Some readers of MandM will know that for the last three years I have taught Theology and Philosophy at a Catholic high-school. I teach five to six classes a day, year 9 to year 13 subjects such introduction to scripture, church history, NCEA religious studies, Cambridge world religions and Divinity. My goal has always been to teach at Tertiary level, but the flooded market has meant I have, so far, found employment easier to come by in the secondary sector, hence my current employment.

One topic I teach is NCEA Religious Studies, in year 13, one standard is to Analyse the response of a religious tradition to a contemporary ethical issue. Officially students have to describe the response a religious tradition has made to a moral issue. Our school like a lot of schools looks at Christian responses to abortion. Because I did my PhD thesis on this very subject in the last year I have been going through my dissertation and simplifying, summarising and rewriting it into short sections I can use with my classes. Because there is some interest in this, I have decided to post some of these on MandM. I welcome any feedback or comments.

When we are analysing the response of a religious tradition to a moral or ethical question one of the first questions we need to ask is “what does the religious tradition in question actually teach”? We need to look at what the teachers and theologians the religion have said and what their arguments were.  This will enable us to avoid misrepresenting someone’s opinions and help us accurately identify the premises and conclusions that we want to evaluate.

Answering this question will be the focus of Part Three of this standard We are going to look at several representative strands of Christian thought or reflection on the question of abortion. When we do, we can find a common a common three-premise argument against feticide that is common to these different strands. The rest of the standard will analyse and critically evaluate each of these premises.

In part one we looked at how to analyse arguments.  Here we will put what we learnt to work.  Historically Christianity has approached the question of killing a fetus by formulating a simple three-premise argument:

Premise [1]: God has commanded people not to kill human beings without adequate justification.

Premise [2]: a foetus, is a human being;

Premise [3]: in almost all cases where a fetus is killed the reasons offered are not strong enough to justify killing a human being.

 Of course, it isn’t enough to just say this. For any sensible analysis, we must provide evidence that we are accurately presenting what Christians have taught. To do this, we will trace the existence of this argument in several representative Christian traditions. We will look at the position adopted by the Church fathers, the church in the middle ages and the Protestant Reformers. Before doing that, however, we will look at the origins or source of Christian moral teaching on this question in Alexandrian Judaism.

Feticide in Alexandrian Judaism

The origins or beginning of Christian responses to abortion begins in a movement known to historians today as Alexandrian Judaism.   During the first century, most of the Roman world was dominated by Greek language and culture. Greek Philosophy also dominated the intellectual world of schools and Universities. This culture is called Hellenism. Alexandrian Jews were Jews who lived outside the land of Israel in this Greek Culture These Jews spoke Greek-speaking and combined a commitment to Judaism with the ideas of Greek Philosophy.

A very important document for Alexandrian Jews was the Septuagint. You learnt about the Septuagint in year 9.  The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, however several hundred years before the time of Christ. The old testament was translated into Greek. This Greek translation is called the Septuagint. The purpose of the Septuagint was to provide a book which could explain to Alexandrian Jews what the commandments and teachings of Judaism were and how to apply and follow these teachings in their community. For this reason, the Septuagint didn’t always provide a word for word rendition of the Hebrew text but offered commentary on what it meant and how it was to be followed and applied.

What is important for the topic we are studying is how the Septuagint translated a particular passage in the book of Exodus. In Exodus 21: there is a body of Jewish law which deals with where a pregnant woman is struck in such a manner that a miscarriage occurs. The Hebrew translations which we have today translate the passages this way:

[I]f men struggle and strike a pregnant woman and she miscarries, and there is no harm, he shall pay a fine according as the woman’s husband lays upon him, according to an assessment. And if there is harm you will prescribe life for life, eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.^[1]

The Septuagint, however, interprets the passage this way:

If two men fight and strike a pregnant woman, and her unformed embryo departs, he shall be fined; according as the woman’s husband lays upon (him) he shall give according to what is thought fit. But if it be formed, he shall give a life for a life.^[2]

The Septuagint draws a distinction between a formed and unformed embryo. This corresponds to our modern distinction between an embryo and a fetus we looked at in part two. A person who kills a fetus must pay “life for a life”. The phrase life for life wasn’t taken literally by Jewish thinkers, it was understood to mean something like “pay the value of life for the value of a life”. But the critical issue is that the Septuagint views the life of a fetus as having the value of human life.

By contrast, the Hebrew text states that if someone kills an embryo or a fetus they must pay a fine based upon an assessment and is silent on exactly how this assessment is carried out. Some scholars, however, have argued that what we know about the legal practices in the cultures surrounding Israel suggests the assessment must have been based on the age of the fetus.

