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Fulfillment of the Law
 ROBBERT VEEN

Fulfillment

of the

Law
This edition 2005 @ by R.A. Veen

Printing on demand: www.lulu.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a

database or retrieval system, or published, in any for or any way, electron-
ically, mechanically, by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means
without written permission from the publisher.
To Noëlle
 …..…..TABLE OF CONTENTS……….
PREFACE.............................................................................13

INTRODUCTION....................................................................15

A. JESUS AND THE LAW IN MARK...........................................17

CHAPTER 1 JESUS AND THE JEWISH LAW...............................18

CHAPTER 2 FULFILLING THE LAW (MATTHEW 5).....................26

CHAPTER 3 JESUS AND JEWISH ORAL TRADITION IN MARK......31

3.1 THE JEWISH TRADITIONS....................................... ..............................32
3.2. MARK’S RESPONSE TO THE TRADITIONS................................................. .....38
3.3 RECONSTRUCTION OF THE ORIGINAL DEBATE...............................................43
3.4 IS JESUS REJECTING THE ORAL TRADITIONS?..............................................48
CHAPTER 4 THE ISSUE OF VOWING: KORBAN........................53
4.1 THE CONFLICT OVER VOWING IN MARK......................................... .............54
4.2 THE EARLY JEWISH DEBATE ON VOWING.................................................. ....56
4.3 RESULTS: THE MEANING OF MARK 7.................................... ....................60
CHAPTER 5 THE SABBATH LAW (MARK 2 AND 3)...................64

CHAPTER 6 REDEMPTION AS HEALING (MARK 9)....................76

B. JESUS AND THE LAW IN MATTHEW....................................80

CHAPTER 7 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT (MATTHEW 5 – 7)....81

CHAPTER 8 SCRIBAL HERMENEUTICS OF THE TORAH (MATTHEW

18)......................................................................................93

CHAPTER 9 RABBINIC AUTHORITY AND THE CHURCH (MATTHEW

23)....................................................................................100

CHAPTER 10 JESUS AND JEWISH LAW..................................108

C. JESUS AND THE LAW IN THE LETTER OF JAMES.................116

CHAPTER 10 THE LETTER OF JAMES.....................................117

CHAPTER 11 THE PAULINIST FRAMEWORK...........................124

CHAPTER 12 CASUISTRY AND MORALISM.............................129

 12.1. RUDOLPH BULTMANN AND NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS...................................130
12.2 THE CASE FOR CASUISTRY............................................................. ....135
CHAPTER 13 JAMES’S DEBATE WITH PAULINISM...................142
13.1 FAITH AND WORKS........................................................................ ..143
13.2 THE MEANING OF FAITH.......................................... ..........................146
13.3 THE REAL DEBATE BETWEEN JAMES AND PAUL...........................................150
CHAPTER 15 JAMES AND THE EARLY CATHOLICISM OF CLEMENT
.........................................................................................157

CHAPTER 16 LAW AND OBEDIENCE AS CONSTITUENTS OF FAITH

.........................................................................................161

CHAPTER 17 CONCLUDING REMARKS..................................165

BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................172
PREFACE

This book contains in essence two chapters (3 and 6) of my disser-

tation, entitled “The Law of Christ” (Maastricht, 2000) that have
been reviewed and only slightly altered. In that dissertation, I tried
to make the case for a different type of Christian ethics that took
Jewish casuistry as a model for applying the Torah to the daily lives
of Christians. A revision and separate publication was necessary in
part, because these chapters had not been available as a separate
statement – which they are. I have left out most of the scholarly ma-
terial that was in the footnotes. It is not necessary to understand my
proposals and it is still available in the text of my dissertation.

The present book makes in effect a single statement: that Matthew

and James present us with a form of Christianity that tries to remain
a partner of Judaism in its attempt to obey the Torah of Moses. I
hoped to show that the new understanding of the Jewish back-
ground of the New Testament might contribute to a different way of
doing Christian ethics.

