[Sca-cooks] snake

[Laura C. Minnick]

At 09:14 AM 5/7/02 -0500, you wrote:

>On Mon, 6 May 2002, Laura C. Minnick wrote:
>> The reference I made was more food- specific. Peter had a vision in Acts
>> 10:9-16, in which a 'great sheet' full of nasty things is lowered and he is
>> encouraged to eat- and he refuses, because the animals, reptiles, etc, are
>> unclean. And it occurred to me that this is just the sort of thing that
>> would have been used as an argument against eating slimy things.;-)
>>
>
>Except that the passage you are referring to is the argument for
>Christians not keeping the laws of kashrut--after Peter says no, they're
>slimy, then the voice responds "Do not call anything impure that God has
>made clean." So really it's an argument *for* the eating of slimy things.
>
>Margaret

Well, yes but. That is one interpretation. The vision is imbedded in the
story of Cornelius- Peter had been insisting that gentiles couldn't get in
on this spiffy new deal, and the vision encouraged him to change his mind-
as shown is vs 28 of the same chapter. I am not sure that the vision had
anythign to do with what food they could eat- I only mentioned it as an
example of a bunch of stuff considered unclean. (As to the matter of the
law, that is addressed at some length in the book of Romans.) It is also my
understanding that the Jews of the Early Church were still following Jewish
law, but the gentiles were not required to. (Source of conflict between
Peter and Paul, until they got together to make Almond Joy ;-)

Reading recently on teh Inquisition- apparently one of the many ways the
Inquisitors found Jews and determined whether or not there was a
conversion, and if it was true- was by what they ate- they were watched in
the market, their servants informed on them, and even the medieval
equivalent of the garbage man turned informer. IIRC it was a matter of
omission- lack of evidence for some foods rather than presence of others,
except perhaps at Passover (one tale of a woman sending her maid out for
particular ingredients, and then staying up in the night to make the
unleavened bread. Or so the maid said when she was questioned.)

I guess the Inquisitors would have to look for something else on me- I'm
much too fond of dead piggy and shellfish.

'Lainie
-going to lay down now- I don't feel so hot.

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