Why we can't have Jesus more favorable view of the Torah and the Jewish
way of deducing moral rules of behavior than had
without the Torah1
By Dr. Robbert A. Veen
Huizen, the Netherlands
@ all rights reserved 2008
Summary: In the light of our present day knowledge
about 1st century Judaism it seems strange that the
Church was so ready to abandon the Torah and the Je-
wishness of the Gospel. Within the NT there is still suffi-
cient support for an understanding of the Torah and Jew-
ish legal thought as a lasting element of Christian ethics.
Especially if we take Matthews priority within the Canon
and the statement Jesus made in Mat. 5:17 about the eter-
nal validity of the Law seriously, one should accept that
Torah and Church ethics cannot be separated. However,
the question must be asked: what happened to the Torah
in the Church and why did it happen if we want to make
some progress in reassessing the value of the Torah as a
source for Christian ethics.
In 1982 Mennonite theologian and pastor John
Toews 2 presented his design for a theology of law in
the New Testament that would be able to provide
us with a biblical method of doing Christian ethics.
In his view, the Torah should again have a role to
play in ethics, precisely because all the evidence in
the New Testament suggests that Jesus took a far
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been acknowledged by the Reformation. His posi-
tion might be summarized as follows:
In the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Torah is
normatively interpreted for the community of Jesus’
followers, who affirm His messianic position, and
the nucleus of this interpretation is the love of God
and neighbor.
Affirmation of the Torah and its validity is precise-
ly the cornerstone of any position that holds that
Jesus came to interpret the Torah in a fresh manner
and not abolish it. Which of course is exactly what
Matthew 5:17 teaches us.
Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or
the Prophets. I did not come to abolish, but to
fulfill.
From this thesis, we can deduce a number of im-
plications, some of which I will try to explore in this
and following articles.
Questions, questions, and even more questions
Other, more preliminary questions need to be
asked too. If the above thesis is valid, how did it
come about that the Christian Churches ignored this
central position of the Torah? What happened?
What doctrine took the place of the Torah in groun-
ding Christian ethics if any? And how did we arrive
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at the almost insurmountable schism between the
demands of the Kingdom and the exigencies of or-
dinary life in the modern state? The status of the
Sermon on the Mount is something of an enigma,
with widely diverging views as to the relationship
between that Sermon and the teachings of the Torah
or Jewish oral tradition.
The issue of the relationship of Christian ethics
and the Torah also has a significant bearing on
many other topics, including the specific position of
a Christian in his or her community. Is a Christian
primarily a citizen with a specific religious attitude?
That is at least what modern liberalism tells Chris-
tians based on the principle that religion is a form of
inner persuasion. Quite different from the American
predicament where 70% of all citizens are still
Christians, in the Netherlands Christians are a small
minority. But even then Christian political parties
represent a sizable chunk of 34% of the electorate,
give or take.
What can it mean that some of us still hold that a
Christian is a citizen of the Kingdom of heavens,
who awaits the return of Christ while living in the
remains of an old order, destined to fade away?
Such a position of 'inner exile' is the reverse of the
liberal position and it is in full harmony with it,
both sides agreeing that there is no place for a
Christian stand on ethics or politics in this life.
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What can we do about it?
Well, what should Christians do when they disag-
ree? They should read the bible together.
It seems to me to be necessary to look with a fresh
mind at the New Testament evidence, the epistle of
James and the gospels of Matthew and Mark in par-
ticular, to establish a biblical answer to these ques-
tions. Why these texts in particular? I'll come to that
later, but for now I can say that Matthew seems to
be the most Jewish gospel, Mark the most 'Roman'
or pagan, and the letter of James has been in debate
since the 1st century. These are the witnesses to the
issue that may have been divided among them-
selves even from the start.
More importantly, they all seem to agree that the
Torah is being read and understood in the Church
as a major source of Christian ethics, something
which we in our time may find almost unintelligi-
ble. After all, in modern Christianity, there seems to
be no place for the concept of a true obedience to
the Torah as an integral part of Christian ethics. The
New Testament seems to leave us with a pair of
conflicting positions on this issue.
