Would that not piss of Jesus? It came to me after watching the pope rap from WKUK.
Specifically, he flipped the tables of money lenders and people selling stuff. Donating a tithe has been a part of Abrahamic religion since the Old Testament.
They had turned the church into a marketplace. So if you’re in it just for the money then yeah you’re a problem.
Jesus actually sent out the disciples to teach without any money and expected them to live on the generosity of the people they taught so that’s where the collection plate likely originates from.
And just like everything in the Bible, they take a grain of truth and turn it into a multimillion dollar pyramid scheme … or they use it as a weapon to go after people and groups they don’t like.
Personally I’m non religious, I think they’re all nuts. The origins of these religions might have started out with some noble goals that might have been for the good of humanity … but now it’s just a system of power, money and control to manipulate a gullible audience.
Yeah, there are definitely bad people out there trying to take advantage of Christians and make money off them. I think that’s exactly what Jesus was mad about. If Jesus was born today he would probably be chasing televangelist’s phone operators away from their desks with a whip and flipping computer desks of the people trying to scam Christian grandmas.
Like any other organization if you look hard enough and if it’s what you’re looking for then you can see people doing bad things but I do not think organized Christian religion is bad as a whole.
I’m Indigenous Canadian and my parents were victims of the Residential School system in Canada in the 50s, 60s … residential ‘schools’ which were literal torture centers for Indigenous children run by Christian organizations.
From my point of view … Christian religion is bad as a whole.
I’m very sorry about what happened to your parents and in turn the effects these schools had on you and your family. From everything I’ve heard the Canadian government has treated the indigenous people terribly.
Nothing in Jesus’s teachings or the New Testament says “Running torture centers is what you should do”.
There are a lot of bad people who want to claim what they’re doing is what God told them to do because it makes it easier to get away with or easier for them to stomach themselves.
At this point in history, the image of Jesus Christ is a caricature of what he is supposed to represent. He is just an image and idea that is worshipped and that is all. No one cares about his teachings or his ideas, they just care about his image, praising him and getting their free ticket to heaven.
In essence, the image of Jesus Christ has become their golden calf that people mindlessly pray to and worship without thinking or wondering about what he actually represents.
I do think the Abrahamic religions are bad as a whole, and things like the splintering of Christianity that allows everyone to go “oh no, that bad stuff isn’t MY Christianity” is just useful idiots providing cover for abusers.
Tithing is in the old testament. It’s from a long time before Señor Christ.
Christian religions follow the teachings of Jesus so if Jesus had said something contrary to the idea of tithing it is worth noting. Likewise if he had done something to reaffirm it then that is worth noting.
Christian religions flow the teachings of Jesus who followed/was aware of/modified the teachings of Judaism, which already had centuries of tithing already established. Dude didn’t invent it.
No he did not invent tithing. Sorry if it seems that’s what I suggested. There are a few things the church does in the Old Testament that Christians specifically do NOT do so imo it’s important to point out where in Jesus’s teachings these practices are reaffirmed.
I got that impression from this part of your comment
that’s where the collection plate likely originates from.
The idea of donating in church or donating to a spiritual leader is waaaaaaaay older and recorded
Yeah, I suppose I should have clarified the Christian collection plate, but I didn’t think that was necessary because OP asked what we think Jesus would think about tithing.
ITT- a lot of people who are very confidently wrong even about basic facts about this.
Jesus flipping tables wasn’t aimed at the priests and church authorities, but at people who were based in the outer area of the temple selling supplies to make sacrifices and offerings prescribed in Jewish law (see the book of Leviticus for more descriptions of these sacrifices). Jewish law at the time required a lot of animal sacrifices and monetary offerings at the Temple, and Jesus didn’t seem to have any issues with these- after all, they were a core part of the religion at the time and again, the Torah explicitly states that priests are supposed to live off of Temple offerings (note that in this passage the priestly class are referred to as “Sons of Aaron”). So it would have been odd for Jesus, as someone who at least according to the Bible was very knowledgeable about scripture and Jewish law, would have been surprised at that aspect.
What he was mad about was the commerce occurring around this system. The Gospel descriptions of this event discuss “moneychangers” and people selling doves. These are people who exchanged Roman currency for traditional Jewish currency (which is what ancient monetary offerings were denominated in) and sold animals (and based on other writings in the Torah, probably spiced cakes as well) that could be sacrificed in the Temple on the purchaser’s behalf. As for why this made Jesus mad, that is up for debate. The obvious answer is that it represents greed and people making money off religion, but the large amount of sacrifices required by Jewish law at the time really encouraged this behavior just from a practical standpoint. Myself I think he would have been completely fine with it had it been happening right outside the Temple instead, but the Temple was considered an especially holy place, where God’s presence literally descended down to Earth to be with mankind in the innermost portion, which each concentric ring acting as a sort of “air lock” for ritual impurity.
