Free Speech in the Old and New Testaments

Peter and John before the Sanhedrin: “We must obey God rather than men.” — christianpublishinghouse.co

This essay is part of a larger project, in collaboration with James Barham, on freedom of thought and expression in Western culture. The main focus of that project is on this freedom as understood against Western culture’s philosophical backdrop. Thus we might say its focus in mainly on Athens. But Western culture looks not only to Athens but also to Jerusalem. Its roots are both Greek and Judeo-Christian. It has a theological backdrop of ethical monotheism whose origin is not Greek but Hebrew. This theological backdrop is grounded not in philosophical reflection but in theological revelation as recorded in the Old and New Testaments. Western culture makes sense only in light of both Athens and Jerusalem.

Any historical understanding of freedom of thought and expression in Western culture should therefore take into account what, if anything, the Bible has to say on this topic. Consequently, if the Bible were dead-set against freedom of thought and expression, we might have reason to doubt any philosophical justifications used to support it. As it is, the Bible is on the whole friendly to free speech, with the New Testament being even more friendly than the Old. This may seem counterintuitive given that theological views are often seen as held on dogmatic rather than rational grounds, and as needing to be affirmed irrespective of any doubts about them that people may privately harbor.

Church history and practice, unfortunately, seem to underwrite this low view of free speech. Thus church leaders claiming to follow the Bible have often been at the forefront of quashing free speech. For instance, within two generations of the emperor Constantine (d. 337) issuing an edict of toleration for Christianity across his empire (the Edict of Milan), his successor Theodosius I (d. 395) forbade any religion other than Christianity in the empire, outlawing paganism and criminalizing non-Christian religious practice, including speech connected with those outlawed religious practices (such as public prayers to pagan deities).

The Reformation likewise offered little solace to free speech. Protestant pamphleteers were happy to express their own theological views freely. But they were less ready to extend the same freedom to their theological opponents. Martin Luther, for instance, supported putting Anabaptists (who insisted on believers’ baptism and tended to be pacifists) to death for spreading their beliefs. John Calvin consented to Michael Servetus’s execution on account of the latter’s denial of the Trinity. Roman Catholicism’s record with free speech was no better, as with the Catholic Inquisition, which enforced speech codes through everything from banning books (on the Index) to imprisonment and torture.

Even Erasmus’s good friend Thomas More (d. 1535) was an imperfect advocate of free speech, unwilling to go as far as Erasmus in extending toleration. As a Christian humanist and Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII, More delivered a speech to the House of Commons in 1523 titled “Petition for Freedom of Speech.” But this was not an across-the-board call for free speech. Rather, it was a request of the king to allow Parliament to speak freely during its deliberations (a freedom hearkening back to Athenian democratic assemblies two millennia earlier). Free speech for More, however, only went so far. For instance, he despised Lutheranism as a heretical threat to Catholic unity, using vitriolic writings like Responsio ad Lutherum to denounce Luther and his followers. He preferred to see their conversion through debate. Yet failing that, he favored suppressing Lutherans through imprisonment, book-burning, and, if necessary, execution under anti-heresy laws.

Despite this history of free-speech suppression by church leaders claiming to take the Bible seriously, it can be argued that the Bible itself provides little basis for challenging free speech and in practice tends to allow it. This is not to say there was anything like a well-defined right to free speech in the Bible. But as a pragmatic matter, we find little in the Bible where people of faith, whether in the Old or New Testaments, are urged to censor others. There are exceptions, which we’ll consider. But in general, if there’s censorship in the Bible, it is against people of faith, whether against the Israelites in the Old Testament or against the Church in the New Testament.

For instance, in the Old Testament, King Jehoiakim of Judah censored the prophet Jeremiah by cutting up and burning the scroll containing Jeremiah’s prophecies as it was read to him (Jeremiah 36:23). Stubborn and defiant, Jehoiakim did not heed the warnings of divine judgment recorded in the scroll (Jeremiah 36:24). In response, God commanded Jeremiah to dictate the same words again to his scribe Baruch, and to add further judgments against the king (Jeremiah 36:27–32).

