Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

So we really should ask: what was Jesus’ relationship to the Torah, the prophets, and the writings? Or, more simply: how did he live with “Scripture”? What significance did it have for him? How did he deal with it? The answer, before anything else we have to say, must be: probably, on the basis of Deuteronomy 6:6-7, he knew central texts of Sacred Scripture by heart. Deuteronomy demands, “These words that I am commanding you today must be written on your heart. You shall cause your children to repeat them.”² “They must be written on your heart” in the first place means nothing but “you must learn them by heart.” This a fixed formula. And when the text continues, “You shall cause your children to repeat them,” it means, “you must recite the Torah [the book of Deuteronomy] over and over again to your children” (“sons” in the original is understood to include daughters) “until they know the text by heart.” And concretely that probably meant that the children heard, day after day, how their parents prayed and meditated on Scripture out loud, and so they also learned the texts, almost automatically, until they were fixed in their memory. So this is not about a way of dealing with Scripture that only Jesus practiced but about the practice of many families in Israel.

Thus we can take it as given that Jesus would have known crucial passages from the Torah and the prophets by heart, and probably all the psalms and some parts of the Wisdom literature as well. Most frequently quoted in the New Testament canon are³ the Torah (35 percent of all direct quotations), the Psalms (24 percent), Isaiah (22.5 percent), and the Book of the Twelve [Prophets] (10 percent). Quotations from other biblical writings make up 8.5 percent. It is true that these numbers already reflect a specifically Christian perspective, but at the same time they reveal the relative values of the different parts of the canon of Scripture in the Judaism of the time. The Torah is, of course, in the foreground; then come the psalms for daily prayer and then the prophets, Isaiah above all.

How was it possible for a Jew of that time to know so many texts by heart? We can by no means judge this phenomenon in terms of the quantity of text we ourselves can recite from memory today. At that time people not only had a universally practiced mnemonic technique at their disposal. The texts themselves were shaped in such a way that they could be more easily remembered. But above all, people’s heads were not crammed with our media garbage.

When Jesus withdrew and prayed for many hours alone (cf. Mark 1:35), he would have recited the Psalms and through them have entered into a deep, wordless conversation with his Father. And when the Torah was recited in the synagogue worship service, followed by sections of the prophetic books as commentary, he heard in public what he had already learned by heart as a child.

The Major Biblical Materials

And what did Jesus learn when he heard Scripture recited or spoke its verses for himself? He learned what Israel had experienced of its God over the centuries, what his great teachers and preachers had understood, formulated, and collected, what they had thought through, corrected, expanded, deepened, arranged, written down, and continued to write, namely, that there was but one God who made heaven and earth. That he had created the world with its multiplicity and its wealth but was not himself the world. That he gave existence to all things, sustained all things, contained all things, gave meaning to all things. That the gods humans created for themselves were idols, nothing but deception and nullity.

He learned that this one God had chosen little Israel out of the many nations because he wanted to have a people in the world that belonged entirely to him with its whole heart and soul and existence. That he had rescued the Israelites from the nation of Egypt, where they were oppressed and violated, in order to bring them together as a people that lived differently from the other nations, in justice and peace with one another and in holiness before its God.

He then learned that God had led Israel through the desert, fed the people, and, at Sinai, gave them a way of life that was both a just order of society and instruction for hallowing all of life. That this Torah was meant to help Israel to give witness before the eyes of the nations to its God: to God’s glory, justice, and concern for the world. That God had made a covenant with Israel, to be their God and to make this people his very own.