As a progressive theologian I get accused rather often of cherry picking the Bible. The people who level this accusation at me typically do so because I am so vocal about social justice and in my support for the LGBTQIA community. These conservative Christians claim that because I say that being LGBTQIA is neither a sin, nor a choice, that I ignore the so-called “clobber passages.” These are verses which they believe prove that I am wrong and that being gay, or trans, or ace, or anything other than “heteronormative” is sinful. The clobber passages are far more complex than that though as I wrote in the post about one of them, Leviticus 18:22, a verse which is actually not clear at all about anything other than not being a blanket prohibition against being gay. That said, this post is not about the clobber passages per se, but rather is about the cherry picking I am so often accused of. It may be surprising to some people that I will admit that yes, I do in fact cherry pick the Bible and one of the reasons why is because I learned it from Jesus.

Cherry picking the Bible and giving more weight to some parts of the text than others is something almost every Christian does. As one of my former seminary professors said in class one day several years ago, “We all have a canon within the canon.” In other words, we all put more emphasis on passages of scripture that resonate with us. But Jesus cherry picking scripture, really? I can just hear some readers saying, “C’mon man, that’s a bridge too far, even for you…” Allow me to back up my claim with some evidence from the Gospels to show that yes, Jesus did in fact cherry pick his Bible and he flat out rejected some parts of it too.

Let’s begin with Luke 4:16-21 where Jesus has returned to Nazareth and is teaching in the synagogue there. He is given the scroll of Isaiah to read from, but as he is reading, he stops in mid-sentence in one verse of the passage before rolling up the scroll to give it back to the attendant. After handing it to the attendant, he says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” thus announcing the beginning of his public ministry. What parts of Isaiah 61:1-2 did he read and which did he leave out? Jesus read aloud that he was “sent to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” In Isaiah that last sentence has another clause that says “and the day of vengeance of our God.” His leaving out that latter clause says to me that Jesus wasn’t nearly as into divine vengeance as some of his listeners would have been or some of the Hebrew prophets of the Tanakh had been in their day. Instead of vengeance his focus had more to do with the plight of the poor, oppressed, and those held captive. That sounds a lot like social justice to me and that’s certainly not the only place Jesus cherry picked.

In the Sermon on the Mount, one of the “Five Discourses” in Matthew, Jesus shows that in some ways he was more conservative than some of those listening to him and certainly more so than some of the passages of the Torah that he quotes. In Matthew 5:27-32 he teaches that not only is adultery wrong, as it says in Exodus 20:14 and Deuteronomy 5:18, but that even looking lustfully at a woman is adulterous. He also teaches a much more stringent rule for divorce for Jews than what was written in the Torah — sexual infidelity rather than a man simply finding the woman unpleasing and objectionable as it says in Deuteronomy 24:1. In so doing he told his hearers that his Bible was flawed and didn’t go far enough — perhaps because he wanted to see women being protected from arbitrary divorce than the writer of Deuteronomy had.

Later in Matthew 5, he shows a more liberal side as he overturns “an eye for an eye” and therefore also the death penalty in Mt. 5:38-39 where he states, “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. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also…” In so saying Jesus not only overturned multiple passages of the Torah (Exodus 21:23-24; Leviticus 24:19-20; Deuteronomy 19:20-21) he also proposed a nonviolent method of shaming the violent person who hits someone. As Walter Wink noted in Engaging the Powers in an honor and shame culture like that of Jesus’ time, to strike someone on the right cheek would have been a right handed backhanded slap rather than a punch to the face because the left hand was only used for tasks considered unclean, and backhanded slaps were used as “the usual way of admonishing inferiors.” His audience would largely have been made up of people who were oppressed by such so-called superior people. Jesus, as Wink notes, was telling his hearers not to meet violence with violence, but rather to show the violent oppressor that their attempt at humiliation was a failure and the oppressor “has been given notice that this underling is in fact a human being. In that world of honor and shaming, he has been rendered impotent to instill shame in a subordinate. He has been stripped of his power to dehumanize the other.” (Wink, pp. 175-176). Jesus was attempting to turn his culture upside down and inside out even if he had to make his point by taking away the validity of a passage of scripture.

Take the idea of honoring one’s father and mother as found in the Ten Commandments for instance. Fundamentalists like James Dobson and the Christofascists behind the Project 2025 document like to harp on that idea, and the idea that the nuclear family is of paramount importance to Christianity and society at large. The problem with this view is that Jesus disagreed with those notions multiple times in the Gospels. In Mark 3:31-35; Matthew 12:46-50; and Luke 8:19-21 the Gospel writers each record a story in which he places his disciples above his mother and his siblings. This would have been shocking to those who heard him. In a similar way in Luke 11:27-28 when a woman in the crows raised her voice to say, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” Jesus’ unexpected reply was, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!” Jesus thus once again decided that what was written in the Bible was not necessarily authoritative to him regardless of what his listeners thought.

These are a few representative passages where Jesus cherry picks or completely dismisses what his Bible and many of the religious leaders of his day taught. He refused to give equal weight to passages of scripture that called for harm or to those passages that were contrary to his message of the Kingdom of God being at hand. In so doing he put paid to the idea that the Bible is inerrant, infallible, and consistent on all topics. Cultural norms too were less important to him than loving God and neighbor, using nonviolence to bring peace, the golden rule, and overturning systems of oppression. Conservative Christians, and especially Christian extremists like Joel Webbon, Doug Wilson, and William Wolfe, would all do well to start focusing on the words in red instead of the misunderstood and misused passages of Torah that they so often latch onto in their desire to impose patriarchal control on the entire nation. The world would be infinitely more Christlike if they did and that is after all what they claim to want.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider picking up a copy of my latest book Theological Musings Volume 1 from Quoir Publishing.