So the problem was not that the priests were making money from religion (again, this was required by Jewish law at the time) but that these other people were hanging out in the Temple treating it as a marketplace rather than as an exceptionally holy and highly ritualized space. Understanding this is kind of difficult for modern people because we don’t really treat religion the same as people did back then, and especially from a Christian standpoint we tend to view religion as a matter of personal belief and not impurity that occurs as a natural consequence of things that happen and that must be cleansed before encounters with the divine.
The bible is long and contradictory. its a bit like palm reading, it can say whatever you want it to say.
A big anthology of paraphrased parables mixed with rants, all from different writers and then edited by the Greeks? Sounds about right.
If someone asks, “What would Jesus do?” Remember that flipping tables and whipping a bitch are viable options.
So was stealing horses.
And cursing fig trees for not bearing fruit out-of-season.
Never was religious, can you give context?
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Modern churches have nothing to do with Jesus.
I suspect that piece of the bible is carefully ignored in the greediest churches. It’s not like the faithful read the fucking thing anyway
Pssst…modern Christians aren’t actually Christian.
It to help the christian missionaries across the world, but not the neighbour sleeping on a mattress on their porch.
Its to help replace the church carpets that the pastor doesn’t like, not help the homeless community who is living under the bridge in the city.
I may be a biased, unhappy, ex-church goer, but that’s what I saw
Jesus wouldn’t gripe the practice of tithing so much as what the modern church does (or mainly doesn’t do) with the money. Obviously if that money was spent helping people he would be cool with it.
There’s even a bit in the bible where he say the poor woman who tithed the 1 penny she could spare was giving more than the rich people who gave much more.
Religion is the largest scam against humanity.
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If you think your church is doing good work, you give.
The church I grew up in closed for lack of funds. The preacher never lived large, they weren’t taking more than people wanted to give.
I would never give money to a mega church, but I have donated to UU churches as an adult.
Well since the bible is badly written fiction, cobbled together from dozens of books written over hundreds of years, based off other stories from hundreds of years before that period… Does it matter at all?
Naw.
For context at this time the Jewish people were under strict roman rule and oppression, treated as second class citizens. And a lot of Jewish folks had stopped giving a fuck about respecting their own culture/religion.
Jesus shows up to this huge, extremely sanctious, temple. It’s not just any temple, its one of THE temples for Jewish worship.
Inside he finds that the romans+Jewish merchants have pretty much turned it into an animal pen + marketplace. It’s filthy, there’s animals shitting all over, there’s people doing business, people are being extremely disrespectful.
So yeah Jesus goes apeshit and starts flipping tables, chasing ppl out of the temple, whipping people and animals, basically being like “all you assholes gtfo how dare you”
It’s less about the money stuff and more about the donkeys actively shitting on the floor and ppl spitting on the temple.
Contextually its likely people were doing stuff like pissing on the wall (no bathroom in a makeshit marketplace, what do you think would happen), graffiti’ing, spitting, throwing garbage on the floor, so on and so on.
Now, originally, this business made sense. Specifically, pilgrims traveling a long distance needed to stop for some key stuff on arrival.
Pilgrims needed animals and approved currency for sacrifices, which they’d do at the temple, so setting up to do that stuff right at the temple made sense.
But what happened is a simple lil currency exchange + buy a sacrifice stall exploded to be a whole marketplace as seedier and more sus ppl moved in, and soon the original point was lost.
It probably originally just started as one guy just exchanging coins and selling goats/chickens outside the temple as a legit business.
As further insult/context, consider the fact that once they moved this process to be in the temple, it meant they were controlling people’s access to worship.
Effectively it became a state of “you have to pay to pray” at the temple, and not a tithe, but more like literally having to pay a bunch of money to even get the right coins, the approved animals, etc.
You couldn’t bring your own stuff now.
You know how movie theaters wouldn’t let you bring in your own food, and would charge you an arm and a leg for anything? Yeah, think of it like that.
He called out the practice of killing animals for money, specifically calling the priests murderers during the event you reference. Not much of that spirit left in modern churches.
