Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

This text summarizes well what Justin also says in other parts of the Dialogue: the Torah has lost its legal authority. In juridical terms it is abrogated. Nothing in it remains valid except what corresponds to the natural law of reason, for example, its moral demands. Also valid are its constant, often mysteriously hidden, references to Christ. But as law, the Torah has no further significance because “a new lawgiver” has come: Jesus Christ. He has given a “new,” an “eternal law.” But he is not only a “lawgiver”; he himself is in person this new and eternal law.⁴

There is no question that in this theology we can already see what in time to come would be formulated more and more radically, more and more effectively, and more and more ominously: the “disowning” of Israel in salvation history. In every respect, in this view, Israel has been replaced by the church.

But it is also unquestionable that Justin tried in his own way to take the New Testament seriously. Does not Jesus appear in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount as the new Moses and thus the new lawgiver who proclaims his new Torah to the disciples and the people gathered around them? That is how it seems. After all, does the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount not say “you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times… But I say to you…” (Matt 5:21-22, 33-34)? And does Paul not speak of the “law of Christ” in Galatians 6:2? And does Jesus not tell the disciples in the Gospel of John “I give you a new commandment” (John 13:34)? In any case, talk of the “new law of Christ” seems to have been just as common in the church of the subsequent years as the idea of the “new people of God,” which was so perilously subject to misunderstanding.⁵

Therefore this chapter addresses one of the most important questions about Jesus’ life: what was his attitude to the Torah? Did he come as a new lawgiver? Did he drain the Torah of its legal authority? Did he see himself as master of the Torah, or even as the one who would overthrow it? Or did he hold up the Torah precisely because he did not come to abolish it but to fulfill it? That, at any rate, is what it says in Matthew 5:17. A great deal depends on Jesus’ relationship to the Torah, ultimately the relationship between the church and Israel. This chapter, therefore, is one of the most important in this book. I will proceed as I did in chapter 11 by attempting to clarify this difficult set of questions through a number of samplings.

The Twofold Commandment

According to Matthew 22:34-36, a scribe once asked Jesus which commandment in the Torah was the “greatest,” that is, the primary commandment.⁶ What the scribe asks is not altogether new; it was something that was commonly being asked in different ways in Jesus’ time. It was the search for the center of the Torah—or the effort to summarize the Torah in brief. It was in no way about a disqualification or nonobservance of the other commandments but was primarily about didactics and the correct understanding of the whole Torah. Jesus answers the scribe’s question:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matt 22:37-39)

This coupling of love of God and love of neighbor became more or less a matter of course in and through the New Testament, for Christians at any rate. But we need to pay attention to what has happened here: two commandments that in the first place have nothing to do with one another and are widely separated in the Torah have now been brought together and are, in fact, inextricably bound up with each other.

“You shall love the LORD your God” (Deut 6:4) was the second sentence in the shema, the “Hear, O Israel.” This confession of God’s unity was probably already being recited daily in Judaism in Jesus’ time. It formulates the traditional center of the Torah,⁷ namely, the commandment to serve YHWH alone and follow no foreign gods, indeed, not only to serve YHWH but to make YHWH the absolute center of one’s life. In short, it was nothing other than a commentary on the first commandment of the Decalogue.

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is in the book of Leviticus within the so-called holiness code (Lev 17:1-26:46), where we read:

You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD. (Lev 19:17-18)