Gawen

I have a question.
Did Jesus do away with Mosaic law or not? I'm under the impression he did not. I'm going to need verses, if you please, to back up either side of the argument. I'm planning on a wee debate come monday at work.

Chili

No he did not and if you present a logical argument you don't need scriptures to back it up.

Jesus was the living proof that Mosaic law was effective for the purpose intended, which was the conviction of sin that we may be liberated from our second sin nature after our prior nature has been reborn in us. For this to be possible the law must be written upon the heart of man by the previous generations in our lineage (which makes it incarnate upon us as if "written in stone") so the inner man can convict the persona (outer man or ego) of its wretchedness and sin.

Notice that the laws were given to Moses not to stop sin but to convict believers of sin. Therefore, to be convicted we must sin but before we can be convicted the law must be able to perform like an anvil to clash with our wretched human behavior and sin.

The solidity of the law is further entrenched by our incarnate virtues wherefore it was noted that Joseph was an upright man unto whom only Christ can be born (in Catholicism our incarnate virtues are reinforced and enhanced by the Capital sins and Cardinal virtues to make us upright and worthy, ).

Jesus was set free from the law in his own life as the reborn Joseph who had to die to his earthly Jewish indentity in effort to be set free from this "anvil" in his own mind. In other words, to die is the only way to get out of the "saved sinner" paradox that convicted him (his cross was the sin nature of his Joseph identity).

PS, the negative connotation of sin is a religious idea only.

Gawen

Thanks for your help Chili.

According to Matthew 5:18, Jesus said that not the tiniest bit of the Law could be changed. However, in Mark 7:19 Jesus declares that all foods are clean, thereby changing the Law.

I've heard both sides..."ceremonial" law and the "moral" law. But this just don't cut it. Either Jesus did not change the law or he did. I just don't know which. I had hoped others here would have shed a bit of light on this.

Chili

Yes in Matthew nothing will change for the Jews until heaven and earth become the New Heaven and Earth which is what Jesus was working on in the gospels. Jesus was a "new creation" (there's even a song on this) and actually was the fulfillment of the law as if the law had born him and now Jesus needed to deal with the customs and tradition as if they were the aftermath (placenta) to be disposed of . . . and of course, the pharisees are the pacemaker of the myth in that the laws are the heart of the mythology to be dealt with here.

Let me take you to Gal.5:4 and Rev.14:12 to show that freedom in Christ and observance of the law is a contradiction and evidence of our failure to succeed.

Magdlyn

This, I think, is an obvious fallacy. "Jesus", a literary fiction, did both. The evangelists do not agree. There is no consensus.

And Chili is in his own little world. With its own laws.

Chili

But Magdlyn, I am showing you how to deal with every passage in harmony with each other. The law is good and doesn't have to be changed if sin is good . . . but arbitrary nonetheless if it is to serve only as a means to the end and therefore the actual context of the law is a non-issue (or the Catholic church would not have added its own bunch of laws, ouch, poor Catholics who are bombarded with sin and have the fancy confessionals to prove it).

Gawen

Judaism at the time tended to see God as a distant and almost impersonal Sovereign whose presence to mankind required the mediation of angels, the Law, and the complexities of religious ritual and tradition. As it is written, Jesus' message was the presence of God, and the required response was mercy toward one's neighbor. His was not the harsh judgment of a terrifying God but as the intimate presence of a loving Father; quite the difference of John the Baptist’s doom and gloom eschatology. But Jesus went further and redefined the Law by referring it to God as its beneficent author and to men as its immediate object, or so it seems. The writers of the Gospels unleashed within Judaism a radically personal eschatology; a new interpersonal ethic.

The heart of the ‘Jesus’ eschatology can be summarized by the simple name he addressed the Lord: "Abba," the Aramaic word for "papa" (Mark 14:36). This must have been a shock to Jews and their current idea of God. With one word, Jesus signaled that God was immediately and intimately present, as a loving and generous father. His presence was a pure and unearned gift; one could call on and relate to him without fear. One did not have to earn this Father's favor or bargain for his grace by scrupulously observing the minutiae of the Law. One simply had to call on him.

The radical newness of the Gospel message of God's reign and kingdom was not something separate from God. Nor was it any form of religion. The kingdom of God was the Father himself given over to his people. It's a new order of things in which God threw in his lot irrevocably with human beings. In other words, God was one with mankind.

Charity fulfills the Law, not because it makes God become present, but because it is his presence. And when God arrives on the scene, Jesus seemed to say, all go-betweens, including religion itself, are shattered. Who needs them? The Father is here. Apparently, Jesus was a pious Jew and did not intend to abrogate the Law. Jesus attacked not so much the specifics of the Law that blinded people to His point of view that the Law, like its divine author, was entirely at the service of mankind. For example, when the Pharisees criticized Jesus' disciples for violating the Sabbath by plucking and eating ears of corn as they walked through a field, the retort: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27). The Law, in short, was a gift from God, not a burden. And in some cases the Law should be skewed or overridden when the need arose.