In the New Testament, the Sanhedrin censored the Apostles by arresting them and ordering them not to speak or teach in the name of Jesus, following Peter and John’s healing of a lame man (Acts 4:17–18). When the Apostles refused to obey this order and continued preaching, the Sanhedrin had them re-arrested and flogged, and after that again strictly forbade them to speak in Jesus’ name (Acts 5:28–40). Despite these threats and punishments, the Apostles proclaimed, “We must obey God rather than men” and so continued to teach and speak publicly about Jesus (Acts 5:29, 42, ESV).

Such examples from the Old and New Testaments support freedom of expression for the vital role that prophetic speech plays in God actively guiding his people. Censorship, when depicted in the Bible, is typically a reaction by governing authorities against prophetic speech, especially as such speech unmasks corruption of the governing authorities. In the Old Testament, prophets were seen as essential voices through whom God directed and corrected his people (Amos 3:7). Their messages—often uncomfortable—were not only tolerated but even preserved as sacred scripture, ultimately to be incorporated into the Bible.

In the New Testament, the Apostles continued this prophetic role, boldly proclaiming the Gospel despite prohibitions by religious and secular authorities (see respectively Acts 5 and Acts 16). The early Church recognized spiritual gifts, such as prophecy, as vital to its health (1 Corinthians 14). The biblical witness therefore upholds the necessity of allowing prophets and apostles to speak freely, as their words are God’s means for communicating with humanity.

In allowing prophetic speech, the Bible does not simply endorse the speech of card-carrying prophets. Because humans are made in the image of God, anyone can be a conduit of divine communication. For instance, in the Old Testament, as David was fleeing Jerusalem during Absalom’s rebellion, a man named Shimei from the house of Saul came out hurling curses, stones, and insults at David, calling him a “man of blood” (2 Samuel 16:5–8). Abishai, one of David’s commanders, asked permission to strike Shimei down, saying, “Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king?” (2 Samuel 16:9) But David restrained him, saying, “Let him curse, for the Lord has told him to,” adding that perhaps the Lord would see his distress and repay him with good for enduring Shimei’s curses (2 Samuel 16:10–12, ESV).

Similarly, in the New Testament, after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, the chief priests and Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin, alarmed that Jesus’ growing following might provoke Roman intervention and destroy their nation (John 11:47–48). In response, Caiaphas, the high priest that year, rebuked them, saying, “You know nothing at all! Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.” (John 11:49–50, ESV) Caiaphas intended this statement politically—to eliminate Jesus as a political threat. Yet the Gospel writer notes that he spoke prophetically, not of his own accord, because he was high priest that year, and thus unwittingly declared that Jesus would die for the nation, gathering into one the children of God scattered abroad (John 11:51–52). In this incident, Caiaphas became an instrument of divine prophecy, stating the truth of Christ’s atoning death even as he plotted his murder for political expedience.

On the whole, the Old Testament places few restrictions on speech. The commandments in the Torah focus overwhelmingly on doing rather than speaking, on prohibiting acts rather than words. There are exceptions, of course. The Ninth Commandment forbids false testimony (Exodus 20:16). Vows were permitted but also expected to be carried out (Numbers 30:2). Cursing God, or blasphemy, was prohibited (Leviticus 24:16), as was cursing those most closely in the place of God, such as parents (Leviticus 20:9) and rulers (Exodus 22:28). Also prohibited were enticing others to worship false gods (Deuteronomy 13:6–10), as well as false prophecy in the name of God (Deuteronomy 18:20–22). This is about the extent of the restrictions on free speech in the Old Testament. Leaving aside speaking ill of God, the Old Testament is in fact quite liberal in allowing freedom of thought and expression.

While people of faith in the Bible have considerable latitude to speak freely, we don’t want to overstate the Bible’s friendliness to free speech in the modern, secular sense. For instance, Old Testament injunctions against blasphemy, false prophecy, and enticing others to idolatry show that some categories of speech were met with severe penalties, including death (Leviticus 24:16; Deuteronomy 18:20–22, 13:6–10). That said, capital punishment for speech acts may not signal a complete departure from contemporary liberal ideals. Everything from treason to intentionally mislabeling medicines can take the form of speech acts that kill people and therefore call for grave punishment.

