While the results in the show and the book are largely comical and portrayed in good humor (at one point a pebble is chucked at a cheating spouse), following every law ever given by God to the letter is nearly impossible, and not what Catholics are called to do, biblical scholar Andre Villeneuve told CNA.
"Good luck if you really want to try to live the Old Testament completely literally," Villeneuve, who has a doctorate in biblical studies and teaches at St. John Vianney Seminary in Denver, Colo., told CNA.
"It would mean you would have to stone your son if he's rebellious and doesn't listen to you. You would have to stone adulterers. You would have to check every time you approach a woman that she's not on her period because you're not allowed to touch her," he said, "a lot of these things that have to do with purity which are really frankly awkward and would be really problematic, if not impossible, to observe."
The problem with such literal fundamentalism, he said, is that it doesn't read and interpret the Bible in light of salvation history and in light of the intent of the laws given by God.
"The 613 commandments in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew Bible, they were given to Jews to begin with, so it's ridiculous for anyone, whether a Catholic or Christian, to say they're going to live by all of these commandments, because they were never given to Gentiles," he said.
Some of these commandments still stand, however – most notably, the 10 Commandments. When Christ came and established a new covenant, the apostles decided which laws were still meant to be followed by Christians, and which laws pertained only to Jews, Villeneuve said.