Outline:
What the Old Testament claimed
What the Jesus of Matthew 5.17-20 claimed
What the New Testament Epistles claimed
Disagreements in the Early Church
Modern Christianity
Summary
Throughout the history of Christianity, there have been occasional debates regarding the "law of Moses" (including, but not limited to, the 10 Commandments) and whether or not Christians should honor its rules to any extent. Most Christians believe that Old Testament laws generally do not apply to them, and parts of the New Testament do, in fact, teach that Jesus "abolished" the law (scriptural citations below). However, the question is not so simple, especially when one reads the writings of the Old Testament "prophets" or when one asks whether Jesus himself held that opinion.
I. The Old Testament:
Old Testament "Prophets" emphasized the validity of the Law of Moses for all time, even the "last days," and for all peoples, even for Gentiles. They never predicted that a spiritual savior would come along and abolish the Torah or the law of Moses.
Isaiah 2.1-4: "In the last days the mountain of Yhwh's temple will be established as chief among the mountains . . . and all nations will stream to it. . . . The law (torah) will go out from Zion, the word of Yhwh from Jerusalem. He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. . . . Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore."
Isaiah 8.20: "To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn."
Isaiah 19.21: "So Yhwh will make himself known to the Egyptians, and in that day they will acknowledge Yhwh. They will worship with sacrifices and grain offerings; they will make vows to Yhwh and keep them."
Isaiah 42.1-9: "Here is my servant [Israel], whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight. . . . In faithfulness he will bring forth justice; he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth. In his law the islands will put their hope..."
Isaiah 42.24-25: ". . . For they would not follow his ways; they did not obey his law. So he poured out on them his burning anger, the violence of war."
Isaiah 51.4: "Listen to me, my people; hear me, my nation: The law will go out from me; my justice will become a light to the nations."
Isaiah 56.6-7: "And foreigners who bind themselves to Yhwh to serve him, to love the name of Yhwh and to worship him, all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it and who hold fast to my covenant -- these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations."
Isaiah 60.1-22: "Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of Yhwh rises upon you. . . . Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. . . . To you the riches of the nations will come. Herds of camels . . . and all from Sheba will come. . . . All Kedar's flocks will be gathered to you, the rams of Nebaioth will serve you; they will be accepted as offerings on my altar, and I will adorn my glorious temple."
Isaiah 66.19-23: Yhwh says he will gather the exiles back to Jerusalem and "will select some of them also to be priests and Levites. . . . As the new heavens and new earth that I make will endure before me, declares Yhwh, so will your name and descendants endure. From one New Moon to another and from one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow down before me, says Yhwh." (Contrast: Paul or the writer of Colossians 2:13-17 says New Moons and Sabbaths do not really matter.)
Jeremiah 33.17-18: "I will bring Judah and Israel back from captivity and will rebuild them as they were before. I will cleanse them from all the sin they have committed against me and will forgive all their sins of rebellion against me. Then this city will bring me renown, joy, praise, and honor before all nations on earth that hear of all the good things I do for it; and they will be in awe and will tremble at the abundant prosperity and peace I provide for it. . . . For I will restore the fortunes of the land as they were before, says Yhwh. . . . In those days and at that time I will make a righteous Branch sprout from David's line; he will do what is just and right in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. . . . David will never fail to have a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, nor will the priests, who are Levites, ever fail to have a man to stand before me continually to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings and to present sacrifices."
Ezekiel 37.24: "My servant David will be king over them, and they will all have one shepherd. They will follow my laws and be careful to keep my decrees."
Micah 4.1-3: "In the last days, the mountain of Yahweh's temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted ... and peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh, to the temple of the God of Jacob.' ... The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem."
Ezekiel 40-48 also calls for the greatness of the OT / Mosaic law for all time.
Again, none of the "prophets" called for the Mosaic Law to be "fulfilled" and then abandoned.
II. Jesus?
Interestingly enough, the Jesus depicted in Matthew 5.17-20 appears to support the validity of the Mosaic law for his followers:
Do not think that I came to abolish (Gk. kataluo) the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others [to do] the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches [them], he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses [that] of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.."
