Last month I wrote a short post called The Proof is Out There (But Not Where You Think) about an exchange on X. The Pope had condemned capital punishment, plainly and in so many words. Commenters answered with New Testament verses they said proved the death penalty biblical. My objection then, and now, was simple: read the verses they offered, and not one of them said “capital punishment.” Not one of them said “execution.” I linked a Dan McClellan video and left it there, which was doing the thing I complain about — handing my readers homework instead of an argument. So here is the argument, in full, in my own words.

First, a concession, because honesty requires it and because I do not want to win this on a technicality: the missing word is not, by itself, a refutation. Ancient writers did not have our legal vocabulary. A text can authorize something without naming it in modern terms, the way a stop sign doesn’t have to say “automobile.” If the death penalty is proved in those verses, it will be proved by what they mean in context — speaker, audience, situation — not by a word search. Fine. Let us apply exactly that test. It is the test I apply to friendly proof texts too, and it is the test the commenters’ verses have to pass.

A note on honesty before the verses themselves. That exchange on X is a month gone now, and I did not save the two commenters’ exact words — my original post never named their verses either, beyond pointing at Romans 13 as the best example. So I am not going to pretend to quote a thread I no longer have. What I can do, and what this argument actually needs, is take the verses that get quoted every time this subject comes up — the standard New Testament proof texts for the death penalty — and run them through the test one at a time. If the case can be made from the New Testament, it will be made from these.

And let me name, up front, the one I consider their strongest, because fairness means meeting the best version of an argument and not the worst: Revelation 13:10 — “if anyone is to be slain with the sword, with the sword must he be slain.” It is the closest any of them comes to saying the thing itself. It is still a poor argument, and I will explain why when we get to it. But if I were making their case, that is the verse I would lead with.

Romans 13 is the centerpiece, so let us put it under the microscope. Paul, writing to the church at Rome around AD 57, tells his readers to be subject to the governing authorities, because authority is instituted by God, and then he says this of the ruler: “For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience.” And a few words before that, the phrase everyone hangs the argument on: the ruler “does not bear the sword in vain.” There it is. The sword. Case closed, say the commenters.

Read the passage for what it is actually doing, though. Notice who it is addressed to: not rulers, but the ruled. It is a passage about the Christian’s duty toward authority — submit, pay your taxes, don’t rebel — written to a small, politically powerless minority living under an empire that did not care what they thought about its penal code. Paul is not handing a magistrate instructions for his office; he is telling powerless people how to live under power. Notice, too, the level of the claim. The sword in the ancient world was the symbol of coercive authority in general — the state’s right to compel and to punish. The passage says God works through governing authority to restrain wrongdoing. It describes what authority is for. It does not specify a method of punishment, it does not mandate one, and it does not instruct any Christian to support one. It describes the government restraining evil and calls that God’s ordering of things. A permission for governments to punish — which is a long way short of a proof that Christians must support executions.

Now the strongest reading on the other side, stated as fairly as I can state it, because it deserves to be answered at full strength and not as a strawman. In Paul’s world, the sword was not a traffic ticket. Roman authority executed people; the ius gladii, the right of the sword, was literally the power of capital punishment, and every reader in Rome knew what a sword was for. When Paul calls the ruler God’s avenger who carries out wrath on the wrongdoer, and says the sword is not borne in vain, the natural first-century hearing of that is: the state’s killing of criminals is part of the divine ordering Paul is describing, and he describes it without condemning it. That is a real argument. It is the best one the commenters have, whether or not they made it this well.

Here is why it still doesn’t land where they think it lands. Everything in that reading is description, and description is not prescription — least of all in a passage addressed to the people under the sword, not the people holding it. Paul also tells slaves, in other letters, to obey their masters; the church spent centuries learning, correctly, that a description of how to endure an institution is not a divine command to preserve it. The question the Pope raised is not “does Romans 13 observe that governments punish?” — of course it does. The question is whether a Christian today is biblically required to support the state killing prisoners. Romans 13 does not ask that question, because Paul wasn’t answering it. He was telling a vulnerable little church not to get itself killed in a tax revolt. Proof texts have a way of being asked to carry freight they were never loaded with.

