![]() Oracle 2 describes abortion as contrary to God’s law, while Oracle 3 commands people to raise their children instead of angering God by killing them.Ī Plea for the Christians was written around AD 177 by “Athenagoras the Athenian, Philosopher and Christian,” partly to convince the Roman Emperor that there was no truth in the rumor that Christians ritually murdered and ate babies. Later, the Sibyllines were rewritten to increase the proportion of Christian ethical teaching. In Paedagogus, he spoke negatively of women who “apply lethal drugs which directly lead to death, destroying all humane feeling simultaneously with the fetus.”Ĭlement and other early Christian writers often quoted from the Sibylline Oracles as the work of a pagan prophet who had predicted the coming Christ like the Jewish ones. Clement of Alexandria, the principal of Christendom’s foremost Christian educational institution at the end of the second century, accepted these statements as an accurate exposition of the Faith ( Extracts from the Prophets). The punishment for women who induced miscarriage was to sit up to their necks in blood and dirt while the aborted children shot sparks of fire into their eyes. It describes in detail the various punishments in hell according to different types of sins. To the author of Barnabas, this practice and abortion were equal in sinfulness.ĭating from just before AD 150, the Revelation of Peter was still read in church services in fifth century Palestine. In the midst of several chapters of instructions on ethics, it states: “Thou shall not slay the child by procuring abortion nor, again, shalt thou destroy it after it is born.” The latter phrase refers to the ancient Greek and Roman practice of abandoning newborns to die in unpopulated areas if the baby was the “wrong” sex or suspected of health problems. It was composed sometime between AD 70 and 132, and was included in some early versions of the New Testament. The Epistle of Barnabas contains a similar guide to Christian morality. It commands, “Thou shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.” The earliest source is an anonymous church manual of the late first century called The Didache. Most of the authors of the period do not touch on the subject, but those who did considered it among the worst of sins.Įarly Christian writings do not discuss abortion in depth, but merely state in a few words or phrases that it was forbidden to Christians. ![]() ![]() With the exception of one author who wrote at length on the subject, early Christian writings do not discuss abortion in depth, but merely state in a few words or phrases that it was forbidden to Christians. The New Testament does not comment on the morality of abortion, so we instead consider the writings of the first generations of Christians after the apostles, for they indicate that opposition to abortion (1) was shared at a time when the writers-or Christians not many generations earlier-personally knew the apostles or their first disciples and thus benefited from their unwritten teachings and interpretations of Scripture, (2) comes from a date so early that there was no likelihood for the original gospel to have been altered, and (3) is not based on only one interpretation of the Bible among many but was the interpretation of Christians who were personally familiar with the New Testament writers or their early followers. What was the early church’s stance on abortion? An examination of several historical texts that date prior to the first ecumenical council (AD 325) reveals the answer.
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