Why do these translations differ? The Hebrew texts we have today were compiled much later than the Septuagint, and so it might be tempting to suggest the Septuagint has the earlier understanding. However, it is pretty clear that the Septuagint is influenced by Greek Philosophy. The distinction it draws between a formed and unformed embryo was a common distinction in Greek philosophy.  Some examples:

• Galen (129 AD- 200) wrote that the Hippocratic philosophers of his day held “That what is in the womb is already a living being when it is formed in all its members”.
• Laertius said that the Pythagorean view was “this first creation [the conceptus] is formed in forty days, and then, in accordance with the law of harmony, the baby is perfected and born after seven, or nine, or maximum ten months.^[3]
• Empedocles argued that the formation of an embryo started on the 39^th day and was completed on the 49^th.^[4]
• Asclepiades referred to the formed/unformed distinction and suggested that for males formation occurred between the 26^th and 50^th days and females were formed around 60 days.¹³
• The author of a Philosophical book titled On Seven Months Child, states a male conceptus is formed at 40 days while a female is formed after this.¹⁵
• Aristotle argued that the embryo became fully human when it achieved form, which occurred 40 days after conception for a boy or 90 for a girl.¹⁶

Consequently, there was an established distinction in the writings of many ancient Greek philosophers between an unformed and formed embryo. It is unlikely that the similarities between the Septuagint’s and Greek Philosophy are a coincidence. The best explanation appears to be that Alexandrian Jews utilised Greek Philosophy in an effort to apply the Jewish law to the question of killing a fetus. The law told them that if a person killed a fetus they had to be punished based on an assessment of the maturity of the fetus. Several schools of Philosophy schools taught that an embryo was human by the time when it acquired human form around 40 days after conception. They probably put these two ideas together concluded that if a person killed a formed embryo, this was homicide and violated Gods laws against homicide. Specifically, the fifth commandment “you shall not kill.”

Philo of Alexandria

The Septuagint translation of Exodus 21:22-24 receives one of its clearest expositions by Philo of Alexandria. Philo was a Jewish Philosopher, Theologian and leading intellectual in Alexandrian Judaism. He lived from 20BC-50AD and so lived at the same time as both Jesus and Paul. For this reason, he is a good source of information on what Jewish theologians taught at the time of Christ.  In his commentary on the Ten commandments Philo writes:

But if anyone has a contest with a woman who is pregnant, and strike her a blow on her belly, and she miscarry, if the child which was conceived within her is still unfashioned and unformed, he shall be punished by a fine, both for the assault which he committed and also because he has prevented nature, who was fashioning and preparing that most excellent of all creatures, a human being, from bringing him into existence. But if the child which was conceived had assumed a distinct shape … in all its parts, having received all its proper connective and distinctive qualities, he shall die; … for such a creature as that is a man, whom he has slain while still in the workshop of nature, who had not thought it as yet a proper time to produce him to the light, but had kept him like a statue lying in a sculptor’s workshop, requiring nothing more than to be released and sent out into the world.^[5]

In this passage, Philo is explaining to his audience what the fifth of the ten commandments requires of them. (The fifth commandment is the commandment: do not kill). He appeals to the Septuagint and argues that the law considered the killing of a formed embryo to be a homicide and so feticide is a violation of the fifth commandment. With this conclusion established, Philo uses it to argue against infanticide. Infanticide is the practice of killing new-born infants after birth and was a widespread practice in the Roman and Greek world. Philo argued that If killing a fetus before birth was homicide, then killing children after birth must be as well. Therefore, the law ten commandments condemned both abortion and infanticide.

Conclusions

The Septuagint and Philo contain a specific argument against feticide. This argument can be initially summed up in two premises. Firstly,  a fetus is a human being and secondly, that the law of God prohibits killing a human being. This argument entails that feticide is unlawful and contrary to the law of God.

I say “initially,” because a careful examination shows that the second of these claims need to be qualified.  We know Jewish rabbis permitted abortion in rare cases where continuing the pregnancy would kill the mother, arguing these abortions were a case of self-defence. Hence, the sixth commandment is best construed as being that the law of God forbids killing a human being without justification, where justification is interpreted as an excuse or permission granted somewhere else by God’s law. In the absence of any other command or permission to the contrary, one should refrain from homicide. With this clarification in place, we can summarise the argument used by Alexandrian Jew’s as follows:

Premise [1]: Killing a human being without justification violates the law of God.

Premise [2]: A formed embryo (i.e. a fetus) is a human being.

Since Alexandrian Jews, and, as we will see, Christian theologians after them, believed feticide to be unlawful in most, if not all, circumstances, they also held to the following enthymeme:

 Premise [3]: in the case of feticide (at least in the majority of cases) insufficient or no justification is forthcoming. 

From these three premises, it follows that killing a fetus (at least in the majority of cases) is unlawful, i.e. contrary to the law of God.

[1] Exodus 21:22-25 MT.

[2] Exodus 21:22-25 LXX. This translation of the  Septuagint comes from Stanley Isser, “Two Traditions: The Law of Exodus 21:22-23 Revisited,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 52:1 (1990): 30.

[3] Kapparis, Abortion in the Ancient World, 39.

[4] Ibid., 45.

[5] Judaeus Philo, “The Special Laws III,” in The Contemporary of Josephus, Translated from the Greek, trans. by Charles Duke Yonge (1993) (108)(109).

<http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book29.html>

Tags:   Abortion · Judaism · Philo1 Comment