In Matthew 5:13-20 is a description of salt losing its saltiness. In our world that doesn’t happen without a chemical reaction of some kind. Our science of chemistry defines a salt as a compound that results when an acid reacts with a base. The most common salt is table salt or sodium chloride. Another common salt is a road salt, calcium chloride. However, what Jesus meant by salt cannot be defined by modern language. It was probably a mixture of calcium sulfate and our table salt. Calcium sulfate is gypsum and used to make plaster of Paris. This mixture could lose the salt component and thus its saltiness. All this proves a very important step in studying the Bible: get our definitions right. Careful research rather than jumping to hasty conclusions helps us understand the Bible so much better.
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