Bigotry

Bigotry in the UPDV is the rigid drawing of a sorting line — tribal, sectarian, regional, ritual, or party — and the refusal to receive whatever or whoever crosses it. The vocabulary clusters around forbidding, rebuking, murmuring, and "having no dealings with"; its opposite is the catholicity that gives the right hand of fellowship across populations. The collected witnesses range from a Jordan-ford slaughter over a mispronounced syllable to disciples who would call down fire on a Samaritan village to scribes who reject the testimony of a man whose eyes have just been opened.

Tribal and Ritual Boundaries in the Old Testament

The earliest scenes set the pattern as social separation around food, language, and access to God. At Joseph's table the Egyptians refuse a shared meal: "And they set on for him by himself, and for them by themselves, and for the Egyptians, that ate with him, by themselves: because the Egyptians might not eat bread with the Hebrews; for that is disgusting to the Egyptians" (Gen 43:32). Late prophetic speech catches the same sorting in religious key, where holiness is invoked as a barrier rather than a calling: "who say, Stand by yourself, don't come near to me, for I am holier than you. These are a smoke in my nose, a fire that burns all the day" (Isa 65:5).

The Jordan fords supply the harshest tribal scene. A dialect-test substitutes for examination: "then they said to him, Now say, 'Shibboleth'; and he said 'Sibboleth'; for he did not accomplish correct pronunciation: then they laid hold on him, and slew him at the fords of the Jordan. And there fell at that time of Ephraim forty and two thousand" (Judg 12:6). A phonetic slip becomes a death-sentence; tribal sorting is weaponized into mass-slaughter at a river-crossing.

Forbidding Spirit Outside the Group: Eldad and Medad

Numbers gives the foundational test-case for forbidding work done outside the recognized circle. Two men are prophesying in the camp rather than at the Tent of Meeting, and Joshua moves to suppress them: "And Joshua the son of Nun, the minister of Moses, one of his chosen men, answered and said, My lord Moses, forbid them" (Num 11:28). Moses' counter-rebuke voids the petition: "Are you jealous for my sake? Oh that all Yahweh's people were prophets, that Yahweh would put his Spirit on them!" (Num 11:29). The argument is structural — God's Spirit is not bounded by the seventy-elder gathering — and it sets the template the Gospels return to.

Regional Prejudice: Nazareth, Galilee, and the Samaritans

Regional bias surfaces at Christ's first introduction. Nathaniel sneers at his hometown — "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" — and Philip's reply is not argument but firsthand exposure: "Come and see" (John 1:46). The hometown bar runs the other direction in Christ's diagnosis: "Truly I say to you⁺, No prophet is acceptable in his own country" (Luke 4:24). When he presses that same point at Nazareth by citing Yahweh's wider mercy to the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, the synagogue's reaction is wrath: "And they were all filled with wrath in the synagogue, as they heard these things" (Luke 4:28). The Mark parallel locates the offense in over-familiarity — the trade, the mother, the brothers and sisters all named — "And they were offended in him" (Mark 6:3). The Jerusalem authorities run the regional argument the opposite way as a closed verdict: "Are you also of Galilee? Search, and see that out of Galilee rises no prophet" (John 7:52).

The Jewish-Samaritan divide is treated as settled practice. The Samaritan woman states it flatly: "How is it that you, being a Jew, ask me for a drink, being a Samaritan woman? For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans" (John 4:9). When the disciples return, the surprise is not the request but the conversation: "they marveled that he was speaking with a woman; yet no man said, What do you seek? Or, Why do you speak with her?" (John 4:27). The bar is mirrored from the other side when a Samaritan village refuses Christ — "they did not receive him, because his face was [as though he were] going to Jerusalem" (Luke 9:53) — and the disciples want a holy-war response: "Lord, do you want us to bid fire to come down from heaven, and consume them?" (Luke 9:54). Christ's answer is a turn and rebuke: "But he turned, and rebuked them. And they went to another village" (Luke 9:55-56).

