and overwhelmed when he abandoned her and his job for three years to follow Jesus.

The archaeologists claim their study shows that text in the Bible was compiled long after the events described in it and challenges the holy book as a historical document

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