And one thing more about Romans 13, because it is the detail the whole argument turns on. The verse says the ruler carries out — executes — wrath on the wrongdoer. It does not say he executes the wrongdoer. Wrath is the thing being carried out, and wrath can be carried out in full in a prison cell: life, no parole, three hots and a cot, and the rest of a man’s natural life to think in it. That is wrath, executed completely, and nobody had to be killed to execute it.

Now the rest of the standard list, one at a time, same test.

Revelation 13:10 first, since I crowned it. Read past the half that gets quoted: “If anyone is to be taken captive, to captivity he goes; if anyone is to be slain with the sword, with the sword must he be slain. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.” That last sentence gives the verse away. It is not a sentencing guideline handed to a government. It is a word to Christians being persecuted — some of you will be taken, some of you will be killed; endure. It describes the violence of the empire the way Romans 13 describes its authority, and it reads to me the way the live-by-the-sword saying reads: violence is a way of life, and a state or a man that lives by it will die by it. And there is a larger problem with building policy on Revelation at all. It is the most misinterpreted book in the Bible. It is not about future things, and it is not what we were taught in Sunday school — it is about what its author and his first readers were living through, Rome in their own day, written in code because saying it plainly was dangerous. People have been misreading it from the beginning. A death-penalty argument built on its most violent line is built on the shakiest ground in the New Testament — their strongest verse, and a poor one.

Acts 25:11 is the runner-up, and it fails a different way. Paul, on trial for his life, says that if he has committed anything worthy of death, he does not refuse to die. That is a defendant accepting the jurisdiction of the court that is trying him — a man making his legal defense. It is not a teacher handing his church a penal code, and accepting that a court holds power over your own case is not the same thing as instructing Christians everywhere to support that court’s harshest sentence.

First Peter 2:14 says governors are sent by him “to punish those who do evil.” Punishment. Not execution — punishment. Life in prison is punishment, and it fits the word exactly as written. The death penalty fits it only if you add a specification the text itself never makes.

Matthew 26:52 — “all who take the sword will perish by the sword” — is spoken in a garden, to Peter, to stop a sword rather than swing one. It is the live-by-the-sword principle: do evil and you will get evil; violence comes back on the one who lives by it. That is a warning, not a warrant.

And Luke 22:36, where Jesus tells his followers to buy a sword — the same night ends with a sword drawn at the arrest and Jesus telling Peter to put it away. Whatever the buying was about, the story’s own conclusion is the sheathing.

Stand back and look at the pattern across all of them: punish, wrath, sword, perish. Not one of them says execute him. If other people can interpret these verses into a license to kill, I can interpret them the other way — the texts are genuinely open, and that openness is itself most of the point. But notice whose reading needs the extra word. Mine reads the words that are on the page. Theirs needs “execution,” and it is not there.

So where do I stand, since the original post never quite said? I am against the death penalty. People who call themselves pro-life should mean it for the whole of life — it should not stop at a zygote in a womb somewhere. And the argument that some men are too evil to walk this earth has an answer that does not require killing them: lock them up for the rest of their lives — in a dark hole, if that’s what it takes — and let them finish their days there. We can punish. We can protect society. We can execute wrath. We do not have to execute people to do any of it. I have more reasons than those, probably a series’ worth, and I am not going to argue them all here; I am not trying to convert anybody. That is my position, stated once, plainly, for the record.

So where is the proof? It is out there, in the sense that the verses exist and can be quoted. It is not where the commenters think, in the sense that the verses are doing other work — describing authority, counseling submission, using a sword as a symbol of the power to punish — and none of them issues the command or the endorsement the argument needs. That is the standard I want applied to every proof text, including the ones quoted at me and including the ones I like: quote it in context, name the speaker and the audience, and show the verse actually saying the thing it is claimed to say. The verses that survive that test are worth arguing about. The ones that don’t are just punctuation in somebody else’s sermon.

Read more

Dan McClellan, “Christian nationalists are wrong about the Pope” (video)

Godless Mom (Courtney Heard), The Ultimate Punishment — a six-part series dismantling the standard defenses of the death penalty one at a time, from redemption and deterrence to cost and “closure”: https://www.godlessmom.com/post/the-ultimate-punishment-part-one-introduction