Jesus or Jeshua?
Who is the real Jesus? The Jesus who apparently
abrogates the food laws in Mark 7 by “declaring all
foods clean,” annuls the Sabbath, invalidates the
Korban law and the laws of vowing in general, and
rejects the institution of the Temple? Or is it the Je-
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sus that we might refer to more adequately by his
Jewish name Jeshua? That's the Jesus who in Mat-
thew 5:17 declares that He “did not come to abolish
the law and the prophets” and expects a higher
righteousness of His disciples than that of the Phari-
sees, implying a greater obedience to the Torah?
The controversy is even apparent within the body
of apostolic correspondence, e.g. in Paul. Is it the
Jesus who has become the “end of the law” in Ro-
mans 10? But how come Paul can say so many
wonderful things about the Torah? Living through
the Spirit actually fulfills the 'righteous demands' of
the Torah.
In what sense then can we argue that the New Tes-
tament as a whole teaches us that the messianic era
starts with the abrogation of Mosaic Law?
So again, we must ask: Who is the “real” Jesus?
The Jesus of Mark or the Jesus of Matthew?
Mark or Matthew?
If Church practice early and late can be considered
at least part of the answer, the “real” Jesus obvious-
ly is that of Mark. You might work backward, start-
ing from what we actually hold to be true in prac-
tice and then reviewing the NT in that light.
Well, then it's obvious the Church has overcome its
inherent or initial jewishness. The Christian
Churches do not hold to laws of ritual purity nor do
they abide by the various food laws, including those
Noachide laws dealing with blood and the stran-
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gled that apparently had been adopted by the apos-
tolic council under the joint authority of James, Pe-
ter, and Paul and the Church in Jerusalem (Acts 17).
For the same reason, if Pauline doctrine can be
considered part of the answer and if it is in strict
continuity with Jesus’ teaching, then Jesus must
have been abolishing the law, since established ex-
egesis has it that Paul surely did.
Even Peter is portrayed as being the recipient of a
divine vision in which impurity barriers between
Jews and gentiles were lifted (Acts 10). Church prac-
tices then and now, and various texts in the New
Testament, speak urgently in favor of the image of
Jesus of Nazareth as the one who abolished the law.
A New Perspective?
Just for argument sake, can we put all of this into
some other perspective? Suppose we take into ac-
count in what context these gospels were written,
without forgetting even for a moment that they are
canonical witnesses and therefore cannot be simply
excluded in our theology.
Matthew might have been speaking from within a
part of the Christian Church to whom the recogni-
tion of an ongoing validity of the law was still im-
portant. To Jewish Christians a continuing role of
the law must have been quite self-evident. And they
would therefore be inclined to retain vivid memo-
ries of Jesus' sayings and acts that were in disconti-
nuity with that presupposition, because they would
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take notice of the divergence sooner than the ob-
vious similarity.
In the same manner it would appear to the au-
dience of Mark, that anything that Jesus had said to
support the Torah and Judaism would be of great
importance because it would be natural for them to
assume that He would take a diverging position on
nearly everything - as they presumably did them-
selves when compared to their Jewish neighbors in
Rome. At least with respect to dietary laws and mat-
ters of sanctity in the daily life, Jesus' teachings and
life must give a foundation for current Church prac-
tices.
The question is how to develop these differences
between the gospels into a consistent theology?
How else can we explain these divergences?
The difference of the images of Christ in Matthew
and Mark might be explained by arguing for two
separate patterns of early Christianity, which we
then can identify according to ethnic boundaries as
Jewish and gentile Christianity.
That has consequences for exegesis. Matthew's
statement are less likely to be taken as the corner
stone of our understanding of any issue, we would
be inclined to start elsewhere. Read historically,
Matthew’s position on the law might then have
been a redactional input by its author to support
viewpoints taken by the congregations that he
wrote for.
A fine example is the way we treat the statement
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about divorce in Mark and Matthew.
