Here, for me, is the much stronger reading: Christianity simply didn’t understand the Jewish rules, and often mistranslated them.
The Mosaic codes are never about controlling “sexuality” — they’re about preserving the holiness of the space around the Temple.
The #1 line of defense against Christians trying to inflict a stupid, evil copy of Jewish law on other humans is Hebrews 8:13, supported by many other references. The previous law is to be “obsolete.” It ends with John the Baptist, as Jesus says in Luke 16:16.
It existed—like a womb—to bring the Messiah into existence. To affirm it now is to deny Jesus. It’s like saying the baby was never born when the person you’re talking about is an adult standing next to you.
It is denying Jesus, as Paul says in Galatians 2:21: “for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”
It is against the earliest & strongest Christian tradition. As Ignatius says, “It is monstrous to take Jesus Christ and to live like a Jew.”
We love our Jewish friends, but we do not even understand Jewish law and certainly don’t try to practice it.
What we do understand is that Jewish law doesn’t concern “taboos”—it’s about spiritual infections. Keeping clean of rival spiritual energies. The main vehicles of contamination are death and idolatry.
But the OT scriptures understood the world as carefully regulated and controlled by many divine beings, and by chains of logic, every aspect of planetary existence is ‘clean’ or ‘neutral’.
This is a system of associations regulated by the High Priest, in direct communication with Moses, who has long conversations with God. This is not a system explained fully in the extant scriptures.
None of it was for Christians, or taught to Christians—ever! We do not even have access to the Temple. More importantly, Jesus is given “all authority in heaven and on earth” in Matt 28:18.
That means all rules of ownership and access are dissolved. All things become “clean” because—in theological terms—Jesus owns them.
Whatever Paul, James, John, etc., knew of Jewish law they did not teach to Gentiles and repeatedly refused to do so.
The scriptures are not a guidebook. They do not even tell us about Christian belief, much less Jewish!!! As Margaret Barker says in Temple Mysticism: An Introduction:
Origen knew that temple teaching had been concealed from all but the high priests, and that much of the teaching was transmitted through liturgy rather than scripture. Much of the New Testament, e.g. Paul’s letters, were sent to clarify certain points or as part of a dispute; they do not give a full picture of early Christian belief.
Even if the Jerusalem Council letter of Acts 15:28–29 is considered binding on Christians today, even if porneia is translated ‘sexual immorality’, the letter says: “You do well do avoid these things.” This is not Jewish law. This is a friend giving pro tips.
In the Muratorian Canon, a surviving reading list for early Christians, the OT scriptures are not included. If you ask an early Gentile Christian what Leviticus says, they’d say, “Huh?”
Hundreds of years later, the OT scriptures were translated, as by Jerome, and so some anti-Semitic Italian guys—out to control the planet by any means necessary, men on a slash & burn campaign against the human race—used the OT for their own malign purposes.