I appreciate the fact that much more needs to be said in order to

make the case for a renewed Christian casuistry along Jewish
lines. To think “legally” about moral issues is not a popular under-
taking in our post-modern era, that prefers emotional consensus to
a debate on principles. Yet I believe from my studies both in ethics
and Rabbinic Judaism that the Christian witness to the Kingdom of
Christ in this world could benefit greatly from Jewish moral and leg-
al hermeneutics.

Robbert Veen

HUIZEN, Christmas 2005

Introduction

In 1982 Mennonite theologian and pastor John Toews 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 more fa-
vorable view of the Torah and the Jewish way of deducing moral rules of
behavior than had been acknowledged by the Reformation. His position
might be summarized as follows:
In the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Torah is normatively inter-
preted for the community of Jesus’ followers, who affirm His messianic
position, and the nucleus of this interpretation is the love of God and
neighbor.
From this thesis, we can deduce a number of implications, some of which
I will try to explore in this book. If the above thesis is valid, how did it
come about that the Christian Churches ignored this central position of
the Torah? What doctrine took the place of the Torah in grounding Christi-
an ethics? And how did we arrive at the almost insurmountable schism
between the demands of the Kingdom and the exigencies of ordinary life
in the modern state? Is a Christian primarily a citizen with a specific reli-
gious attitude? Or is he a citizen of the Kingdom of heavens, that awaits
the return of Christ while living in the remains of an old order, destined to
fade away?
It seems to me to be necessary to look with a fresh mind at the New Test-
ament evidence, the epistle of James and the gospels of Matthew and
Mark, to establish a biblical answer to these questions. After all, in mod-
ern 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 is-
sue.
Which is the real Jesus? The Jesus who apparently abrogates the food
laws in Mark 7 by “declaring all foods clean,” annuls the Sabbath, invalid-
ates the Korban law and the laws of vowing in general, and rejects the in-
stitution of the Temple? Or is it the Jesus who in Matthew 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 Pharisees, implying
a greater obedience to the Torah? Is it the Jesus who has become the
“end of the law” in Romans 10? In what sense then could we argue that
the New Testament teaches that the messianic era starts with the abroga-
tion of Mosaic Law?
I will first present the difference in opinion between the gospels of Mat-
thew and Mark. I will try to establish that Mark is a writer that focuses on
Jesus as the Healer, which goes beyond issues of Torah-obedience. Mark
represents a point of view on Christ that is perfectly suitable for a mission-
izing Church in its contact with a pagan world. Matthew, though writing
later than Mark, in my view has tried to reconstruct the original gospel by
presenting Jesus in a Jewish context that is more congruent with Jesus
own reality as a Jew in first century Palestine. In a third section I will try to
show, that the letter of James presents us with a clear view on a mode of
discipleship and a form of Christian ethics, that includes obedience to the
Torah.
The aim of this book is fairly modest. By using some of the available
sources on the Jewish background of Christianity, I want to make the
case that Christians should start to think again about the meaning of the
Torah and its Jewish interpretation for the way we act as Christians in this
world. The point I am trying to make therefore is a preliminary one. It
defines a program of reinterpretation of Christian ethics in the light of our
knowledge of the Jewish background of Jesus that will give us more spe-
cific ideas of what a Christian ethics should look like. Though I dislike the
terminology, it might be fair to say that this book is a plea for a specific
form of “legalism”. Devising a mode of discipleship in our time, in which
ancient biases against Jews and the Old Testament are set aside, is nev-
ertheless to me a fascinating undertaking that might make our witness in
this world efficient by making it more apparent and specific.
A. Jesus and the Law in Mark
Chapter 1

