see Part I here.
Jesus’ Teachings in the Gospels on Law
Scholars have long noted that the Jesus portrayed in the gospels displays absolutely no explicit intention of changing the law. Some scholars have even made the bold statement that Jesus never knew that he was starting a new religion. Let’s examine what some of the gospels actually say in a little more depth.
Matthew’s Jesus particularly has been singled out as teaching obedience to Moses’ law. Jesus actually very explicitly states that he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it, and that anyone who sets aside even the least of the commandments and teaches others the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; when asked what one must do in order to have eternal life, he very explicitly instructs them to keep the commandments of Moses.[1] It is ironic then that this very Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is often abused by Christian apologists to show the very opposite, that Jesus taught a New Law that superseded Moses’. While it’s undeniable that Jesus taught with an authority that virtually no biblical prophet displayed since Moses, Jesus’ teachings related to Moses’ should be understood based on what he was actually saying. When he said “you have heard it said” regarding the law against murder (5:21-26), he was not removing the Mosaic law against murder, but intensifying it: if you hate your brother, it’s just as great a sin as murdering him. Jesus was in fact carrying on the rabbinic tradition of expounding on the law, except that I would argue that he was teaching the law with more spiritual depth than most rabbis did; this can be seen by comparing his writings with other rabbinic ones we have from the period or slightly later; also, Jesus was the only rabbi to have never written anything, yet to have his words become the predominant and overwhelming best seller in perpetuity. Once we see what Jesus was doing with the law, it’s easy to see the parallel with his expansion on the law regarding adultery (5:27-30); once again, Jesus does not tamper with the law against adultery, but focuses on the importance of what’s in the heart, not mere outward actions.
In Matthew 5:18-42, Jesus seems to deploy a different tactic, but I would argue he is actually not. He does not intensify the eye-for-an-eye law, but rather emphasizes the importance of mercy and service. And once again, this does not somehow repeal the need for judicial punishment of crimes commiserate with the level of damage done; Jesus is quite clear on the need for judicial justice, even for crimes which would not be considered punishable by Christians today, such as insulting one’s brother.[2] And the prophets of the Hebrew Bible back him up on this: mercy is important. He is not teaching anything new here.
In verses 43-48, he does something else seemingly different. He cites something they have “heard said”, but which, to the modern eye, is not actually in the law of Moses explicitly, although its principle could be found there, such as when they were commanded to smite the Amalekites for their sins, and to have war with them from generation to generation.[3] I’ve often heard it said that the law did not actually teach them to hate their enemies. Since there is a modern conception taught among many believers that God and the faithful do not hate sinners, only the sin, it seems necessary to have an aside about the way that the Bible speaks of hate, then we’ll consider whether the law did indeed teach them to hate their enemies.
At least one term often translated as “hate” in the Torah can mean simply not to love, as in the case of Jacob and Leah, whom he had not originally wanted as wife.[4] At no point in the context of the narrative would we think that this “hate” meant that he wanted her dead, or even wished her ill. A similar use of this word often translated as “hate” is found in Genesis 26:27, where Isaac speaks of Abimelech not favoring him because he had sent him from his presence; this does not mean that he wished him harm, but merely disfavored him, wishing him to go away. Yet the same Hebrew word in these passages is in fact used for hating one’s enemy, for whom one does wish ill, even to the point of wanting to kill them.[5] In other words, the Hebrew term sane had a broad meaning, all the way from merely not loving someone all the way to wanting to kill them.
What, then, did the law actually command concerning their enemies? Regarding certain people groups of Canaan, they were not only commanded not to favor them, but to slaughter them to the last woman and child, without mercy. Certainly this falls not only on the spectrum of not favoring, but also of not being concerned for their life. This is arguably most of the spectrum of the use of the Hebrew term. The only argument that it did not involve the entire spectrum of the term for hate, sane, would be if they were not supposed to take satisfaction in the killing of their enemies. As far as I can tell, the Torah provides no guidance in this department; there is one passage in Deuteronomy 9 that says they should not get a big head because God is destroying the people for them, but this is to humble them, and does not specifically address how they should feel about the destruction of their enemies. There are at least a few explicit statements in the latter prophets that indicate that one should not take pleasure in the death or misfortune of one’s enemy, however.[6] While we’re on this topic, I should point out that this was probably considered a radically progressive view for the time, although similar teachings can be found among the Greeks and in Asia around the same time period.[7]
So, for moderns like myself who grew up hearing that God does not hate anyone, passages such as Psalm 5:4-6 and 11:5 seemed to contradict this teaching.