This is Mark's statement:
Whoever should put away his wife and marry
another commits adultery against her. And if a wife
should put away her husband and be married to
another, she commits adultery. (Mark 10:11, 12)
And this is Matthew, I have put the divergent
clause in bold letters.
But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife,
except for a matter of sexual immorality, makes her
commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorcee
commits adultery. (Mat. 5:32)
The exception is treated most often as an en-
hancement and Marks statement as the original one
or as the principle. In Jewish thinking the amplifica-
tion of the Law would be treated on a par with the
ultimately valid position or halakha - which the
Church also does if you look at its practice of allow-
ing divorce, at least in most protestant churches.
A Jewish approach would tend to accept an under-
lying structural relationship between the two state-
ments. Marks statement would still be considered of
importance because it showed the intent of the
lawmaker to make divorce a difficult thing to do.
The statement of the principle and the ultimate rul-
ing on a point of 'law' would be in harmony.
By the way, the terminology might lead us astray
here. We are talking about 'halakha', which is a Jew-
ish word for a way of life rather than about 'law' in
any modern sense.
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 Historically speaking, Mathew and Mark would
have done very much the same thing, both obscur-
ing the “real” Jesus behind their own theological
needs.
Theologically speaking we have to choose between
two strategies: reading it as 1st century believers,
that are familiar with Jewish legal thought, or as
modern folk, that consider legalities to be the prov-
ince of the lawyers. Our modern distinction be-
tween the realm of the legal and the moral would
make us believe that we find the whole truth in
Mark and a particular addition to that in Matthew
which should be considered secondary.
It would mean a crushing blow to our instincts, -
and I'll be ready to deliver it later on - that the addi-
tion to the law that Jesus made according to Mat-
thew would be considered only the beginning. After
all, the interpretation of law and ethics according to
Matthew 18 is left in the hands of the congregation
as a whole. But we will climb that particular moun-
tain when we come to it later in this series.
The equilibrium of our historical observation can
theologically be ignored by a harmonizing strategy
that starts from the gospel statements that are con-
current with modern practices. We could either start
from Mark or from Matthew.
In a way, we are doing the same theologically that
they did according to our presumptions, when they
wrote the gospels. Jesus must have said something
in support of what we are doing and know to be
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right, how can it be otherwise?
The differences are then not really recognized but
they are actually ignored because the gospel of
Mark - mostly of course the theological views of
Paul - can be used to explain Matthews position as
belonging to a separate social group with specific
theological issues to contend with. We take the his-
torically contingent statement of Mark to be eternal,
and the addition of Matthew we see as deviating.
The popular idea that Mark is the oldest and there-
fore the most authentic gospel can be cited for sup-
port in this case, even by those who do not wish to
practice historical-critical method.
The canon expresses priorities
To modern Christians, this historical issue is not
without importance, but it does not confront us
with an obstacle that needs to be solved completely
in order to make progress.
We must first accept that the “real” Jesus cannot be
reconstructed as if we can go back behind the texts
that we have, and we must accept fully that we are
left to do our work with the canonized text. The
"real" Jesus is the Jesus of all the canonical gospels
and letters. We have to find our way through a
maze of conflicting pieces of evidence and travel
among incongruent images of Christ, both between
and within the given text, to reach our goal. But we
should not deny the internal evidence.
Is there a way to ease this burden? We should at
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least accept the canon as such as our starting point,
as the given material to work with, defining our
task as finding the unity or the center of the whole
of the text that the Church considered Sacred Writ-
ings. From that unity we can achieve some grasp of
the consistency of the various texts, not as a simple
uniform statement, but as something with the con-
sistency and the variety of a chorus piece, where
different voices are necessary to express a single
melody and harmony results from hearing them all.
The canon is not a practical list or a divine revela-
tion in itself, but it reflects the historical perspective
and a way of reading Scripture that was current in
the early Church. Matthew was put first in the order
of gospels for a reason. It was supposed to be the
basic and grounding view of Christ. Mark could not
set it aside and its historical priority did not affect
its theological position after Matthew.