Jesus and the Jewish Law

Who is the “real” Jesus? The Jesus of Mark or the Jesus of Matthew? If
Church practice early and late can be considered at least part of the an-
swer, the “real” Jesus obviously is that of Mark. 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 strangled
that apparently had been adopted by the Jerusalem council under the
joint authority of James, Peter, and Paul (Acts 17).
For the same reason, if Pauline doctrine can be considered part of the an-
swer and if it is in strict continuity with Jesus’ teaching, then Jesus must
have been abolishing the law, since established exegesis has it that Paul
surely did. Even Peter is portrayed as being the recipient of a divine vis-
ion in which impurity barriers between Jews and gentiles were lifted (Acts
10). Church practices then and now, and various texts in the New Testa-
ment, speak urgently in favor of the image of Jesus of Nazareth as the
one who abolished the law.
On the other hand, Matthew might have been speaking from within a part
of the Christian Church to whom the recognition of an ongoing validity of
the law was still important. To Jewish Christians a continuing role of the
law must have been quite self-evident. The difference of the images of
Christ in Matthew and Mark must then be due to the difference between
two separate patterns of early Christianity, which we most often identify
according to ethnic boundaries as Jewish and gentile Christianity. Read
like this, Matthew’s position on the law might then have been a redaction-
al input as well as that of Mark, both obscuring the “real” Jesus behind
their own theological needs.
To modern Christians, this issue is not without importance, but it does not
confront us with an obstacle that needs to be solved in order to make pro-
gress. We must first accept that the “real” Jesus cannot be found behind
the texts we have, as we must accept equally that we are left to do our
work with the canonized text. We have to find our way through a maze of
conflicting pieces of evidence amongst incongruent images of Christ, both
between and within the given text.
Is there a way to ease this burden? We might start with accepting the
canon as such, as the given material to work with, defining our burden as
finding the unity or the center of the whole of the text that the Church con-
sidered Sacred Writings. The canon is not a practical list or a divine revel-
ation, but it implies a 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, nor could Paul contradict with im-
punity the basic position of the gospels. The gospels had particular au-
thority because they represented the living voice of Christ who was the
Lord of the Church and the consensus of local Churches or Church
groups.
However, from our modern point of view the New Testament 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 quarrel 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? Side by side with
the historical decision to adopt four gospels instead of the shortened ver-
sion of Luke that Marcion and Arius had proposed in the 2nd and 4th cen-
tury, there was the effort to harmonize the gospels into a synoptic vision
of events. The conflicts between them were noticed and seen as problem-
atic. Therefore, the conflicts among the New Testament writings had to be
smoothed out by a meta-narrative that did not allow inconsistencies to be
understood as formal contradictions.
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 differences
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
surmise that the differences are part of different theological appreciations
of the apostolic traditions that the gospel writers were working with, or re-
flect the different contexts in which their congregations had to deal with
those traditions. In such a case, when the contradiction cannot be ex-
plained away, theological intent supersedes descriptive accuracy.
Since the Reformation placed so much emphasis on the interpretation of
the gospel by Paul, a new problem arose: that of harmonizing Jesus’
statements 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 accepting 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.
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 proph-
ets that is contained there. It was generally accepted that the passage
was about 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 prophets had pre-
dicted, and the higher righteousness demanded of Jesus’ followers could
be equated with the righteousness imputed to sinners. The Matthew pas-
sage however becomes equivocal in this way of reading, involving a
double-entendre at the moment it was uttered.
From our present understanding of the Jewish context of early Christianity
we can ask a different question. Perhaps already in the era of the forma-
tion of the canon, the Church had forgotten what it actually meant to “fulfill
the law” and not to abolish it?
Perhaps the early Church already employed a reading 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 cen-
tury. Paul’s post-resurrection theology, after having reached the status of
primary framework, could then become the foundation of all 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
finally on Paul’s mission to the gentiles.
It is this meta-narrative of the replacement of Israel by the Church that al-
lowed 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-resurrection 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 explained to gentiles and Jews alike. 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 un-
derstanding 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 tradition of reading the gospel behind us.
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.”1 Such a piety would try
to achieve God’s acceptance through a painstaking effort to comply with
the law’s demands. Religion, law, and ethics were not separated in Phar-
isaic doctrine, so that civil law became a divine 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 adap-
ted to the new circumstances by an artificial process of interpretation.
“The consequence of all of this is that the real motivation for the moral act
has become perverted.”2 Obedience is in that case seen as something
formal and the question of why a moral act is commanded cannot be
asked; the principle of retribution (Vergeltung) is the primary motivational
force. In such a legal discourse, religious ethics cannot achieve a radical,
real obedience from the heart.
Jesus’ intent was, according to Bultmann, to bypass the codified law and
the cultic requirements and present the case of a radical, moral obedi-
ence beyond legalism. God demands what is morally good in every situ-
ation anew. The moral relationship becomes the pure divine requirement,
beyond legal, ritual and cultic law, to respond authentically to Gods pres-
ence.
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 behavior 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 Phar-
isees (a way of understanding obedience as a “way of life”) with this legal-
ist distortion of Torah-obedience.
Even a casual reading of Sander’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism, written
in 1977, should teach us differently. The themes of God’s grace, election,
the ”direction of the heart,” the minor relevance of the aspect of retribu-
tion, and the great emphasis on moral attitudes 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 attributed to Judaism in the thought of Bultmann. In

