Jesus and the Law

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is explicit that he neither rejects nor abolishes the “law or the prophets” and explains that there is a relationship between keeping the commandments and admittance into the kingdom of heaven. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—modeled after Moses’ giving of the law at Mount Sinai (Exodus 19–20)—continues with the so-called antitheses, arguably best understood as Jesus’ intensification of six Torah laws. Whereas the Torah prohibits murder, for example, Jesus goes further and prohibits anger. Jesus’ intensifications of the law may be understood in the vein of the later rabbinic instruction to build a fence around the Torah so as to prevent inadvertent transgression (m. Avot 1:1). At the same time, the Gospel of Mark states that Jesus abrogated the Jewish dietary laws and “declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19). The parallel in Matthew 15 does not include this gloss but does suggest that Jesus preached a relatively relaxed interpretation of certain laws.

Mark 7:1–23 begins with an indictment of the Pharisees for their scrupulous observance of ritual laws, “the traditions of the fathers,” specifically regarding purification of the hands before eating, as Jesus invokes the prophet Isaiah to say that the rituals are empty. Jesus goes on to assert that nothing that enters the body has the power to defile, but rather only that which “comes out of a person,” the evil intentions of their heart, defiles. (See also “Sectarian Disputes over Purity.”) The Gospel of John’s narrative of Jesus’ miraculous healing of a lame man on the Sabbath reflects this Gospel’s anti-Jewish sentiment in its depiction of “the Jews” as seeking to kill Jesus for a Sabbath violation.