Jesus’ ideas do not engage the viewpoints of the Hellenistic Jews of the Diaspora, who believed the Law should be reduced to the simple Ten Commandments or the Palestinian Jews who thought the Law should contain the entire Torah. Rather, with ‘authority’ he dismissed these theological complexities and pointed to the heart of what Judaism was supposed to be about: revering God by loving one's neighbor and doing unto others….

If God is now identified with human beings and the kingdom of God was at hand, then strictly speaking there was no longer a God above the clouds upon whom one could make religious claims by scrupulously observing the Law. In that sense, the demands of mercy that Jesus made were more rigorous than the stipulations of the Law.

Jesus pointed the new commitment to a personalized God in the direction of one's fellow human beings, especially the poor. The ethics always entails taking the side of the weaker or disadvantaged party or the side of the poor and oppressed including those declared to be outcasts. When the Pharisees criticized him for eating with such sinners, Jesus, quoting from the OT the prophet Hosea, responded with a maxim that summed up not only the Law but his own eschatological ethics as well: "Go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice'" (Matthew 9:13). And when the Pharisees questioned his practice of eating with tax collectors (an act that violated the Law) Jesus responded, "Those who are in good health have no need of a physician, but rather those who are sick; I came to call not the righteous, but sinners" (Mark 2:17).

Jesus told parables about attitude reversals in that the 'old', but 'now' kingdom of God demanded. Representing the eschatological judgment, the owner of a vineyard pays grape pickers who worked only one hour the same wages as those who worked from dawn to dusk, for "the last will be first, and the first last" (Matthew 20:16). God justifies a sinful tax collector who repents, rather than a law-abiding Pharisee who prides himself on his strict religious observance, because "everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted" (Luke 18: 14).

Jesus' theme of reversal, of the overturning seemingly reasonable values, runs the gamut of the NT from the Prodigal Son through to the depiction of the Last Day, when the ruler gives his kingdom to those who had simply fed the hungry and clothed the naked because "as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me" (Matthew 2-5:40).

So, it seems to me that the Law is Law but can be bent in certain circumstances. Granted, the stories are written over a couple centuries. But what happened to make the various councils throw out Mosaic Law in favour of current Christianity?

Rick Sumner

This is false, and born of subvert antisemitism. The problem, contended the prior Rabbinic scholar (*cough*Bousett and everyone who relied on him*cough*), with Judaism is that it foregoes the relationship between man and God in favor of one of man and the Law, that it has no sacramental treatises to allow for a more immediate presence with God, that the Law complicates matters unduly (which is ridiculous. I don't know the intricacies of the Alberta Highway Traffic Act, yet I'm nonetheless bound by it--it hardly weighs on me, and it's complexities really have nothing to do with how I drive my car), and on and on and on.

More succinctly, Bousett et al. thought the problem with Judaism is that it wasn't more like Christianity.

For an excellent discussion on a topic far too broad to cover in a post here, see the first 428 pages of E P Sanders, _Paul and Palestinian Judaism_. Sandmel has also written several good essays in various journals on the topic.

Jews didn't teach mercy to one's neighbour? To "love thy neighbour as thyself?" What, exactly, do you think Jesus was quoting?

See above. The Rabbis observe at one point that if one angel out of a thousand deems a man worthy, God forgives him--a man is made righteous by that single vote. That's not the harsh judment of a terrifying God. This entire picture of Judaism is a myth, created not by first century Jews, but by late nineteenth and early twentieth century Christians.

Yeah, those Jews lived in constant fear of the judging monster. They never called God "Father." They'd have been shocked. Except, of course, when they were reading Psalms, eg, Ps.68.5, 89.26, and so on and so on.

This entire post is based on a misinformed assessment of first century Judaism.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Gawen

I freely admit it. I haven't read near as much as I should be.
From what I've read so far, I got this impression as well.

This is the stuff I've been looking for.

It would seem I have been duped...and wasted most of my weekend for it...*sigh*

Thanks for setting me on the right track.

Chili

Just a little observation here, Gawen (I hope you don't mind). Jesus and the father were 'one' in the gospels but Jesus was still torn in his dual nature of which one had to die before the fulness between God and Lord God was complete. Abbah is God and Jesus (as 'son of man') was Lord God here pleading for completion in unity with God. The Jewish identity of Jesus is what they were after and that had to be emptied before he could let go of it. Hence when they were sound asleep (in complete resignation) the "hour had come" for the 'involuntary surrender' of the Jewish identity (the entire ego) prior to crucifixion.