According to the Old Testament, a capital sentence is to be carried out only on the testimony of two eye-witnesses to the crime.
According to the New Testament, capital punishment is to be carried out only by those who are without sin.
Applying Biblical standards would eliminate false convictions of the innocent based on incompetent lab work, circumstantial conjecture, or the corruption of evidence -- the kind of situation cited by Dreher, and not really that infrequent.
When Jesus was confronted with the woman caught in adultery, His argument against her being stoned to death was not that she didn't deserve it, but that there was nobody there who was morally fit to execute the sentence. It was a commentary not on the woman directly, but on everybody else in that self-righteous, blood-excited crowd.
And are we better than they were? We are a society which has killed 50,000,000 of its own young without any national repentance, and hence a society which does not collectively distinguish between the blood of innocents and criminals. We have Supreme Court which has been in open defiance of the Court of Heaven for over 40 years. It is not a court system nor a society which I would trust to handle power over life and death.
And Jesus' point in the John 7 incident was not that a grave sinner doesn't deserve capital punishment, but that the rest of us, with our unclean hands, are unqualified to carry it out.
The point of the woman in adultery issue with Jesus was not to say capital punishment can only be done by someone sinless. They were trying to trap Jesus. If He said stone her, where was His mercy, this healing man of God? Also they would appear to be right if Jesus agreed with them, upping their power. If He said Don’t stone her, He’d be going against clear law of Leviticus. So instead He gave an answer that didn’t entrap Him they were not expecting and had no response for.
The Pharisees were hell-bent in trying to catch Jesus in logical pretzels. Remember the whole taxes question? If Jesus said ‘pay taxes’ then he was putting the state before God, if He said honor God, they’d say he was telling people to break Roman law. He said whose coin is it, they said Caesars, and He said “Then give unto Caesar what it Caesar’s and give unto God what is God’s.”
Begin under grace does not magically get rid of severe temporal consequences.
Further, since very early versions of John don't include the story at all, there's some question about its authenticity: Is 'Let Him Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Stone' Biblical?
It's a few things to think about.
“Applying Biblical standards would eliminate false convictions of the innocent based on incompetent lab work, circumstantial conjecture, or the corruption of evidence — the kind of situation cited by Dreher, and not really that infrequent.”
*************************************************************
You’ve stated what you think we CAN’T do to murderers. What is your solution offered instead? What about a guy who chops his family up in a shredder with no two witnesses? I’m not attacking your values BTW I honestly want to know.
“According to the Old Testament, a capital sentence is to be carried out only on the testimony of two eye-witnesses to the crime.
According to the New Testament, capital punishment is to be carried out only by those who are without sin.”
I don’t think you should “pit” the OT and the NT against each other.
It is all true, so, how do we reconcile it?
From the beginning, God’s law has told us, a killer of a man shall be put to death. This law is from the earliest parts of Genesis, but repeated throughout Scripture.
Now Jesus did say the woman caught in adultery should be spared. It could have been because it was not being done right; in other words there were not two or three witnesses, the male perpetrator was being let off, I don’t know.
You might therefore say that only correctly administered and adjudicated death penalty cases can be carried out. You also might deduce that the death penalty for adultery is now abrogated. But I don’t think you can logically deduce that the death penalty is suddenly and forever canceled for all crimes. That conclusion is not consistent with the rest of Scripture.
God forgave the New Testament adulterer just as He forgave Old Testament adulterers, ((Hos. 3:1). Still, He demanded that His people obey His law (Hos. 4:6)) in neither instance revoking His law(King David committed adultery and murder (2 Sam. 11). Yet God forgave him (Psalm 32:1-5)). Jesus knew that even doing so caused problems. "The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die. However... by this deed you have given great occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme..." 2 Sam. 12:13
God has all authority to forgive the criminal and disregard temporal punishment. Contrariwise, Men must obey God and cannot ignore punishment.
The Pharisees Wanted to Trap Christ, remember they hated him.
The Pharisees wanted to accuse Jesus of rebelling against the Roman Empire:
This [the Pharisees] said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. John 8:6
Rome had revoked the Jews' authority to put a criminal to death (John 18:31). A straight-forward answer to the Pharisees would have brought Jesus into premature conflict with Rome before His "hour had come." Jesus solved this problem stating, "He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first" (John 8:7). Christ often frustrated the Pharisees giving clever answers that thwarted their wicked intentions (Mat. 22:15-22; 21:21-27; Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:20-26).
Jesus Did Not Repeal The Law
Without the law, lawlessness cannot exist. Yet as Christ said, "because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold" (Mat. 24:12)