Way Back In Henry VIII's Time

I recently saw several episodes of the TV series "The Tudors" on BBC-America, a program in which the producers certainly took some liberties with the facts (it's labeled as "historical fiction"). But it prompted me to finally download an audiobook that had been on my wish list for quite some time, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty (G.J.Meyer). As I was listening last night, I came upon a section that really caught my attention, mainly because I was so surprised to see that, even back in the 16th Century, theologians (and kings, obviously) were picking and choosing which sections of the Old Testament actually apply. Not unlike what they do today. I transcribed the relevant section from Chapter 2 where the author is discussing Henry's attempts in the 1520s to get his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled:

There were problems, moreover, with the biblical passage to which Henry attached so much importance: "If a man takes his brother's wife, they shall be childless." One of the mentors of Henry's youth, the learned and revered John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, pointed out that nothing in these words indicates that they refer to a dead brother's wife. On the contrary, a reader's natural inclination might be to assume the opposite. As for the warning about childlessness, nothing could be more obvious than that Henry and Catherine had a living child, Princess Mary. Henry, clutching at straws, suggested that a mistake had been made when Leviticus was translated from Greek into Latin, so that the word liberis ("children") had been incorrectly substituted for filius ("sons"). In an age when all educated people shared a knowledge of Latin, and no one could have claimed to be a theologian without mastering it, this argument got him nowhere, having no basis in fact. Leviticus was, in any case, a peculiar foundation upon which to construct arguments about how Englishmen were supposed to conduct themselves in the 16th century. It included many rules, some of them intended for Hebrew priests, to which no one paid the least attention. Instruction in the proper way of killing chickens, for example, along with prohibitions against eating of rabbits, and the incorrect trimming of hair and beards. The church had long taken it as settled that the relevance of Leviticus did not reach far beyond the time, place, and people for which it had been written. 

Even worse for Henry's case, Leviticus was directly contradicted by another Old Testament passage, one from a book written later and, therefore, arguably preemptive. Deuteronomy 25:5-7 declared it to not only be permissible, but obligatory, for a man to marry the childless widow of his dead brother: "He shall go in unto her and take her to him to wife." Failure to do this would mean that the dead brother was "put out of Israel," a deplorable fate, and therefore severe punishment was prescribed for those who did not comply. The straw that Henry clutched this time was the notion that the kind of marriage prescribed by Deuteronomy had been a mere ceremonial matter, and that in any case the Jews themselves had abandoned such practices many centuries before. About this, too, he was proved wrong.  

The point, I suppose, that I'm trying to make is there is so much worthy of our skepticism in the OT, this being but one example. Not eating shellfish (Leviticus 11:9-12, Deuteronomy 14:9-10) is another silly thing in there, along with the interpretations of Leviticus 18:22 today by those busy bodies who are trying to stop same-sex marriage (Yes, I know what it says, but I say if you want to follow a literal interpretation of Lev 18:22, you better stop eating shrimp, oysters, lobster, etc., because that prohibition is in there, too. You CANNOT pick and choose this stuff without me labeling you a hypocrite.)

I think the most important sentence in the paragraphs quoted above is this one: The church had long taken it as settled that the relevance of Leviticus did not reach far beyond the time, place, and people for which it had been written. If Pope Clement VII chose to ignore parts of Leviticus in the 16th Century, we should probably do likewise with ALL of it here in the 21st.

*(Truth be told, I had an Anglican vicar tell me over 30 years ago that most of the Old Testament was a collection of (allegorical) tribal stories. Some years later this idea was reinforced when I read The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (Neil Asher Silberman, Israel Finkelstein) - bottom line to be taken away from the book is that the archaeology in that region simply does not support most of the OT stories [and it doesn't take but a couple of minutes searching the internet to learn that, for example, the Noah's Ark story was a rewrite of a portion of the Mesopotamian poem Epic of Gilgamesh - can't believe they're making a new movie about Noah . . . why bother?).]