The Great Tattoo Debate, or GTD (Part Uno)

So I wrote some stuff about the Bible and tattoos. This will be in a couple parts, and is not meant to be a complete study, just a few thoughts on the common Scripture used to decry tattoos.

This is the most explicit reference to what we would call tattoos today, and the lightening-rod verse people go to immediately claiming the Scripture prohibits all tattoos:

Leviticus 19.28 " 'Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.

This verse is found in a long section of Scripture describing the laws God gave to His people, the Israelites. It is referencing an ancient practice whereby people would worship the dead or false gods by making cuts on their skin, inscribing themselves with markings symbolizing their affinity for these objects of reverence.

Do we see these types of tattoos in our day? Yes, we absolutely do. When someone gets a tattoo honoring a loved one who has died (or is still living for that matter), pictures of a hero or tattoos worshipping things and anything that coud be considered an idol, this is in the same vein (pun-ish) as the types of tattoos that Moses writes of, and God forbids, in Leviticus.

In I Kings 18, the prophets of Baal, a false God that Israel was guilty of worshipping in place of the God of the universe, as they were trying to get their demon-god to act in response to the challenge of Elijah, cut themselves and spilled their blood in an act of devotion and worship to Baal. This has been compared to modern tattoos, which could be a comparison for the types of tattoos mentioned earlier.

To put the Leviticus passage in context a little, and give some perspective, here is the verse directly before the verse about tattoos.

27 " 'Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.

Now, many Jesus people assume tattoos are sinful…do we cut our hair? Trim our man–(or woman?) beards? Here is the thing, and Paul totally backs this up in the NT, if you keep some of the law, you are on the hook for the whole thing. You can’t cherry-pick cultural laws and enforce them like they are way way more important than the sentence that comes right before the law you are picking. It is disingenuous, not to mention downright hypocritical.

EVEN IF you somehow feel it is reasonable to argue that the OT passages condemning idol-honoring tattoos apply to God-honoring tattoos, you have to read the whole Scripture. In Romans 6 Paul reminds believers that we are not under law but under grace. While we are still bound by the principles found in the OT because Jesus summed them up in loving God and our neighbor, and now actually set free in Jesus to live healthy, whole lives that are modeled after those principles, we are not bound to uphold the specific hundreds of laws found in the law.