1 R. Bultmann (1953), p. 10.

2 Ibid.
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 Judaism, 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 research into the Jewish
context of Jesus’ preaching, we can no longer ignore the continuity
between Jesus’ statements and those of his Pharisaic contemporaries.
Liberal theology did so. Where Jesus states like the Pharisees, that God
rewards full obedience, Bultmann does not hesitate to point out that be-
hind the idea of reward lies the promise of redemption to those who
obeyed for reasons other than the reward. Jesus’ use of the concept of
reward is thereby given a theological depth to counteract the possibility
that obedience for reward perverts the ”moral motivation.”
However, such a sympathetic reception of language that opposes Bult-
mann’s own intuitions is not given to the Pharisaic teachers. The assump-
tion 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 affirm such a statement by Je-
sus and reject that of the Pharisees.
All of the explanations of Jesus’ original gospel by Bultmann are determ-
ined 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 that the intent behind some of the Pharisees’ dis-
puted rulings can be reconstructed with some certainty, not in a concrete
historical fashion, but by locating the “pattern of religion” (Sanders) in-
volved, and that this actually throws an important light on the meaning of
Jesus’ saying and the reasons behind it.
According to Bultmann, Jesus does not reject the authority of the Old
Testament, but distinguishes critically among its diverse commandments
(which only mean that he has a specific hermeneutic) and has a sover-
eign 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.
However, how can Bultmann claim that this sovereign attitude is without a
doubt (1) attributable to Jesus Himself? After all, Bultmann discriminates
between Jesus’ sayings and Gemeindebildung (redaction within the con-
gregation and for the latter’s needs), because the image of Jesus as
standing above the law is part of the confession of Jesus as the Messiah.
If it is part of the apostolic interpretation of Jesus’ gospel, it cannot revoke
Jesus’ own sayings with regard to the authority of Torah. And (2) how can
Bultmann claim that, even given this sovereign mode, 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?
When it suits him, Bultmann can claim that words that deny both Jesus’
rejection of tradition and Torah are actually part of the Gemeindebildung,
whereas words that reject the Torah must be authentic. 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 comparison with other
words of Jesus and taking His actual behavior into account this cannot
possibly be a genuine 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 interprets it as (close to) an affirmation of Phar-
isaic 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 congregation, nor the introduc-
tion of a semantic framework in which ”to fulfill” suddenly becomes con-
nected to Pauline Christology. There is no real hindrance to accept that
there was enough in Pharisaic Judaism that could be adopted and adap-
ted 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 incongruence between the position of the Church and this saying
must mean that it is attributable to Jesus, by the standard of critical meth-
od that what is in conflict with what can be expected must therefore be
genuine.
Notwithstanding his general rejection of a favorable attitude towards the
law in Jesus, Bultmann accepts that Jesus did not abrogate fasting in
Mark 2, did not speak out against the Temple cult and did not reject the
Old Testament. The redactional stage of Matthew 5:17, in that sense, re-
mained in continuity with Jesus’ own attitude, even if it derived its position
from the lack of criticism rather than from an actual position that Jesus
had expressed.
The impact of the saying is, however, greatly reduced to a general ac-
ceptance of the Old Testament as sacred literature, and reduced further
by its attribution to a Judaizing congregation, history of form and redac-
tion history are given the final say over the matter.
The assumptions behind Bultmann’s position therefore lead him astray
here, as we will show by looking at the relation between gospel context
(reflective 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 (ful-
fill) it. What does this mean?
Chapter 2