After all the gospel of Jesus Christ started to
spread around the world from Jerusalem. Matthews
placement as the opening gospel also meant, that
even Paul could not contradict the basic position of
the gospels with impunity. The gospels had particu-
lar authority because they represented the living
voice of Christ who was the Lord of the Church and
the consensus of local Churches or Church groups.
And finally, because of the specific contents of Mat-
thew, it made clear from the outset, how the rela-
tionship between the Old Testament history and the
life of Jesus was to be understood.
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The canon preserves diversity
However, we should be aware that the New Tes-
tament is in many ways a product of conflicting
positions. James was in conflict with Paul on the
issue of justification; Peter and Paul had their quar-
rel about the status of gentile Christians in the
Church; the gospels of Matthew and John seem to
depict quite a different Jesus. All of this is reflected
in the texts.
Should we harmonize them into one consistent
picture? I say we should not, nor should we exagge-
rate the differences.
Side by side with the historical decision to adopt
our four gospels instead of the shortened version of
Luke that Marcion and Arius had proposed in the
2nd and 4th century, there was the effort to harmon-
ize the gospels into a synoptic vision of events.
The conflicts between the gospels were duly noted
and increasingly, as the Church moved further into
Roman territory, seen as problematic.
That accounts for the drive toward conformity and
consistency that permeated theology from the third
century on. In stead of creatively building upon the
example of the NT, and its Jewish mind cast, there
was a drive toward a unifying view, a synoptic
completeness without tensions, that allowed for
easy decisions about right and wrong and stirred
the dogmatic imagination. The differences between
the New Testament writings had to be smoothed
out by a meta-narrative that did not allow them to
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be understood as formal contradictions.
And finally dogmaticism arose as the systematic
attempt to produce a single consistent series of
statements. Dogmatic statements tried to define the
Person that all these storied were told about in such
a way, that harmony between the texts became
possible.
Harmonization, the smoothing out of differences,
became the dominant hermeneutic strategy. E.g., if
Luke said something that is not in John, both events
must have happened at different times. The differ-
ences between Paul and James should be attributed
to different emphases in the same overall gospel-
story. If John mentions a date different from the
other gospel writers, then he purposely deviated
from the historical truth to make a point.
In a modern approach, we would read differently.
We would surmise that the differences are part of
different theological appreciations of the apostolic
traditions that the gospel writers were working
with, or reflect the different contexts in which their
congregations had to deal with those traditions.
In such a case, when the contradiction cannot be
explained away, theological intent supersedes de-
scriptive accuracy.
Whereas the canon preserved the differences be-
tween apostolic witnesses and yet hinted at their
inner harmony, the drive for dogmatic unity de-
stroyed it in favor of a uniform position. Already
within the New Testament, this urge was present in
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the baptism formulae that gave succinct answers to
the question what do Christians believe. But these
statements tried to preserve basic truths as the
foundation for different perspectives. They did not
try to integrate everything into one logical system.
Paul and the gospels
Since the Reformation placed so much emphasis
on the interpretation of the gospel by Paul, a new
problem arose: that of harmonizing Jesus’ state-
ments in the gospels with the letters of Paul.
Matthew e.g. could be harmonized with Paul by
using a double strategy: (1) Matthew was either
writing about a preliminary position that Jesus took
because at that time the gospel was still meant to
reach Israel or (2) Matthew’s text, with its emphasis
on “doing the Law” had to mean something else, i.e.
it had to be spiritualized.
One of the ways of doing that, was to speak about
the demands of the law as a prerequisite of accept-
ing the gospel. Jesus was actually showing us to
what degree we had merited punishment in order
to guide us to divine grace. That strategy resulted in
a near dismissal of Matthew’s own intent.
Affirming the Law in a gentile Church
That is particularly apparent in the case of the
great stumbling block that we find in Matthew 5:17,
the massive affirmation of the law and the prophets
that is contained there.
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 It is generally accepted that the passage deals with
the meaning of Christ’s death in the light of His
resurrection, which was the real fulfillment of law
and prophets. To be able to fulfill the law meant
that Jesus was the One that the law and the proph-
ets had predicted, and the higher righteousness
demanded of Jesus’ followers could be equated with
the righteousness imputed to sinners.
