Feticide, The Masoretic Text, And The Septuagint -- By: Matthew Flannagan
Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 74:1 (Spring 2012)
Article: Feticide, The Masoretic Text, And The Septuagint
Author: Matthew Flannagan
WTJ 74:1 (Spring 2012) p. 59
Feticide, The Masoretic Text, And The Septuagint
Matthew Flannagan, a theologian based in Auckland, New Zealand, is currently a teaching elder at Takanini Community Church in Auckland.
Implicit, if not overtly explicit, in much historic Christian moral reflection on feticide is a simple, three-premise position. Firstly, that there is a divine law prohibiting homicide, the killing of a human being without adequate justification; secondly, that a formed conceptus, a fetus, is a human being; and thirdly, that in all or most cases of feticide, justification for homicide is not forthcoming. In this article, I will refer to this line of argument as the Alexandrian argument, naming it after the Alexandrian Jews from whom it originated. The Alexandrian argument receives one of its clearest expositions by Philo. In his commentary on the Decalogue, The Special Laws, Philo argues that the law of God considered the killing of a formed conceptus to be homicide and hence a violation of the sixth commandment.1 With this conclusion established, Philo offered an a fortiori argument against the widespread practice of infanticide in his day. If killing a fetus before birth were homicide, then killing children after birth would be as well. Therefore, the law condemned infanticide, like feticide.
Like Philo, numerous early Christian writers appealed to feticide in a fortiori arguments against infanticide and appropriated the argument Philo expounds. Examples include Athenagoras, Tertullian, and Minucius Felix.2 This argument against infanticide is also found in the fourth-century catechism The Apostolic Constitutions.3 And it was formulated by Pope Stephen V writing in 887.4 Allusions to the Alexandrian argument also appear in the writings of Jerome, Lactantius, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret, Ambrosiaster, and Augustine of Hippo.5
In the early Middle Ages the Alexandrian argument found its way into penitential literature, particularly the collections, The Canones Hibernensis
WTJ 74:1 (Spring 2012) p. 60
(675), Bigotian Penitential (4.2, 2–4), Anglo-Saxon Penitentials (668–690), Capitula Deacheriana, Canoes Gregorii, and Penitentiale Discupulus Umbrensium. Later through Ivo of Chartres it was incorporated into official canon law in the Concordia of Gratian (1160), the Compilationes of Bernard of Pavia, and the offic...
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