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"'Anyone who says, You fool! will be in danger of the fire of hell.' So says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:22)."

"He claims that words spoken in anger are the moral equivalent of murder. But by chapter 23, he’s pretty angry at the religious leaders. 'You blind fools!' he shouts during a chapter-long rant (Matthew 23:17). He calls them hypocrites, snakes and vipers, everything — as the saying goes — but a child of God. We all know that insulting people is incompatible with Christian teaching. But Jesus actually did it quite a bit. Here are some of Jesus’ best insults...."

From "Jesus' best insults" by Dave Barnhart (in Ministry Matters), which I'm reading this morning because we've been discussing the insult "Fredo," which I compared to "Uncle Tom," which is an insult even though the fictional character Uncle Tom was originally conceived of as a Jesus. I got to wondering Did Jesus insult people?

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