Fulfilling the law (Matthew 5)

Now we are somewhat prepared to address the reading strategy that
takes the fulfillment of the law as implying materially the same thing as an
abrogation. What does it actually mean to fulfill the law in a Jewish con-
text? The expression “fulfilling the law” has been taken as the equivalent
of “doing the law,” as in Rom. 2:13. Jesus then came to do the law, to be
in obedience to all its precepts. But the Greek pleroosai stands closer to
the Hebrew lehaqim which means to uphold, to accept as a standard.
That is also how the Aramaic translation of Onqelos takes the Hebrew
(doing, here “the law”) in Deut. 27:26. The translation with “to uphold”
brings it closer to agreement with Rom. 3:31, where Paul states that he is
actually establishing the law (but using a form of histemi, to establish).
Besides, the LXX in 1 K. 1:14 clearly shows that the Greek pleroosai and
the Hebrew word for “fulfill” i.e. establish or affirm were seen as equival-
ents. The prophet Nathan here announces his intent to come to the king
to corroborate the words of Bathsheba. It seems clear that Jesus wanted
to uphold the Law as a standard for obedience in a Jewish sense.
The meaning of the expression is disputed, however. One might argue
that fulfilling the law equals doing it, i.e., obeying its precepts individually.
Jesus would then be saying that he ”does” the law, and Paul can then still
say later that to the Church the law is abrogated because of changed cir-
cumstances: Israel after all did not accept Jesus’ gospel.
The problem is that the Greek has a perfectly simple word for ”doing” the
law. The Greek poiesai is used, e.g., in LXX Deut. 26:16, to translate the
Hebrew for “doing” (‘asah) i.e., obeying the law. That does indeed suggest
that to fulfill means more than to obey or do it. It is hardly likely that doing
and fulfilling were seen as equivalents when the LXX takes such pains to
differentiate the two.
Another way to explain the underlying issue is to make a difference
between doing the precepts of the law and upholding it, i.e., maintaining it
as a standard even when occasional transgressions against it are com-
mitted. That seems to be clear from the Hebrew use of jaqim in Deut.
27:26, where we have the meaning of upholding (as standard) in order to
do. It certainly is the meaning of meqim in MPirkei Avoth 4:9, which
speaks about fulfilling the Torah in poverty. Surely, this does not mean do-
ing all the mitzvoth, but rather affirming their validity. The LXX strengthens
this impression when it translates the same word in Deut. 27:26 with “con-
tinue” (emmenei) and not with fulfill, thereby accentuating the required
persistence in obedience. All of this implies that fulfilling the law goes
beyond obeying it, and that it has a meaning that cannot be harmonized
so simply with Paul’s approach to the law. Or is there a way?
Another, more popular approach involves putting the expression into con-
nection with the so-called “formula quotations” (Erfüllungszitate) that are a
redactional device used by Matthew, where the word for “to fulfill” has the
meaning of “to give them their full meaning.” Law and prophets find their
deepest significance in the coming of the Messiah, specifically in the way
this Messiah acts and instructs His disciples on matters of law. Fulfilling
the Law must then mean that Jesus reveals the true intent of the Torah
and demonstrates it in action. This messianic authority may on occasion
come into conflict with Pharisaic halakah or even with contemporary inter-
pretations of the Torah.
In this case, we take the verb pleroosai to have received its meaning from
Matthew’s Christology. But even here, the basic sense of “fulfill” is to cor-
roborate. The expression does not lead us into the arena of Pauline fulfill-
ment-theology that would imply abrogation at the same time. In Matt.
3:15, the expression “to fulfill all righteousness” is used to mean
something like “to do everything that is demanded by the standard of
righteousness.” To fulfill the law might then be taken to mean to do the
law and uphold it as standard insofar as it, as a written statute, leads to
the fulfillment of the divine demand of righteousness.
We should notice something else in this context. There is no reference to
Jesus as a person who might annul the law here. In stead, we find a
straightforward statement about Jesus’ obedience to and indeed rever-
ence for the Torah.
Furthermore, we can infer from the opposition between katalusai (to an-