The passage is quite equivocal in this way of read-
ing, involving a double-entendre at the moment it
was uttered. It simply doesn't say that without re-
course to the 'meta-narrative' or dogmatic frame-
work that is set up in advance.
From our present understanding of the Jewish con-
text of early Christianity we can ask a different
question. We now know what the expression 'to
fulfill the Law' really means: it means that Jesus had
no intent whatsoever of abrogating the Torah but in
stead came to uphold its standard or even bring the
Torah to its real goal.
So, perhaps already in the era of the formation of
the canon, the Church had forgotten what it actually
meant to “fulfill the law” and not to abolish it?
Maybe the early Church already employed a read-
ing strategy that made it possible to circumvent the
massive affirmation of the Torah’s validity? To fulfill
might have come to mean to supersede, by the end
of the 2nd century. Paul’s post-resurrection theolo-
gy, after having reached the status of primary
framework, could then become the foundation of all
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Christian theology. Jesus’ affirmation of the law
was read from hindsight as a stage in a progressive
revelation. His effort to build a new Israel had failed
and was first present in a new shape in the apostolic
preaching of Peter and James, and then given up
halfway through the book of Acts to be focused fi-
nally on Paul’s mission to the gentiles.
It is this meta-narrative of the replacement of Israel
by the Church that allowed for the harmonization
strategy to work, in essence dividing pre- from post-
resurrection theology (whereas in fact all of the
New Testament in its redacted state is post-resur-
rection reflection).
It is then set in the framework of Jesus’ preaching
of the gospel of God’s kingdom to Israel first, and
only after they rejected His message could the
complete gospel of freedom from the law be ex-
plained to gentiles and Jews alike.
However, that is not the reading strategy that the
canonical structure seems to hint at. The placement
of Matthew with its massive law-affirmation as the
first of the canonical gospels is the decisive act on
which we need to base our understanding of its
practical status.
The canonical stature of Matthew’s Sermon on the
Mount, including the massive affirmation of the
continuing validity of the law in Matthew 5, is a
barrier to any contemporary attempt to formulate a
law-free gospel, even if based on the gospel of Paul
or his followers. It is necessary to leave a formidable
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tradition of reading the gospel behind us.
Bias against the Jewishness of the gospel
Even in modern readings of the gospel however,
this ancient bias against the Jewish character of the
gospel is present. Rudolf Bultmann can state, e.g.,
that Jesus’ teachings are ”a major protest against
Jewish legality (Gesetzlichkeit), i.e., against a piety
that sees the will of God expressed in the written
law and the tradition that explains it.”3 Such a piety
would try to achieve God’s acceptance through a
painstaking effort to comply with the law’s de-
mands. Religion, law, and ethics were not separated
in Pharisaic doctrine, so that civil law became a di-
vine institution and divine law was handled as civil
law.
That position in his view must lead to casuistry,
where legal institutions that have lost their force
because of changing circumstances need to be kept
alive because they are considered of divine origin
and must be adapted to the new circumstances by
an artificial process of interpretation. “The conse-
quence of all of this is that the real motivation for
the moral act has become perverted.”4 Obedience is
in that case seen as something formal and the ques-
tion of why a moral act is commanded cannot be
asked; the principle of retribution (Vergeltung) is the
primary motivational force. In such a legal dis-
course, religious ethics cannot achieve a radical, real
obedience from the heart.
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Jesus’ intent was, according to Bultmann, to by-
pass the codified law and the cultic requirements
and present the case of a radical, moral obedience
beyond legalism. God demands what is morally
good in every situation anew. The moral relation-
ship becomes the pure divine requirement, beyond
legal, ritual and cultic law, to respond authentically
to Gods presence.
The antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount would
in fact portray such a moral requirement versus the
religious and legal dictates of the rabbis. The beha-
vior of man cannot be determined by legal rules; it
would leave a person a sphere of freedom outside
of Gods imperative that the law could not deal with.
