05 Oct 06
1 edit
Originally posted by ngeisler88If you’ll accept a response from a non-Christian (I'm surprised you're not getting more discussion on this from among your target group)—
Does anybody have anything intelligent to say in response to my opening question?
It seems that the thrust (in both Jesus and Paul, say) was to distill the letter of the commandments, to their underlying basic principle (e.g., love God, your neighbor and yourself).*
What clued me in to this was a recent reading of some Talmudic formulations of the same kind of distillation, wherein the 613 mitzvot are reduced to a single principle. One, at least, goes all the way back to Hillel, who was an older contemporary of Jesus, and whose school was well-known at the time.
So, it’s not really a matter of “abrogating” the mitzvot, but of honoring the principles that they point to; and not missing the principles for the sake of some kind of (really impossible) rote obedience to the letter—recognizing that such a rote obedience can actually undermine the intended principle. Two examples:
(1) Orthodox Jews (as well as non-Orthodox) universally speak of the joy of Sabbath—a joy that would be difficult to maintain if all the rules of Sabbath were seen as a “burden;” and
(2) The mitzvot themselves are “hierarchical”—for example, it is a mitzvah to violate the mitzvot for the keeping of Sabbath if a life is in danger; and the rabbis have interpreted that to mean, for example, seeking medical attention for a small cut—on the grounds that even a small injury could lead to an infection that could endanger one’s life (it is lawful to heal on the Sabbath).
* jaywill was making this argument to me recently, when I was juxtaposing Matthew 5:17 directly to Ephesians 2:15. Although I think the textual argument I was making is—well, at least not incorrect—I think jaywill may well be right in terms of the broader question of the treatment of the law in the NT.