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roland comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong
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"Turn the other cheek" is a phrase with a natural figurative meaning—"expose yourself to further aggression". Are you saying that this figurative meaning should itself be taken figuratively, or just that "turn the other cheek" should not be interpreted literally literally?
Here is the whole:
Matthew 5:39
"Turn the other cheek" can only be understood if you know the cultural context of the time which goes as follows:
The left hand was considered unclean so people used the right hand and for a person to strike your right cheek with his right hand implies that he is giving you a backhand slap. This was understood as a humiliating gesture that a higher ranking person would dish out to someone lower in status, e.g. a master to his servant. Now, if you received such a slap and proceed to offer the other cheek you would put the higher ranking person in a conundrum. He can no longer reach your right cheek with a backhand slap, the only option he has left is attacking you on the left cheek. But attacking on the left didn't have the same social connotation, it probably would just be interpreted as a de facto aggressive behavior, implying that the higher ranking person is acknowledging you as socially equal and also giving you the right to fight back.
The same logic is also present in "walking another mile" and "leaving the undergarmnet"(which are part of the same biblical passage).
So we can see that offering the other cheek puts the other in check and has nothing to do with "exposing oneself to further aggression" or being meek and humble, it is in fact a gesture of defiance, a very clever one.
Former christian here. Every once in a while, I catch myself about to--or worse, in the middle of--recounting an explanation like the one you just gave for which I have no evidence other than some pastor's word. On more than one of those occasions, the recalled explanation was just wrong. I haven't googled your explanation here, so it's possible that there's lots of evidence for it, but my prior for that is fairly low (it seems like a really specific piece of cultural information, and it pattern matches against "story that reinterprets well known biblical passage in a way that makes the inconvenient and obvious interpretation incorrect").
I'm incredibly pessimistic about the abilities of the average christian pastor at weighing the evidence for multiple competing historical hypotheses and coming up with the most correct answer (it's basically their job to be bad at this). I know that reversed stupidity is not intelligence, but as a rule I no longer repeat things I "learned" in a church setting unless I've independently verified it.
(Oh, and: my apologies if you came by that story via a more rigorous process.)
I was interested enough to google, and found some relevant links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_the_other_cheek has (unlinked, presumably offline) references for an explanation like that.
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/9385 has more of the argument and says "resist not evil" is a biased or incorrect translation invented by King James' bible translators.
From the above page (by Walter Wink): "Jesus did not tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. His entire ministry is at odds with such a preposterous idea." - I had noticed that a lot of his behaviour described in the bible was inconsistent with this doctrine. He makes more sense without it.
This seems strange. I don't know Greek so I can't look at the closest to original text, but I can read some Latin. So I looked at the Vulgatus which is both a) Catholic and b) predating the KJV by many centuries. That uses the phrase here "Non resistere malo" means something like "don't resist the bad" but might be closer to "don't fight bad things".
Alright, wikipedia has better evidence than I expected, although I'm also not going to read the referenced book.
Wink's piece is coherent and well-put, but doesn't seem like great evidence-- I cannot tell if he mentally wrote his conclusion before or after making those arguments, and I can't tell which elements are actual features of ANE culture identified by historians and which are things that just sounded reasonable to him.
There are specific things that pastors are required to be wrong about yet when it comes to adding mere details for the sake of little more than curiosity there is little reason to believe they would be worse than average. For most part, of course, they will be simply teaching what they were taught and theological college - the evidence weighing is done by others. This is how most people operate.
What you say is true for competent pastors. I've probably been exposed to more than my fair share of the incompetent ones.
...I noticed a long time before I deconverted that when pastors said something about a subject I knew something about, they were totally wrong some ridiculously high percentage of the time. Should have tipped me off.
I've been fortunate in as much as several of my pastors and most of my lay preachers had science degrees. Mind you I suspect I've selected out most of the bad ones since I do recall I used to spend time with my family absolutely bagging the crap out of those preachers who said silly things.
I didn't learn that in a church setting, I read it on the internet in a page that claimed this to be the result of some scholar. What I liked most about the explanation is that it makes sense of the weird examples: cheek slapping(usually men use their fists if they mean to be aggressive) and forcing someone to walk a mile(makes sense if you assume the roman occupation context). So it is the best explanation I heard up to date, sigh.
Hm, as Caspian says it shows up on wikipedia.
I think I have heard a garbled version of this story before, which probably contributed to my skepticism (which, if you squint just right, makes my prior comment an example of the thing I was protesting).
Anyway, I'll retract the accusatory nature of my prior comment. I'm still pretty skeptical, but I don't care enough to read the book wikipedia references. :)
I noticed after posting that roland had linked to the same wikipedia page I did with nearly the same URL in his earlier comment http://lesswrong.com/lw/9p/extreme_rationality_its_not_that_great/6gc
Looks like we both missed it.
Huh. I recall reading the rest of that comment. Joke's on me, I guess.
I encountered an identical explanation on the History Channel a decade ago (this was back when the history channel was actually about history beyond Nostradamus and Hitler).
This explanation is neat, but it sounds quite contrived to me, especially since the previous sentence clearly says, "do not resist an evil person". Is there any reason to believe that your interpretation is the one that the writers of the Bible originally intended ?
Writers of the bible? Who wrote the bible? It is a collection of folklore that at first was transmitted orally and some day some people starting writing it all down. The people who wrote it down were not necessarily the originators or even first witnesses of the stories. As always different people will try to extract different teachings from the same stories. Maybe there was originally the parable of the cheek and later someone added "do not resist an evil person" trying to make a general teaching out of it and disregarding or not knowing the original context.
To really find out you would have to go back to the origin of the whole and understand what cultural context was present there at that time. That there is a lot of confusion nowadays is an indicator that a lot of the context got lost.
Did you ever find anyone who forced you to go a mile with you? Isn't that weird that such a thing is in the bible? It is until you understand that there was a roman occupation and that soldiers had the right to demand you carry their pack for a mile(but not more, a soldier could be punished if he forced you for more than that hence the second mile thing).
Sure, that's true, but:
I agree with you there. I kind of assumed that you have already accomplished this task, though, since you are pretty confident about your interpretation of the "other cheek" concept. All I was asking for is some evidence that your interpretation is the more correct one. I agree that it sounds neat, but that's not enough; you also need to show that this was the passage's original, intended meaning. Same thing goes for miles and undergarments.
How would you accomplish this?
I'm not a historian, so I don't really know. But, naively, I'd try to find some historical evidence that the "slapping customs" you describe actually existed and were widely followed, and that someone actually took Jesus's advice and implemented it successfully. I would do so by looking through sources other than the Bible, such as works of fiction, historical documents, paintings and sculptures, etc. I could also try to tracing some oral folklore backwards through time, to see if it converges with the other sources.
It is the explanation that makes the most sense to me, but that doesn't mean it is the correct one. The mile thing only makes sense in a context where people actually force you to go a mile with them, thus the roman law explanation sounds plausible. Again, doesn't mean this is the correct one.
Ok, in this case, your explanation is nothing more than a "just so" story. I could make up my own story and it would be just as valid (which is to say, still pretty arbitrary). And yet, you stated your own explanation as though it were fact. That's confusing, at best.