It was just another skirmish in the culture wars. In 1995, in a Colorado courthouse, a jury was deliberating in a murder trial. One of the members of the jury pulled out his Bible and read his fellow jurors the following verse from Leviticus, chapter 24, verse 17, in the King James Version: “And he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death.”

            Not long after, the jury voted to impose the death penalty.

            Then, the appeals began. The defense attorney argued it had been improper for the man to read from a Bible in the jury room. The Bible was not one of the numbered volumes of the Colorado statutes. He called it “an extraneous text.”

            He argued successfully. Ten years later — that’s how long the appeal took — the Colorado Supreme Court downgraded the man’s sentence to life imprisonment without parole.¹         That decision set off a firestorm of criticism: “How dare that judge ban the Bible from the jury room? What an outrage! Doesn’t he know this is America, and here in America, we are a Christian nation? Doesn’t he know the Bible is the foundation of our legal system?”

            On the TV talk shows, the phone lines lit up and stayed lit up for days. The pundits and talking-heads had a field day.

            What few seemed to notice is that from a Christian point of view, the juror completely misused the Bible. He read from Leviticus, saying a murderer must be put to death. Make the punishment fit the crime. What he failed to do was share what Jesus says about this passage.

A crazy new teaching

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