2013

Infant baptism reflects traditional family values.

Jesus’ Family Values

Jesus never said, “The family that prays together stays together.” Instead, he said that his disciples were to hate their families: their parents, their siblings, and their children. As Bible verses go, Luke 14:26 doesn’t get a lot of play in Sunday school. Jesus preached about the Reign of God, a blessed spiritual state that people could enter, but only after they cut ties to the everyday world. “Let the dead bury the dead,” said Jesus to the man with a duty to bury his father. For early Christians, joining the church generally meant renouncing one’s family. In the gentile congregations that Paul founded, a convert underwent baptism, in which they died and were reborn into a new family, the “body of Christ.” In general, once you were baptized, you were then expected not to sin for the rest of your life. Abstention from sex was the ideal, even for married Christians. Becoming a Christian in the first century was sort of like joining a monastery, a convent, or a cult today. It set you apart from your family and from your society.

As for Jesus’ own mother and brothers, he said they were not his true family. His brothers may have been upset at him for not setting up shop in Nazareth and bringing gifts their way. Once Jesus was dead, his family moved in. His brother James took over as the leader of Jesus’ sect, centered in Jerusalem. Other relatives apparently led congregations of Jewish Christians in the surrounding area. This Jewish phase of Christianity, however, got written out of history after Jerusalem was destroyed and Paul’s gentile-friendly version of the sect became the norm.

The idea that Jesus supports conservative family values reflects Christianity’s later development into a mainstream religion. Baptism became a baby’s initiation into society, and gospel verses about forsaking your family were quietly neglected. Before Christianity turned mainstream, however, it rejected the mainstream way of life, right down to family ties.

Gospel Verses

Hating your family: Luke 14:26. The Jesus Seminar rates this saying as pink, or “probable.”

Dead bury the dead: Matthew 8:22, Luke 9:59-60. Rated pink.

Jesus’ biological family is not his true family: Matthew 12:48, Thomas 99:2. Rated pink.

More on Jesus’ Family

Was Jesus a bastard?