Jesus interacted mostly with the Jewish Pharisees, who held similar views on oral laws and traditions to the modern Orthodox/Catholic church. With that being said, is there any proof that Jesus valued tradition just as much, if not more than scripture?
I love Thanksgiving but I never really bother with Black Friday shopping. But I really want to try to watch it every year on Black Friday to add one more fun tradition to the holiday season.
In recent times, the Church's position on the death penalty can be summed up as "the death penalty is morally acceptable only when there is no other way to protect society from a specific criminal."
The first problem with this idea is that it has no biblical basis. Of all the biblical passages that can be used to defend the death penalty, none indicates that the death penalty can only be applied under those conditions; the Bible treats the death penalty simply as one more way to punish and suppress evil. It's hilarious, for example, to think that the Good Thief said he deserved the death penalty through crucifixion (Luke 23:41) because he was a threat to society that the Roman and Jewish authorities could only suppress through a very brutal death; the Good Thief probably said this simply because he committed a crime and deserved to be punished for it, not because he was an unstoppable threat to society.
Catholics throughout history also clearly never saw that the death penalty was acceptable only under these circumstances. I mean, do you really think that in the Church's perception the death penalty by burning was the only way to protect society from heretics? Or that the Church saw the death penalty for anyone who try to assassinate the pope as the only way to protect the pope's life from capturated aggressors? This modern way of looking at the death penalty was created and developed by pope John Paul II and his successors; this is not doctrine development, this is making up informations, and rejecting ideas that the Church and the Bible clearly defend/defended and replacing them with things they never defended.
https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html
Lies in order to destroy.