Historically, rulers have tended to repress the speech of those who criticize them. Yet the Old Testament is surprisingly lenient in allowing criticism of rulers. Consider, for instance, how the prophet Nathan confronted King David by telling him a parable about a rich man who stole a poor man’s only lamb. Thinking the parable to be factual, David reacted with outrage against the obvious injustice (2 Samuel 12:1–6). Nathan then declared, “You are the man,” revealing that the parable was about David’s sin of adultery with Bathsheba and his subsequent scheming to murder her husband Uriah (2 Samuel 12:7–9). Nathan then went further and pronounced God’s judgment on David and his house:

[The Lord speaking:] “Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife. Behold, I will raise up evil against you out of your own house. And I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun. For you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun.” (2 Samuel 12:10–12, ESV)

These are as harsh words as could be uttered against any ruler. How could they be interpreted as anything other than a curse? And yet they were divinely sanctioned and did not elicit retribution under the Old Testament prohibition against cursing rulers. Nor did David try to censor Nathan’s speech or react defensively by trying to minimize his offence with Bathsheba and Uriah. Instead, he accepted without qualification God’s judgment as delivered through Nathan: “I have sinned against the Lord.” (2 Samuel 12:13, ESV)

The New Testament is even broader in its latitude for free speech than the Old Testament. Except when foreign powers ruled the Israelites, the Old Testament describes a theocracy where religious and secular laws are all mixed together indiscriminately. For instance, Leviticus 16:29–34 commands the Israelites to observe an annual Day of Atonement, during which the high priest enters the Holy of Holies to make atonement for the sins of the people. This is clearly a religious law, as it centers on sacred rituals, priestly mediation, and spiritual purification before God. Yet a few chapters later, Leviticus 19:35–36 prohibits the use of dishonest weights and measures in trade, ensuring fairness in commercial dealings. This law is clearly secular by modern standards, regulating commerce and protecting consumers.

Unlike the Old Testament Israelites, who sought self-determination and theocratic rule within an earthly kingdom, the New Testament church, by contrast, rejected that the kingdom of Jesus the Messiah was temporal. As Jesus put it, “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36, ESV) The New Testament Church saw itself as unbeholden to both Israelite religious rulers and Roman secular rulers. Both sets of rulers had, after all, been complicit in Jesus’ crucifixion. Moreover, the prime directive of the early Christians was to proselytize for their faith not through coercion but through teaching. As Jesus put it in the Great Commission,

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:18–20, ESV, emphasis added)

There is no recorded instance in the New Testament where someone identified as a true disciple of Christ is seen as inflicting violence on others to advance the faith. The closest exception is Jesus forming a whip of cords to drive the money changers out of the temple in Jerusalem (John 2:15). But there’s no teaching in the New Testament about when and where followers of Christ are authorized to commit acts of violence against each other or against unbelievers.

The New Testament Church saw its authority in terms of moral suasion, not physical coercion. At most it could therefore exercise church discipline by expelling people from its midst, refusing to associate with them and barring them from the communion table. Dissociation was as far as church discipline could punish. Consider the following examples from the New Testament:

• [Paul writing:] “Warn a divisive person once, and then warn them a second time. After that, have nothing to do with them. You may be sure that such people are warped and sinful; they are self-condemned.” (Titus 3:10–11, NIV)

• [Paul writing:] “I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people. What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.” (1 Corinthians 5:11–13, NIV)

• [Jesus speaking:] “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” (Matthew 18:15–17)

Interestingly, the Jesus who uttered these words about excommunicating people from the church when they refused three opportunities to repent is the same Jesus who spoke about forgiving others without any limits whatsoever on the number of opportunities to repent if in fact they did repent. As Jesus put it: “If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them. Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.” (Luke 17:3–4) In the same vein, consider Jesus’ response to Peter’s question, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus responded, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (18:21–22)

There’s an irony in the proximity of this last passage (Matthew 18:21–22) to the earlier passage quoted (Matthew 18:15–17), in which Jesus sets out the conditions, as a matter of church discipline, for excommunication: forgive only three times versus forgive without limits—the passages are only a few verses apart in Matthew’s gospel. There’s also a further irony in that Jesus treated pagans (such as the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24–30, whose daughter he healed) and tax collectors (such as Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1–10, who was not just a tax collector but a chief tax collector) with grace and kindness. Jesus, it seems, made a habit of eating at the home of tax collectors (Luke 7:34), outraging the Pharisees. So much for Jesus dissociating himself from pagans and tax collectors.

Setting aside these ironies, it might be argued that excommunication or shunning could constitute a catastrophic punishment against people to the extent that they would be so isolated and therefore so cut off from economic and social resources as to put their lives in jeopardy. But that was hardly the case in the world of the New Testament. Christians of that time were in the minority, and people excommunicated from their midst could readily find associations necessary for their livelihoods outside the church.