Bultmann equates the halakhic system of the Phari-
sees (a way of understanding obedience as a “way
of life”) with this legalist distortion of Torah-
obedience.
Reconstruction of the gospels Jewishness
Even a casual reading of Sander’s Paul and Palestin-
ian Judaism, written in 1977,5 should teach us diffe-
rently.
The themes of God’s grace, election, the ”direction
of the heart,” the minor relevance of the aspect of
retribution, and the great emphasis on moral atti-
tudes beyond the strictures of the law - all present
in early Jewish law traditions - are shown to imply
the precise opposite of the legalist, cultic, self-
centered righteousness that Christian scholarship
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attributed to Judaism in the thought of Bultmann. In
our Churches, we have not really begun to draw the
consequences from this revolution in our way of
thinking.
With a more realistic picture of 1st-century Ju-
daism, our image of Jesus’ opposition to it must
change, and with that, our appreciation of the role
of the Torah in Christian ethics must also change.
At the present, after several decades of new re-
search into the Jewish context of Jesus’ preaching,
we can no longer ignore the continuity between
Jesus’ statements and those of his Pharisaic contem-
poraries. Liberal theology did so. Where Jesus states
like the Pharisees, that God rewards full obedience,
Bultmann does not hesitate to point out that behind
the idea of reward lies the promise of redemption to
those who obeyed for reasons other than the re-
ward. Jesus’ use of the concept of reward is thereby
given a theological depth to counteract the possibili-
ty that obedience for reward perverts the ”moral
motivation.”
However, such a sympathetic reception of lan-
guage that opposes Bultmanns own intuitions is not
given to the Pharisaic teachers. The assumption is
that the theological evaluation of the Pharisees, as
presented by some readings of the gospel context,
provides us with enough clues to accept in Jesus a
statement that is virtually identical to a statement
made by His Pharisaic contemporaries and still af-
firm such a statement by Jesus and reject that of the
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Pharisees.
All of the explanations of Jesus’ original gospel by
Bultmann are determined by his opinions about
Pharisees. They are context-derived and biased in as
far as they generalize from the gospel-accounts and
do not offer an explanation for the intent behind the
Pharisees’ position beyond a notion like their “zeal
for the law.”
I will endeavor to show in some of my next contri-
butions that the intent behind the Pharisees’ dis-
puted rulings can sometimes be reconstructed with
some certainty, not in a concrete historical fashion,
but by locating the “pattern of religion” (Sanders)
involved, and that this actually throws an important
light on the meaning of Jesus’ saying and the rea-
sons behind it.
Jesus against the Law?
According to Bultmann, Jesus does not reject the
authority of the Old Testament, but distinguishes
critically among its diverse commandments (which
only means that he has a specific hermeneutic) and
has a sovereign attitude towards it.
This last point is of course of primary importance.
The relationship between the authority of the Torah
and the authority of the Messiah is a vital issue. If
Jesus as Messiah is sovereign and above the law,
then so are His followers. If the Messiah however
upholds the Law, then His followers cannot be ex-
empt.
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 Did Jesus stand above the Law?
How can Bultmann claim that this sovereign atti-
tude is without a doubt (1) attributable to Jesus
Himself?
After all, Bultmann makes a highly technical dis-
tinction between Jesus’ sayings and Gemeindebildung
(redaction within the congregation and for the lat-
ter’s needs), because the image of Jesus as standing
above the law was a necessary part of the confession
of Jesus as the Messiah. The notion that Jesus super-
sedes the Torah might very well be part of a tradi-
tion that emphasized Jesus' status.
It would be easy to loose sight of Jesus' teachings
about the Law. Jewish Christians would not make
that mistake easily. They after all would expect the
Messiah to prove His status by upholding the To-
rah.
If these expressions of Jesus' sovereign status
above the Law are indeed part of the apostolic in-
terpretation of Jesus’ gospel, however, they cannot
revoke Jesus’ own sayings with regard to the au-
thority of Torah.
That leads to the first conclusion: Jesus authority as
the Messiah actually enhances the authority of the
Torah en does not diminish it.