“For you are not a God who delights in wickedness;
Evil may not dwell with you.
The boastful shall not stand before your eyes;
You hate all evildoers.
You destroy those who speak lies;
The Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.”
—Psalm 5:5
“I hate the assembly of evildoers, and I will not sit with the wicked.”
—Psalm 26:5, this is from the perspective of a pious man in this case. A sermon today with such a tone probably would not be well received among many.
After all, God doesn’t want anyone to perish, right?[8] Fortunately, I do not have to wade too far into the debate of how God could want everyone to be saved while also withholding the revelation that would save the many who go through the broad path that leads to destruction. I just have to point out that moderns tend to use the term “hate” to include the meaning that one desires someone’s misfortune, where the Bible does not always use it that way.
Let’s now return to Matthew 5:43-48. Were the Israelites indeed commanded to love their neighbor and hate their enemy? In at least one sense of the term, meaning not to have favor for someone, absolutely. Apart from the myriad commands for them to kill or enslave their enemies (which did in fact involve both the desire and the right to bring misfortune on them), many of the Torah’s laws very explicitly favored Israelites as opposed to foreigners. We’ve considered some of the laws in previous chapters, such as the way one had to treat a fellow Israelite servant, but not a non-Israelite, who need not even be classified as an enemy. One could not exact interest of a poor fellow Israelite, but could of a foreigner. This favoring of the Israelite as opposed to the relative disfavor toward the foreigner falls within the definitions of loving one’s neighbor and “hating” a foreigner, although some laws did in fact command them to show favor to foreigners, as we’ve seen. But how much more would disfavor toward an actual enemy be classified as sane (שָׂנֵא)?
In this light, Jesus is still taking the law and using it to teach a more spiritual concept. Yes, one had the right to treat foreigners, and especially enemies, a certain way, but Jesus is teaching love and mercy as the better way. Paul has very similar teachings, where love should trump rights, even though one still had the rights.[9] In other words, here again we have no indication that Jesus is taking away the law. To view this as an abrogation of the law is a modern misconception of their understanding of law. Joseph, for instance, did nothing wrong by not having Mary stoned or even just disgraced, even though the law technically required her punishment, special circumstances of divine insemination notwithstanding. Jesus is giving teaching beyond the law, not contradicting it. And he is in agreement with many of the prophets. His command to love your enemy is echoed by Paul in Romans 12:20, who quotes part of his version directly from Proverbs 25:21, 22.
But what did Matthew mean about that which new cloth and wineskins not being put the with old in 19:16-17? (See below.) And does the conclusion of Matthew’s gospel narrative presuppose some sort of new covenant that supersedes the old, as some sort of mystery (since it’s not stated explicitly)? After all, Jesus preaches the building of his “church” (16:18), the end of the Age (24-25), and the great commission to go into all the world preaching his good news (28:16-20).
