Should we really be stoning homosexuals, disobedient children, adulterers and witches, as the Old Testament commands? What an all-loving god you serve, Christians!

Those laws are in the text, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. They are also jarring to a modern reader, and the jarring is worth taking seriously rather than deflecting with a slogan.

1. This was Israel's civil code, not a universal charter. The penalties belong to the covenant law given to a particular nation at a particular time (Exodus 19:5-6), the criminal code of a theocratic people. It is not a statute book for humanity, and it was never addressed to anyone else's courts. Confusing a national legal code with a universal ethic is where most of the confusion starts.

2. The church is not a nation-state. The New Testament assigns the sword to governing authorities, not to the church (Romans 13:1-4). Christians are not commanded to enforce Israel's penal code, and nothing in the New Testament suggests they should. So the answer to the question's first move is direct: no, we should not be stoning anyone.

3. The law itself made execution hard. Conviction required two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 17:6), a false accuser received the penalty he sought for his brother (Deuteronomy 19:19), and cities of refuge protected someone who killed without intent (Numbers 35). Later Jewish legal tradition made capital convictions so difficult that the Mishnah calls a court destructive if it executes even once in seven years.

4. Compared with its neighbors, the code was restrained. Ancient Near Eastern law codes were typically harsher and often class-based, with a slave's life valued below a free man's. Israel's law set a single standard for the resident alien and the native, limited retaliation, and required even kings to answer to the same text. That is not nothing, even if it is not modern liberalism.

5. Jesus stopped a stoning and changed the question. In the account of the woman caught in adultery, Jesus defuses the execution: let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone (John 8:7). That passage is missing from the earliest manuscripts, and honest readers should say so. But the trajectory it expresses matches what Jesus teaches elsewhere.

6. Jesus intensifies the moral law, not the penalty. He locates the offense in the heart: anger is murder, lust is adultery (Matthew 5:21-22, 5:27-28). The Sermon on the Mount is not a schedule of executions; it is a call to inner transformation that makes the outward penalty beside the point. The direction of the canon is toward mercy, not toward more stones.

7. Paul says the law served a temporary purpose. The law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith (Galatians 3:24). Its civil arrangements belonged to a phase of redemptive history that has ended, and they are not reimposed on the world. That is not an embarrassment about the Old Testament; it is the New Testament's own account of it.

8. The 'disobedient child' law is narrower than it sounds. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 describes an adult son who is persistently rebellious, a drunkard and a glutton, whose parents have exhausted every remedy and brought him before the elders. It is not a toddler who talks back. The Hebrew terms describe habitual behavior, and the case is the last resort of a community, not the ordinary discipline of a household.

9. The objection assumes a theocracy nobody is proposing. It takes a code given to one nation under a covenant and treats it as a platform Christians are running on. But the church has no coercive power in the New Testament and is told to expect persecution rather than to administer it. The target of the outrage is a position almost no Christian holds, which makes the outrage easier than the argument.

10. Christians disagree about how the civil law applies today. Some argue for an abiding moral law behind the civil code and read it as a model; others, such as Paul Copan, read the trajectory as accommodation and movement toward mercy. This is a live discussion, not a settled one, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. What no mainstream Christian body teaches is that the church should stone people.

So: should we stone anyone? No, and the New Testament is the reason, not an embarrassment to be explained away. The harder question is what the presence of that code in Scripture means for how God reveals himself over time, and that is worth arguing about seriously.

Sources: Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?; Richard Hess; Stand to Reason; Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel.

Related challenges:
• Please check your facts – the biblical account of Noah was derived from the Babylonian myth of Utanapishtim. Your mythical God didn’t 'inspire' it.
• Sorry Christians, but the creation account in Genesis is borrowed -- it is based on the Enuma Elish.
• Christian claims are not credible! Wouldn’t we expect SOME evidence of the exodus from Egypt, if it took place? 2.5 million people wandering around for 40 years in a specific geographic location...and NOTHING!