| 67. The Relation of Jesus to the Mosaic Law. | ||||
The Mosaic Institutions were actually extinguished in the Church of which Jesus was the founder; hence it is natural to suppose that their abolition formed a part of his design: a reach of vision, beyond the horizon of the ceremonial worship of his age and country, of which apologists have been ever anxious to prove that he was possessed, Neither are there wanting spceches and actions of Jesus which seem to favour their effort. Whenever he details the conditions of participation in the kingdom of heaven, as in the sermon on the mount, he insists, not on the observance of the Mosaic ritual, but on the spirit of religion and morality; he attaches no value to fasting, praying, and almsgiving, unless accompanied by a corresponding bent of mind (Matt. vi. 1-18); the two main elements of the Mosaic worship, sacrifice and the keeping of sabbaths and feasts, he not only nowhere enjoins, but puts a marked slight on the former, by commending the scribe who declared that the love of God and one's neighbour was more than whole burnt offerings and sacrifices, as one not far from the kingdom of God (Mark xii. 23 f.) and he ran counter in action as well as in speech to the customary mode of celebrating the Sabbath (Matt. xii. 1-13: Mark ii. 23-28; iii. 1-5; Luke vi. 1-10; xiii. 10. ff.; xiv. 1. ff.; John v. 5. ff.; vii. 22; ix. 1. ff.), of which in his character of Son of Man he claimed to be Lord. The Jews. too, appear to have expected a revision of the Mosaic law by their Messiah. A somewhat analogous sense is couched in the declarations attributed by the fourth evangelist to Jesus (ii. 19); Matthew (xxvi. 61.) and Mark (xiv. 58.) represent him as being accused by false witnesses of saying, I am able to destroy (John, destroy) {P.313} the temple of God (Mark, that is made with hands), and to build it in three days (Mark, I will build another made without hands). | ||||
The author of the Acts has something similar as an article of accusation against Stephen, but instead of the latter half of the sentence it is thus added, and (he i.e. Jesus) shall change the customs which Moses delivered us; and perhaps this may be regarded as an authentic comment on the less explicit text. In general it may be said that to one who, like Jesus, is so far alive to the absolute value of the internal compared with the external, of the bent of the entire disposition compared with isolated acts, that he pronounces the love of God and our neighbour to be the essence of the law (Matt. xxii.36ff.), to him it cannot be a secret, that all precepts of the law which do not bear on these two points are unessential. | ||||
But the argument apparently most decisive of a design on the part of Jesus to abolish the Mosaic worship, is furnished by his prediction that the temple, the centre of Jewish worship (Matt. xxiv. 2. parall), would be destroyed, and that the adoration of God would be freed from local fetters, and become purely spiritual (John iv.21ff.). | ||||
The above, however, presents only one aspect of the position assumed by Jesus towards the Mosaic law; there are also data for the belief that he did not meditate the overthrow of the ancient constitution of his country. This side of the question has been, at a former period, and from easily-conceived reasons, the one which the enemies of Christianity in its ecclesiastical form, have chosen to exhibit; but it is only in recent times that, the theological horizon being extended, the unprejudiced expositors of the churchf have acknowledged its existence. In the first place, during his life Jesus remains faithful to the paternal law; he attends the synagogue on the sabbath, journeys to Jerusalem at the time of the feast, and eats of the paschal lamb with his disciples. It is true that he heals on the sabbath, allows his disciples to pluck ears of corn (Matt. xii.1. ff.), and requires no fasting or washing before meat in his society (Matt. iv. 14; xv. 2). But the Mosaic law concerning the sabbath simply prescribed cessation from common labour, fa-a, (Exod. xx. 8. ff.; xxxi. 12. ff.; Deut. v. 12. ff.), including ploughing, reaping, (Ex. xxxiv. 21), gathering of sticks (Numb. xv. 32. ff.) and similar work, and it was only the spirit of petty observance, the growth of a later age, that made it an offence to perform cures, or pluck a few ears of corn. The washing of hands before eating was but a rabbinical custom; in the law one general yearly fast was alone prescribed (Lev. xvi.29ff.; xxiii.27ff.) and no private lasting required; hence Jesus cannot be convicted of infringing the precepts of Moses. In that very sermon on the mount in which Jesus exalts spiritual religion so far above all ritual, he clearly {P.314} presupposes the continuation of sacrifices (Matt. v. 23 f.), and declares that he is not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil (Matt. v. 17.). Even if KpuMi, in all probability, refers chiefly to the accomplishment of the Old Testament prophecies, it must at the same time be understood of the conservation of the Mosaic law, since in the context, perpetuity la promised to its smallest letter, and he "who represents its lightest precept as not obligatory, is threatened with the lowest rank in the kingdom of heaven. In accordance with this, the apostles adhered strictly to the Mosaic law, even after the Feast of Pentecost; they went at the hour of prayer into the temple (Acts iii. 1), clung to the synagogues and to the Mosaic injunctions respecting food (x. 14), and were unable to appeal to any express declaration of Jesus as a sanction for the procedure of Barnabas and Paul, when the judaizing party complained of their baptizing Gentiles without laying on them the burden of the Mosaic law. | ||||
This apparent contradiction in the conduct and language of Jesus, has been apologetically explained by the supposition, that not, only the personal obedience of Jesus to the law, but also his declarations in its favour, were a necessary concession to the views of his contemporaries, who would at once have withdrawn their confidence from him, had he announced himself as the destroyer of their holy and venerated law. We allow that the obedience of Jesus to the law in his own person, might bo explained in the same way as that of Paul, which, on his own showing, was a measure of mere expediency (1 Cor. ix. 20. comp. Acts xvi. 3.). But, the strong declarations of Jesus concerning the perpetuity of the law, and the guilt of him who dares to violate its lightest precept, cannot possibly be derived from the principle of concession; for to pronounce that indispensable, which one secretly holds superfluous, and which one even seeks to bring gradually into disuse, would, leaving honesty out of the question, be in the last degree injudicious. | ||||