Firstly, I believe scholars err when they see Matthew’s use of the term ekklesia[10] as necessarily anachronistic, assuming some sort of institution that did not exist in Jesus’ or even the apostles’ lifetimes.[11] Not only is this term unfortunately usually translated with the more ecclesiastical English term “church”, it is used extensively throughout the undisputed Pauline epistles, which are also not disputed as being among the earliest writings of the New Testament (c. 48-64 CE); but I would argue that the idea is taken directly from the much more ancient Hebrew Bible, with Hebrew terms such as edah[12]. Though it could simply refer to a general gathering of people, it could also be used to refer to the specific entire group of those whom God had sanctified for himself, as in Exodus 12:19 and Psalm 74:2. In other words, just because Matthew says “church” does not mean he’s assuming some sort of institution with rules about how to fill offices, as found in the pastoral epistles, covered in previous chapters above; he may only be speaking of the idea of God’s assembly/congregation whom God has sanctified/set apart, as Paul often does. (Though Paul also indicates some forms of institutional structure as well, such as rules about how to deal with wayward members, and a few about how to conduct an orderly worship assembly, for example; therefore, Matthew’s few rules in chapter 18 for the “assembly” are not necessarily as indicative of an advanced institution as scholars make them out to be.) Nor is Matthew using some sort of ecclesiastical term in his own day, but the general Greek word for “assembly”; in fact, you’ll find the term ekklesia used in the New Testament in the broader sense of “assembly”, where it does not refer to God’s chosen people, several times.[13] It is all the more amazing that scholars so often ignore the implications that I’ve explained above because they assume the more narrow and “later” ecclesiastical use of the term, especially since they will often show knowledge of and draw parallels between Paul’s earliest uses of the term to the more specific use of the term to the body of semi-self-governing authorities for a given town or city, as in Acts 19:39. The irony is that by ignoring these matters, the scholars themselves project anachronisms (i.e., their use of an ecclesiastical term that really isn’t “as ecclesiastical” as they assume) onto the authors that they are accusing of committing anachronism from what scholars therefore assume to be a later period than the lifetime of those who saw Jesus in the flesh. In case I haven’t made it plain enough, scholars and believers would be able to dispel all sorts of misconceptions if they had a translation that simply rendered ekklesia as “congregation” or “assembly”.
Secondly, I’ll save the rest of the discussion for whether the gospel’s teachings regarding the End of the Age and the Great Commission might suggest a mystery that presupposed some sort of New Law for after we get to Luke’s second book, and especially Hebrews. Matthew has two other finer points related to the nature of the Mosaic law, but I will address them below.
Let’s now turn to Mark. Besides also presenting Jesus and his followers as observant Jews, and never having Jesus explicitly teach an end to the Mosaic law, the author of Mark or someone very early in the book’s textual transmission interjected a very remarkable editorial comment in 7:19: “In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.” Many scholars and of course Christian supersessionists take this comment to presuppose that Jesus was planning on replacing the Mosaic law. I will further explore this topic when we come to the book of Acts, but I would here point out another possible interpretation which I’ve seen argued by a few theologians. The context of the passage is that Jesus is refuting a common practice of washing hands and many other things like cups; such traditions came from “the elders”, but Jesus is saying that, no, failing to wash your hands or anything else does not cause your food to be defiled and thus defile the person who eats it. In other words, their food was fine to eat without handwashing. This does not, of course, indicate at all that he is thus removing the dietary restrictions of Moses. If he did, then Peter knew nothing about it years later in Acts 10. If this theory of interpretation of Mark 7:19 is true, then I think the main barrier to moderns interpreting it correctly, apart from a bias to find prooftexts that support Supersessionism, is that we fail to recognize the Jewish idiom of using “all” hyperbolically. By this theory of what Jesus meant, he did not declare ALL foods clean, but all food they could eat, just like the entire populace (what we would usually mean by “all”) of Judea did not go out to the wilderness to see Jesus, but a substantial portion (Matthew 3:5), and “all” the sick were not healed (4:24), but all the sick who came to him. In fact, apart from Mark 7:19, there is another hyperbolic use of the term “all” right there in verse 3: of course all Jews around the Mediterranean world probably did not have this practice of the elders; in fact, the practice very well could have been confined to Palestine, and possibly not to even all the Jews there, as there were very different sects besides the Pharisees, ranging all the way from the “establishment” Sadducees and Herodians to the anti-establishment Qumran community. But, even if Mark did in fact mean this parenthetical comment as a reference to the removal of Mosaic food laws, we will see when we get to Acts why that still is not a smoking gun for Supersessionism, surprisingly enough. We’ll have to get to Paul and Hebrews before the supersessionists have the best prooftexts. Also note that Mark does not at all make it explicit anywhere that Jesus intended to change the whole Mosaic law, either.
