FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Early Christians may well have been vegetarians – but why?

Early Christians may well have been vegetarians – but why?

Re: “Evidence vegetarianism was widespread among early Christians”, Have Your Say, March 14.

While Ian Martin might be right about vegetarianism in early Christianity, what he fails to make clear is that eating vegetables was merely a means to an end, and not an end in itself, for many early Christians. 
The quote that he used from 1 Corinthians 8:(13) makes this explicit. “If food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat again, lest my brother stumble.” So the early Christians were not vegetarians for health reasons, but because they wanted to save people from falling into the wrong path.
As Mr Martin alluded to an earlier piece, the belief in other gods was prevalent after the death of Christ. Many people made food offerings in the temples of their respective gods, and even ate the food offered to the deities.  So real followers of Christ would set a poor example to the “weak believers” if they too ate food in the temple of other gods; Paul believed that the latter would be more likely to engage in the worshipping of idols if they saw true Christians eating in the temples of other gods. Thus in order to stop idol worship, he encouraged Christians, where necessary, to not eat meat.
Nonetheless, he cautioned in the same letter: “But food does not commend us to God; for neither if we eat are we the better, nor if we do not are we the worse” (1 Corinthians 8: 8).
It should also be mentioned that the other source which Mr Martin used to back up his claims, the book of Ebionites, is not  found in the New Testament of the Bible. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that he made a convincing case here for showing that many early Christians were vegetarians, whatever their real motivations were.
Mr P
Khon Kaen

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