Cheryl

Don,
Yes, you are right in that being Jewish had as much to do with circumcision as it did with the blood line. In my reading in the Talmud I came across the Pharisee idea of hell. All uncircumcised men went to hell and no circumcised (Jewish) man went there. However if a Jewish did something really bad to his Jewish brother when he died in the afterlife he would have his foreskin sewed back on so that he could be sent to hell.

I haven’t done a research project yet on the paternity issue so I don’t know first hand how or why they would go through the woman’s line. It all sounds very interesting.

Charis,
It took me a long time to get to the issue of marriage regarding women in ministry. I originally didn’t want to deal with it however it is so interconnected with the subject of ministry and it is used as a emotional argument to stop women from using their God-given gifts for the benefit of men, that I could not forever stay away from the issue of marriage. i.e. if you let women minister in church then men will no longer have a loving/obedient wife at home and they will have lost all “control”. It is about time that we seriously talk about what “control” that God has ordained and if he has ordained it, to what extent does it exist? Should be fun as we pull back the blinds and have a peek behind the source of these traditions and what is and isn’t scriptural. I hope that we can do this with much gentleness and grace yet without sidestepping any truth from scripture.