nul) and pleroosai that to fulfill does mean to uphold, to affirm its authority.
As a technical term, it denotes a process of interpretation whereby indi-
vidual laws are explained in such a way that they serve the goal of the
whole body of law, i.e., establish justice. Another meaning of the word
that plays into this, is that of completion. When a road is “fulfilled”, it is
possible to reach its destination. The Torah is understood as a road to life,
and fulfilling it might mean to apply it in such a way, that its goal is
reached.
Another approach might be to look more closely at the contents of this no-
tion of fulfilling by trying to figure out what its particular usage might have
been within 1st-century Judaism. Since we are now seeking a pattern of
thought, and not historical dependency, even relatively late texts might
provide us with valuable clues. A passage in BMakkoth 23b-24a might
help us out here. R. Simlai opens a discussion with a statement that God
gave Moses 613 commandments. David summarized (reduced) these
613 to eleven basic precepts in Psalm 15 (24a). The Psalm ends with the
statement: “He that does these things will not be moved.” Now this does
not mean that David annulled 600 commandments, but it does mean that
the manifold of commandments were seen as being derived from a lesser
number of major commandments, that could be regarded (a) as basic eth-
ical requirements and (b) as fundamental ways of interpreting and doing
all other commandments. Beyond that, (c) anyone who was able to per-
form these commandments with the fundamental concentration on doing
God’s will that was required (what the Rabbis called “kawanah”) would
merit the world to come. So the eleven moral demands David enumerated
(which are not all part of the list of 613) form the basis of obedience to all
of the 613 precepts.
Rabban Gamliel then remarks that only someone who can practice all of
these precepts can merit the world to come, but he is refuted: the text
simply states “these,” i.e., any of these, and does not say “all of these.”
So the merit of the world to come is already earned by practicing merely
one of the ethical requirements mentioned by David with the required
concentration, and it will be that obedience (which does not imply a rejec-
tion of the other 613 commandments) which brings salvation.
At the end of the passage, Amos 5:4 is quoted as indicating that obedi-
ence to God (“And seek me and you shall live”) is the fundamental “ethic-
al” requirement that will bring salvation. The Gemara refutes this by quot-
ing Rav Nachman b. Isaac as saying that this ”seek Me” effectively in-
cludes all the 613 precepts and can therefore not be called a “reduction.”
The Gemara then offers another text: Hab. 2:14, “the righteous will live
through his faith.” It is not difficult to see how similar in reasoning, though
different in result, this is from the text we have in Romans 1:16, 17. Could
it not be that fulfilling the law is functionally the equivalent of a fundament-
al ethical requirement, as well as a hermeneutical perspective within
which the precepts should be applied?
To fulfill the law must then mean to uphold it by effectively obeying it in
accordance with its most general principle, expressed in and as the sum-
mary of the law. Matthew now expresses the righteousness that is the in-
ner standard of the law as written statute as the double commandment
upheld in a specific community.
In Matthew’s version, this most general principle involved (1) the basic
principle and hermeneutic perspective of the law as explained by Christ,
i.e., love for God and neighbor, and more particularly the nature of the
eschatological community as defined by the introductory Beatitudes; (2)
the authority of the Messiah to formulate absolutely binding halakhot
while at the same relegating the formal rabbinic authority to the com-
munity “assembled in His name.” (Matthew 18)
The messianic authority as shared by the Church is in fact in itself a sign
of the new Messianic era. In this respect, the anti-Pharisaic address in
chapter 25 serves as a corollary to Jesus’ Messianic status, because it
shows that the rabbinic decisions were being made by men. These men
were unable themselves to “fulfill” the law in many respect. They were
shown to be the opposite of Jesus as the one who through His death had
shown the ultimate sacrifice in the service of God and His fellow-men,
thereby ultimately demonstrating the absolute authority He had used in
matters of law-exegesis.
Chapter 3