Sectarian Boundaries: Pharisees and the Wrong Company

A whole cluster centers on Pharisaic objection to the company Christ keeps. The scribes object to a meal: "And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with the sinners and publicans, said to his disciples, [How is it] that he eats with publicans and sinners?" (Mark 2:16). The objection becomes a rolling murmur: "And both the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, This man receives sinners, and eats with them" (Luke 15:2). At Zacchaeus's house the murmur is unanimous: "they all murmured, saying, He has gone in to lodge with a man who is a sinner" (Luke 19:7). At the Pharisee's banquet, the host's silent verdict bars the sinful woman by category: "This man, if he were a prophet, would have perceived who and what manner of woman this is who touches him, that she's a sinner" (Luke 7:39). The same Pharisaic reflex extends to ritual: "And when the Pharisee saw it, he marveled that he had not first bathed himself before dinner. And the Lord said to him, Now you⁺ the Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the platter; but your⁺ inward part is full of extortion and wickedness" (Luke 11:38-39). The most concentrated portrait is the Pharisee-and-publican parable, addressed to those "who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and set all others at nothing" (Luke 18:9): the Pharisee's prayer — "God, I thank you, that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican" (Luke 18:11) — is the inward voice of bigotry, and the publican's "God, be merciful to me a sinner" (Luke 18:13) is the voice the parable justifies.

The same pattern hardens into legal action when [the Speech] makes the bar itself the issue: "For this cause therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath, but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God" (John 5:18). And when the man born blind testifies to his healer, the rulers sort him out by master rather than by evidence: "You are his disciple; but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses: but as for this man, we don't know where he is from… You were altogether born in sins, and do you teach us? And they cast him out" (John 9:28-29, 34).

Disciples Mirroring the Bar

The Gospels show the disciples themselves repeatedly drawing the very line Christ has been crossing. John reports an exorcist they have silenced: "Master, we saw one casting out demons in your name; and we forbade him, because he does not follow with us" (Luke 9:49); the Markan version names the same complaint — "we forbade him, because he didn't follow us" (Mark 9:38). Christ's reply names the rule: "Don't forbid [him]: for he who is not against you⁺ is for you⁺" (Luke 9:50). The same gatekeeping shows up at the children: "And they were bringing to him little children, that he should touch them: and the disciples rebuked them" (Mark 10:13); the Lukan parallel narrows it further to babies — "And they were bringing to him also their babies, that he should touch them: but when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them" (Luke 18:15). In each case the disciples bar a class of person — the unaffiliated exorcist, the small child — by membership rather than by what is being done.

Misdirected Zeal and Persecution

Bigotry takes on a religious-zeal register in Paul's diagnosis of his own past and his countrymen's present. Of Israel he writes, "they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For being ignorant of God's righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God" (Rom 10:2-3). Of his pre-conversion self he writes, "I persecuted the church of God, and made havoc of it: and I advanced in the Jews' religion beyond many of my own age among my countrymen, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers" (Gal 1:13-14), and again: "as concerning zeal, persecuting the church" (Phil 3:6). The persecution-as-bigotry note is sharpest in Thessalonians, where the bar against the wider mission is explicit: those "who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove out us, and do not please God, and are contrary to all men; forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved" (1 Thess 2:15-16).

The Catholic Counter-Movement

Against this whole bar-drawing reflex Paul sets a deliberate catholicity. The Jerusalem pillars receive the Gentile mission: "and when they perceived the grace that was given to me, James and Cephas and John, they who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcision" (Gal 2:9). The pressure to compel circumcision on Gentile believers is refused outright: "But not even Titus who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised: and that because of the false brothers secretly brought in… to whom we gave place in the way of subjection, no, not for an hour; that the truth of the good news might continue with you⁺" (Gal 2:3-5). The apostolic obligation is named in maximally inclusive paired terms: "I am debtor both to Greeks and to Barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish" (Rom 1:14). And the partitions themselves are voided in Christ: "There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor free, there can be no male and female; for you⁺ are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal 3:28). The collection of UPDV witnesses thus closes by reframing every earlier sorting line — Egyptian-Hebrew, Ephraimite-Gileadite, Jew-Samaritan, Pharisee-sinner, disciples-outsider — as a partition that the in-Christ unity has set aside.