Hence others have made a distinction between the moral and the ritual law, and referred the declaration of Jesus that he wished not to abrogate the law, to the former alone, which he extricated from a web of trivial ceremonies, and embodied in his own example. But such a distinction is not found in those striking passages from the Sermon on the Mount; rather, in the law and the prophets, we have the most comprehensive designation of the whole religious constitution of the Old Testament, and under the most trivial commandment, and the smallest letter of the law, alike pronounced imperishable, we cannot well understand any thing else than the ceremonial precepts. | ||||
A happier distinction is that between really Mosaic institutes, and their traditional amplifications. It is certain that the Sabbath {P.315} cures of Jesus, his neglect of the pedantic ablutions before eating, and the like, ran counter, not to Moses, but to later rabbinical requirements, and several discourses of Jesus turn upon this distinction. Matt. xv.3ff., Jesus places the commandment of God in opposition to the tradition of the elders, and Matt. xxiii. 23, he declares that where they are compatible, the former may be observed without rejecting the latter, in which case he admonishes the people to do all that the Scribes and Pharisees enjoin; where on the contrary, either the one or the other only can be respected, he decides that it is better to transgress the tradition of the Elders, than the commandment of God as given by Moses (Matt. xv.3ff.). he describes the mass of traditional precepts, as a burden grievous to be borne, which he would remove from the oppressed people, substituting his own light burden and easy yoke; from which it may be seen, that with all his forbearance towards existing institutions, so far as they were not positively pernicious, it was his intention that all these commandments of 'men, as plants which his heavenly Father had not planted, should be rooted up (xv. 9. 13.). The majority of the Pharisaical precepts referred to externals, and had the effect of burying the noble morality of the Mosaic law under a heap of ceremonial observances; a gift to the temple sufficed to absolve the giver froin his filial duties (xv. 5), and the payment of tithe of anise and cummin superseded justice, mercy and faith (xxiii. 23.). | ||||
Hence this distinction is in some degree identical with the former, since in the rabbinical institutes it was their merely ceremonial tendency that Jesus censured, while, in the Mosaic law, it was the kernel of religion and morality that he chiefly valued. It must only not be contended that he regarded the Mosaic law as permanent solely in its spiritual part, for the passages quoted, especially from the Sermon on the Mount, clearly show that he did not contemplate the abolition of the merely ritual precepts. | ||||
Jesus, supposing that he had discerned morality and the spiritual worship of God to be the sole essentials in religion, must have rejected all which, being merely ritual and formal, had usurped the importance of a religious obligation, and under this description must tall a large proportion of the Mosaic precepts; but it is well known how slowly such consequences are deduced, when they come into collision with usages consecrated by antiquity. Even Samuel, apparently, was aware that obedience is better than sacrifice (1 Sam. xv. 22), and Asaph, that an offering of thanksgiving is more acceptable to God than one of slain animals (Ps. 1.); yet how long after were sacrifices retained together with true obedience, or in its stead! | ||||
Jesus was more thoroughly penetrated with this conviction than those ancients; with him, the true commandments of God in the Mosaic law were simply, "Honour your father and your mother, You shall not kill etc, and above all, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and your neighbour as yourself." But his deeprooted respect for the sacred book of the law caused him, for {P.316} the sake of these essential contents, to honour the unessential which was the more natural, as in comparison with the absurdly exaggerated pedantry of the traditional observances, the ritual of the Pentateuch must have appeared highly simple. To honour this latter part of the law as of Divine origin, but to declare it abrogated on the principle, that in the education of the human race, God finds necessary for an earlier period an arrangement which is superfluous for a later one, implies that idea of the law as a schoolmaster, "Paidagogos" (Gal. iii. 24), which seems first to have been developed by the apostle Paul; nevertheless its germ lies in the declaration of Jesus, that God had permitted to the early Hebrews, on account of the hardness of their hearts, (Matt. six. 8 f.) many things, which, in a more advanced stage of culture, were inadmissible. | ||||
A similar limitation of the duration of the law is involved in the predictions of Jesus, (if indeed they were uttered by Jesus, a point which we have to discuss,) that the temple would be destroyed at his approaching advent (Matt. xxiv. parall), and that devotion would be freed from all local restrictions (John iv.); for with these must fall the entire Mosaic system of external worship. this is not contradicted by the declaration that the law would endure until heaven and earth should pass away (Matt. v. 18), for the Hebrew associated the fall of his state and sanctuary with the end of the old world or dispensation, so that the expressions, so long as the temple stands, and so long as the world stands, were equivalent. It is true that the words of Jesus seem to imply, that the appearance of the Baptist put an end to the validity of the law; but this passage loses its depreciatory sense when compared with its parallel, Matt. xi. 13. On the other hand, Luke xvi. 17. controls Matt. v. 18., and reduces it to a mere comparison between the stability of the law and that of heaven and earth. The only question then is, in which of the Gospels are the two passages more correctly stated? As given in the first, they intimate that the law would retain its supremacy until, and not after, the close of the old dispensation. With this agrees the prediction, that the temple would be destroyed; for the spiritualization of religion, and, according to Stephen's interpretation, the abolition of the Mosaic law, which were to be the results of that event, were undoubtedly identified by Jesus with the beginning of the Age of the Messiah, Hence it appears, that the only difference between the view of Paul and that of Jesus is this: that the latter anticipated the extinction of the Mosaic system as a concomitant of his glorious advent or return to the regenerated earth, while the former believed its abolition permissible on the old, unregenerated earth, in virtue of the Messiah's first advent. {P.317} | ||||