The coerciveness of excommunication or shunning would change when Christianity became the established religion of the Roman empire and alternative religions were criminalized. But any such future change in the church’s power dynamics, coming not until the fourth century AD, is nowhere evident in the New Testament. No New Testament passage predicts that church authorities would gain secular power and so be justified in using of coercion and violence once they had it. Jesus’ admonition to the contrary is worth repeating: “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36)

Before leaving what the Bible says about free speech, we need to consider one further question: whether the Bible draws gender differences regarding speech? The world of the Bible was male dominated. The question therefore naturally arises whether biblical speech regulation imposed gender-based restrictions on women? Simply put, did Bible women have less free speech than Bible men? In the New Testament, explicit restrictions on women’s speech appear in the Pauline epistles. Thus Paul writes, “women should keep silent in the churches.” (1 Corinthians 14:34, ESV) He also writes, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” (1 Timothy 2:11–12, ESV)

Some Christian traditions have interpreted these Pauline restrictions on women’s speech as teaching that the biblical model of speech grants greater speaking rights to men than to women. It may be, however, that Paul was in such passages simply giving utterance to his own personal judgment. For instance, consider how Paul explicitly differentiates between his own judgment on the one hand and God’s direct command on the other in regard to marriage and divorce:

To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband (but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife. To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. (1 Corinthians 7:10–12, ESV)

The problem with interpreting Paul’s restrictions on women’s speech as the Bible’s universal teaching on that topic is the example of women in the Bible. The Bible’s own testimony about women in speaking and leadership roles stands at odds with Paul’s restrictions. Bible women, in both the Old and New Testaments, did not maintain the silence that Paul seemed to be mandating. In the Old Testament, we find female prophetic voices, such as Moses’ sister Miriam (Exodus 15), the judge Deborah (Judges 4–5), and the prophetess Huldah (2 Kings 22).

The Appearance of Jesus Christ to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection — iconsofsaints.com

In the New Testament, striking examples exist where women are given a voice in ways that affirm their freedom to speak, teach, and bear witness. Most notably, women are the first to testify to the resurrection of Jesus. All four Gospels record that Mary Magdalene, along with other women such as Mary the mother of James and Salome, were the first to discover the empty tomb and receive angelic or direct instruction from Jesus to report his resurrection to the male disciples (Matthew 28:1–10, Mark 16:1–7, Luke 24:1–12, and John 20:1–18). In a culture where women’s testimony was often deemed legally or socially unreliable, we find here an affirmation of women’s spiritual authority to proclaim the core message of the Gospel. Far from silencing these women, Jesus entrusts them with the initial announcement of arguably the most significant event in Christian history—his resurrection.

Other examples of women in the New Testament exercising divinely sanctioned speech include the following:

• Elizabeth and Mary’s Spirit-filled speeches. Both Elizabeth and Mary engage in prophetic utterances to announce Jesus’ coming. Elizabeth, “filled with the Holy Spirit,” loudly blesses Mary and her unborn child (Luke 1:41–45). Mary responds with the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), a poetic hymn exulting in God’s redemptive purposes. Both women are depicted as public speakers of divine truth, their words given center stage in the canon of Scripture.

• The prophetic activity of Philip’s daughters. Acts 21:9 (ESV) notes that Philip the evangelist “had four unmarried daughters who prophesied,” suggesting not only that women were active in public proclamation under the influence of the Holy Spirit but also that their prophetic voices were recognized and respected within the early Christian community.

• The teaching ministry of Priscilla. Priscilla illustrates female speech being accepted and valued in the teaching ministry of the early church. Alongside her husband Aquila, Priscilla is recorded in Acts as taking the learned but incomplete preacher Apollos aside and “explain[ing] to him the way of God more accurately.” (Acts 18:26, ESV) The text suggests that she played an active role in theological instruction. Interestingly, Paul commends Prisca and Aquila (Priscilla is the diminutive of Prisca, so they are one and the same) in Romans 16:3, 1 Corinthians 16:19, and 2 Timothy 4:19, suggesting that even Paul made allowances for Priscilla’s teaching ministry.

Consequently, to the degree the Bible allows free speech for men, it also allows it for women.