Jesus and Jewish oral tradition in Mark

If Jesus did not abrogate the law what then was His teaching about its
use for His disciples? We must turn now to the difficult question of what
Jesus really taught about the Mosaic law and of what consequences this
has for the shape of Christian obedience.
First, to simply go to the opposite and assume agreement between Jesus
and the Pharisees on major issues of law, based for the most part on si-
lence, is a dangerous enterprise. There is more than enough positive
evidence to suggest that in many cases there was agreement between
Jesus’ position and at least some of the reconstructable early sources of
rabbinic doctrine. In any case, Jesus would certainly have agreed with the
majority of his contemporaries that the Torah contained the decisive revel-
ation of the will of God. However, there are differences. The texts show us
that a different understanding of the nature of God and his response to
the social tensions of his time that made Jesus different in some of his
decisions on Jewish law.
The following seemed necessary in the traditional view for understanding
Jesus’ position vis-à-vis the law:
1Jesus accepts the gospel of John the Baptist that there was only one
way to escape the coming judgment, and that way did not lead through
the Temple and its system of sacrificial atonement. One needs to be bap-
tized and follow the will of God with a new commitment. Jesus’ baptism in
the Jordan implies Jesus’ rejection of the sufficiency of the Temple cult. It
includes an image of God as avenging Judge that soon afterwards is
transformed in Jesus’ own preaching.
2Jesus shows that God is about to renew his marriage vows to Israel.
God, the Bridegroom of Israel, is coming to His people to save them. That
is why there can be no fasting! There is a deep sense of the presence of
God among His people.
3If God is coming like that to His people, then Israel is not identical to the
Kingdom of God. That kingdom was present since the Mosaic law, the
commandments, were given to realize God’s sovereign rule in this world.
What Israel is awaiting is a new kind of presence of God in the midst of
His people without the mediation of the Temple, i.e., directly, forgiving the
sins of all people without condition. That is the reason that Jesus is not in-
terested in matters of holiness and purity.
Jesus looked at the Torah in the light of his particular understanding of
God. Torah had the function to reveal to humankind God’s boundless and
benevolent love for man. Because God had already begun His new king-
dom of divine presence, it was not important to direct everybody’s atten-
tion to the Torah as a rule of life. Not the text of the Torah, but the revela-
tion of God’s love contained in it, was to Jesus the essence of the tradi-
tions of Israel. It seems clear that though this is a different position from
that encountered in mainstream Pharisaism, it does constitute a radical
effort to affirm the validity of the Torah as a vehicle of revelation and the
basis for man’s behavior. The nature and extent of Jesus’ abrogation of
the Torah in its aspect of law could be combined with His statements on
the validity of the Law as vehicle of the revelation of grace.
Is this picture correct? Then we should find a clear rejection of the rab-
binic way of thinking in Jesus’ teaching on the Law. Since the affirmation
of the Torah as Law is the viewpoint that is most often associated with the
Pharisaic approach to Torah, our attention now must shift to Jesus’ con-
nection with the proponents of oral law.