John also portrays Jesus as a faithful Jew. He does, however, make one interesting comment in the fourth chapter, where Jesus converses with a Samaritan woman. Firstly, he tells her that the Jews got it right, that the Samaritans are the ones that have twisted the law of YHVH. Secondly, he says that there is a time coming when everyone will worship YHVH, everywhere, not just in one place. It would appear that he has the Gentiles in view, just as some of the Hebrew prophets did. Still, he makes no mention of a change in the law. And if you’re thinking that Christians being allowed to worship God anywhere necessitates a change in the law, I’d ask that you’d withhold judgment until we get to Acts.
The Sequel to the Gospel of Luke: The Mosaic Law as Ethnic Law
Luke is perhaps the most interesting and informative gospel writer regarding what law applies for God’ people after Christ. And while we’re on the topic of Jews being God’s faithful people, it’s a great place to point out that the New Testament only uses the word “Christian” three times, two of which are in Acts.[14] Not only does he provide the gospel story, but he also provides a sequel, the book we call Acts[15], which covers what follows Jesus’ ascension and the subsequent growth of the church. It is here that we got not only (finally!) some explicit teaching about what is to be done about the law of Moses, but even a Jerusalem council where the apostles and elders make their unanimous proclamations on the matter, which I’ve already examined in more depth in chapter one above. In the fundamentalist tradition in which I was raised, I was taught a type of dispensationalism that saw the day of Pentecost in Acts 2 as the repealing of the Mosaic law, and establishment of the New Law. While we should not discount the significance for this New Testament writer tying the delivery of the Spirit that fully reveals the gospel mystery at a second Mosaic feast (a celebration of the wheat harvest, Pentecost) that was to take place “seven sevens” after the Feast of Firstfruits and Passover, when Jesus was said to have been killed, some serious questions arise if we try to interpret Luke as presenting this as the delivery of a law that superseded Moses’.
Firstly, the early sermons of Acts are about the revealing of the gospel message, that the Messiah had come, with no mention of a new dispensation for Jews. Secondly, the Jerusalem council in chapter 15 made no ruling whatever about whether the law of Moses was still in effect, only whether Gentiles had to keep it. If you’ll recall, the Torah itself has Moses testifying to the same thing: it was not for the Gentiles.[16] But if you read carefully, what you’ll find is that the laws that the council placed on the Gentiles was actually in the Law of Moses; and further, they were actually an expansion of the law of Moses, because those laws had previously only applied to foreigners who lived among Israel, but were now applied to all Gentiles everywhere.[17] Thirdly, and maybe most significantly, the rest of Acts had faithful Jews, including the apostles themselves, keeping the law![18] Even though salvation was now through Jesus, there is no indication that Jews were not still bound by the law of Moses.
If the law was removed in the teachings of the earliest Christians, this detail is conspicuously absent in even the earliest sermons of Acts. Even though they were meeting in Solomon’s Colonnade, and arrested for what they were teaching, they were not prosecuted for teaching the removal of the laws of Moses.[19]
There is at least a hint of possible exception to this that has not gone unnoticed by scholars. In Acts 6 and 7, for example, we see one of the first martyrs. Stephen is accused not only of teaching the destruction of the Temple, as Jesus had, but also of teaching against the law, of changes in the customs that Moses had handed down to them.[20] This is the first explicit mention of the idea of Supersessionism, as an accusation against the followers of Jesus, but not yet an explicit doctrine. The author of Acts calls these false testimonies against Stephen, but you will notice in Stephen’s speech that he does not deny the charge of teaching a change in the customs of Moses. It should also be noted that just because they were “false” witnesses does not mean all of their testimony was false: they were probably right that he had predicted the destruction of the Temple. Recall that the “false” witnesses against Jesus accused him of similar things that he actually taught. When asked to address the charges of teaching against the law of Moses, Stephen’s speech does not include any response in the affirmative. But he also does not deny it. Scholars have speculated that the charges against him were brought because he had in fact been teaching this, and Luke, who had a different view as we continue to see, was smoothing this over.[21] We’ll explore this below, but first I want to note one more example of this in Acts. In 21:17-26, Paul appears before the council of James and the elders at Jerusalem. There is apparently also a report of Paul that he has been teaching the Jews living in the diaspora among the Gentiles that they need not keep the laws and customs of Moses; in order to combat this, they ask that Paul accompany four men under a vow to purify themselves and pay their expenses, so that everyone will know that Paul is not teaching against the laws of Moses. Notice that our author does not say so that it appears that he keeps the law, but so that his detractors will know that Paul actually keeps it and does not teach Jews to abandon it. There can be no doubt then that the author of Acts’ view is that the law was binding on Jews, even years after the day of Pentecost of Acts 2.
