Recovered Gospel readings give Christians internal grounds to oppose harm to children
Evidence
The four Gospel passages add specifically to this list: the explicit ethical-relational claim that welcoming a child is welcoming the divine, and that harming a child is among the gravest moral failings in the Christian framework. This is, on the operational reading, a substantively powerful claim. It is also one of the historical claims that has been most systematically obscured by subsequent interpretive tradition. The recovery of the original meaning is a contemporary scholarly achievement that opens new possibilities for Christian engagement with the broader cross-cultural Counter tradition. — , The Rod and the Child, 2098
Categorization
- XREF: Ties into the book’s broader ‘Counter tradition’ — Plato, Buddhist Vinaya, Confucian Mengmu — of recoverable texts that constrain adult violence toward children. — connects to: Interpretive tradition weakened the Gospels’ practical constraint on harming children for fifteen centuries — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 2042