3.1 The Jewish traditions

We must ask what Jesus’ response was to the Pharisaic traditions. Was
He really that far removed from the way the Pharisees explained the law?
We cannot simply identify Jesus with a form of Pharisaism, and the clas-
sical view informs us that Jesus was in opposition to the Pharisaic exposi-
tion of the Torah. We need to examine at least some of the evidence.
The most decisive opposition to Pharisaism in the gospels seems to be
found in Mark 7. Some introductory remarks are needed here. The gos-
pel of Mark is based on Palestinian traditions about Jesus, which account
for most of the sayings, and Hellenistic and Galilean narratives. His main
effort was to provide a consistent narrative that could combine the various
traditions that he had received. The main intent of Marks theology seems
to be linked to a very early type of piety that saw in Jesus the exceptional
teacher, debater, leader, and healer. The debates are constructed in or-
der to show Jesus’ exceptional nature, and they focus less on the con-
tents. Nevertheless, Mark received Palestinian traditions that did focus on
the contents, as is clear in particular from such passages as Mark 2 and
7. It is Marks strategy to use them in such a way, that the emphasis shifts
from the dialogue to a statement about Jesus.
In the same manner, the role of the disciples is portrayed in various ways
as a response to Jesus. The crowds, the disciples, the Pharisees, and
other groups are confronted with Jesus and are astonished or in fear.
(E.g. 1:22, 27; 2:12; 4:41; 5:20, 42; 6:50; 7:37; 9:14; 10:32; 12:17, 34;
15:5; 16:8) The meaning of Jesus’ mission is not presented in a more or
less independent Christology, but through the response of men to the ex-
ceptionality of Jesus’ character and mission.
If we can ascertain that the break with Judaism is a product of the chan-
ging situation of the early Church and its debate with Judaism, we have
thereby shown that Jesus’ own position may have given rise to a variety
of positions on the Torah and, by implication, a variety of positions with re-
gard to what constitutes Christian obedience. The major key in separating
between the oldest traditions and the effort to harmonize those traditions
with current Church-decisions will be the form of the material. If it is
halakhic in nature, we probably have the material that occasioned the
labor of the redactor. Halakhic elements therefore have priority over
Christological material.
Let us examine the issue of the impurity of the hands first, and let us ex-
amine it first of all from a Jewish perspective to see precisely what issue
our chapter 7 of Mark is dealing with.
First we must ask ourselves whether the issue of ritual washing of the
hands was part of a live debate in the 1st century or not. The Gemara3 in
Sabbath 15a quotes Rav Judah (Judah b. Ezekiel, a Babylonian Amora 4
of the third century) as saying in the name of Samuel, who lived one gen-
eration earlier at the end of the 2nd century, that King Solomon had insti-
tuted the ritual washing of the hands. That seems to indicate that the dis-
cussion was settled and the ritual an ordinary part of Jewish life. The
statement about the antiquity of the ritual is then hardly exaggerated.
Sanders, on the contrary, maintains that the issue arose much later, in the
early period of the formation of the Mishnah tractate Yadaim, in his estim-
ate well after A.D. 70, which deals extensively with the purity of the
hands.
The decree that triggered later conflict was, however, at least as old as
the era of Shammai and Hillel, though the same text seems to indicate
that there was initially a difference of opinion amongst them and that the
matter was brought to agreement only afterwards amongst their pupils,
therefore, presuming that the Talmud is historically accurate, also after Je-
sus’ lifetime.

3 “Gemara,” literally: completion. The word refers to the oral discussions on

the body of Jewish Law as they were recorded and collected in the two recen-
sions of the Talmud, the Babylonian or the Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud, or to
the whole of the Talmud consisting of Mishnah and Gemara.
4 The authorities in the Mishnah are called “Tannaim,” expounders (of the
law). The authorities that commented on the Mishnah are called Amoraim, teach-
ers (of the law). These Amoraim lived in Babylonia or Palestine from the 3d cen-
tury onward.
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