But (2) how can Bultmann claim that, even given
his sovereign control over the Torah, Jesus actually
did abrogate the law, over against the evidence of
Matthew 5:17, which at least in the primitive
Church was held to be authoritative?
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I give it to you to consider whether it makes sense
that the Church would keep Jesus' statements about
the Torah which contradicted her own contempo-
rary practice if it had not been convinced that Jesus
had actually said it.
Bultmann can also (3) at the same time claim that
words that deny both Jesus’ rejection of tradition
and of the Torah are actually part of the Gemeinde-
bildung, whereas in his view, words that reject the
Torah must be authentic. That sets up a definite bias
in favor of Mark against Matthew.
A case in point is the expression in Matthew 5:17,
where Jesus states that He did not come to abolish
the law. Bultmann has this to offer: “...in compari-
son with other words of Jesus and taking His actual
behavior into account this cannot possibly be a ge-
nuine saying of Christ; it must be a Gemeindebildung
from a later age.”
We beg to differ, and the reason is precisely this:
that Bultmann rejects it as genuine because he in-
terprets it as (close to) an affirmation of Pharisaic
legalism.
If, however, one can interpret the affirmation of
Torah not as a form of legalism, but as something
common to all strands of Palestinian Judaism, there
is no problem. It certainly cannot be denied that
Jesus was a Jew.
The solution to the problem need not be the hypo-
thesis that Matthew wrote for a Judaizing congrega-
tion, nor the introduction of a semantic framework
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in which ”to fulfill” suddenly becomes connected to
Pauline Christology. There is no real hindrance to
accept that there was enough in Pharisaic Judaism
that could be adopted and adapted both by Jesus
and by the early Church.
That there is a problem with the absolute nature of
this affirmation of Torah in Matthew 5 should lead
us into the opposite direction. Precisely the incon-
gruence between the position of the Church and this
saying must mean that it is attributable to Jesus, by
the standard of critical method that what is in con-
flict with what can be expected must therefore be
genuine.
Notwithstanding his general rejection of a favora-
ble attitude towards the law in Jesus, Bultmann ac-
cepts that Jesus did not abrogate fasting in Mark 2,
did not speak out against the Temple cult and did
not reject the Old Testament. If Bultmann is ready to
accept such a favorable attitude toward the Law by
Jesus, why does he have to explain Mat. 5:17 with
recourse to some later stage in the theology of the
early Church?
What if the statement was first made by the
Church on the basis of all the other things Jesus
taught and did? The final phrasing of Matthew 5:17
still remains in continuity with Jesus’ own attitude,
Even if it derived its inclusion in the gospel from
the absence of Jesus' criticism of the law rather than
from an actual statement that Jesus had made.
But Bultmann not only diminishes the weight of
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Jesus' statement by reference to its origin in the
post-resurrection Church, he also diminishes it by
his interpretation of its phraseology. The impact of
the saying is reduced to mean a general acceptance
of the Old Testament as sacred literature, and re-
duced further by its attribution to a Judaizing con-
gregation.
The assumptions behind Bultmanns position there-
fore lead him astray here, as we will show later by
looking at the relation between gospel context (ref-
lective stages) and (reconstructed) logion context.
It is clear that a saying as recorded in Matthew 5:17
is a real hindrance to accepting the law-free gospel
as something that derives from Jesus, and not from
the pagan majority Churches and their (vulgarized)
Paulinism.
In it, Jesus states that He did not come to abolish
the law but to uphold (fulfill) it. His followers
should too.
So, what does this statement actually mean?
We will discuss that in the next article.
1
Chapter 1 of my doctoral thesis The Law of Christ, (Maas-
tricht: Shaker, 2001). I have reworked the entire chapter.
2
John E. Toews, "Some Theses Toward a Theology of Law in
the New Testament," in: Williard Swartley, ed. The Bible and
Law, Essays on Biblical Interpretation , Elkhart, 1982.
3
Rudolf Bultmann, Theologie des Neuen Testamentes, Tü-
bingen, 1953, p. 10.
4
Ibid.
5
E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, London, 1977.
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