Another passage that might be “prooftexted” into indicating a change in the law might be Peter’s vision in Acts 10, when God tells him to eat unclean things. But upon waking and meeting Cornelius, Peter realizes that it means that God has accepted the Gentiles, who of course have always been allowed to eat things unclean. If this was some sort of indication that the law of Moses had been entirely removed, then why did they continue to observe the Mosaic laws for the rest of the book? Whether there was intended a change to the law later will be examined in the next part of this article.
[1] Matthew 5:17-19; 19:16-22
[2] E.g., Matthew 5:21-26. Note that leaders of the synagogue could have members of the community flogged, and they did it based on the law of Moses. E.g., 2 Corinthians 11:24, cf., Deuteronomy 25:3. Just imagine if it was considered appropriate application of authority today for church leaders to have wayward members flogged. I say this not only to help you see how different our modern culture is, but also for you to think about Christians you know who could use a good flogging….
[3] Exodus 17:8-16; cf. 1 Samuel 15:1-3, hundreds of years later, at least in the narrative.
[4] Genesis 29:31-33; Strong’s 8130
[5] E.g., Genesis 37:4-8; 24:60
[6] E.g., Proverbs 24:17-18
[7] How all the major world religions and philosophies could spring from about the same time period is a fascinating topic that I’d love to expound on at a later time.
[8] 2 Peter 3:9
[9] E.g., 1 Corinthians 8-10
[10] Also found in 18:7.
[11] E.g, New Testament History and Literature, by Dale Martin, ch. 7, pp.102-106. See Strong’s 1577.
[12] Strong’s 5712, “congregation”, often coupled with 6951, qahal, “assembly”, Exodus 16:22; 12:6, etc. And for the immediate context of the first century, they were using the LXX, which used the exact Greek term ekklesia.
[13] E.g., Acts 15:12, 19:32-41; 23:7
[14] Acts 11:26, where I do not think it coincidence that they’re first called Christians at the seat of power of the empire that last overturned their law, Antioch, and where Paul is headquartered, yet Luke goes to great pains to try to show that Paul and the Jerusalem apostles are in agreement, even when they are not always. Also see Acts 26:28 and 1 Peter 4:16 for these other uses of the term “Christian”. There are many other names put for what the followers of Christ believe, especially “the Way.” (E.g., Acts 9:2, 18:25, 19:9, 23, 24:14, 22; cf. Matthew 3:3, 22:16, 2 Peter 2:2, 21.) Curiously, I have met zero Christians who use this term to refer to their religion.
[15] Ironically, the full conventional name for the book is the Acts of the Apostles, but the book is not actually primarily about that.
[16] Deuteronomy 5:3
[17] Two of the four commands of Acts 15:19-20 are explicitly in the law of Moses, and the other two seem to be interpretations. They all come from Leviticus 18 and 19. Compare the abstaining from food polluted from idols to Levitus 17:8-9, prohibition of sexual immorality (18:6-26), strangled animals (17:13, 15), and blood (17:10).
[18] E.g., Acts 18:21; 20:6, 16-26; 23:1-9; 24:5-18; 25:7-8; 28:17.
[19] E.g., Acts 5:11-42.
[20] Acts 6:11-14; 7:1, 2.
[21] New Testament History and Literature, by Dale Martin, ch. 10