Here, Jesus allegedly says that "not the smallest letter" nor "the least stroke of a pen" will by any means disappear from the law "until heaven and earth disappear." According to this version of Jesus, the law of Moses would/should be in effect for Christians even "until heaven and earth disappear," and Jesus goes on to praise those who teach others to follow the Mosaic law and keep it even better than Pharisees.
In Mark and Matthew, Jesus often gives judgements that are even stricter than Mosaic law (Mt 5; Mk 10; Mt 19), and he does not teach that it will be abolished, but says the opposite.
I am not suggesting that a historical Jesus really said these words any more than the other words attributed to him by biased, agenda-promoting gospel writers and editors long after his death (https://sites.google.com/site/investigatingchristianity/home/wordsofjesus). Maybe he did. It is impossible to say for sure. The sources are simply not reliable.
The question of whether the messiah/king wanted followers to keep following the law of Moses or to stop seems extremely unlikely to have arisen among the Jews themselves or the Jewish followers of Jesus, even after his death. Such an idea runs in direct contradiction to all the the Jewish prophets hoped for and claimed.
It seems more likely to have been a question that would come up later, among Gentile converts, when Christian missionaries were trying to win over non-Jews to the new religion. It may well be that long after Jesus' death, when more recent Gentile Christian communities started arguing with older conservative Jewish Christian communities over whether or not people should keep the Mosaic law, each group invented stories about Jesus to support its own ideology, long after Jesus was dead. When groups further from Jerusalem started claiming that converts no longer needed to follow the Law of Moses and claimed that Jesus abolished the law, the more traditional group may have written Matthew 5 in such a way as to make Jesus himself say explicitly, "No. I never intended to abolish the law/ commandments of Moses." If there was a historical Jesus, it seems far more likely that he would have supported the Mosaic law, as all the Jewish "prophets" had hoped.
What a historical Jesus really said ... nobody knows. However, there is no good basis in early gospel literature for claiming that Jesus himself wanted his followers to disregard Jewish law, and Matthew's Jesus explicitly supports the Jewish law.
III. The Epistles:
There were many factions in early Christianity, and it seems that the earliest movement was quite Jewish and continued to advocate following the "Mosaic" law. However, over time the new religion became increasingly Gentile-dominated, or "Pauline."
After Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, the center of Jewish-dominated Christianity was wiped out. A more Gentile version of Christianity became increasingly popular throughout the Roman empire and dominated the rest of Christian history, leaving few traces of the older, more Jewish Christianity.
The rest of the New Testament says the following, in contradiction to the portrayal of Jesus in Matthew:
Romans 10.4: "Christ is the end of the law."
Ephesians 2:15: speaks of Christ "abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations."
(Gk. katargesas – having annulled/abolished/terminated/put an end to)
Hebrews 10.1: "The law is only a shadow."
Galatians 3.24-25: "The law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law."
Colossians 2.13-17: says that Jesus "cancelled the written code, with its regulations. . . . He took it away, nailing it to the cross." New Moon celebrations and Sabbath days were just "a shadow."
(Gk. exaleipsas < exaleipho – wipe out, blot out, erase, obliterate)
The Epistles of the New Testament were written, compiled, and edited by individuals who wanted Christianity to be free from adherence to the Mosaic code. They directly contradict the words of Jesus in Matthew 5.17-20.
IV. Disagreements within the Early Church?
Even though the Christians who wrote and edited the New Testament and other literature whitewashed their religious history (e.g. Acts) to support their particular version of events, they may have inadvertently left behind small clues that there had once been disagreements regarding the role of the Jewish law in the new religion.
The whole purpose of the Epistle to the Galatians in the New Testament is to settle ideological disputes in the church and oppose the idea that Christians should observe Jewish law. Here is an excerpt from Galatians:
When Cephas [Peter] came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.
When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? (Galatians 2.11-14, NIV)
What?! The Apostle Peter was a hypocrite and Paul had to publicly shame him?!
Note that there was a pro-law faction of Christians, associated with James in Jerusalem, likely the dominant seat of Christianity at the time. This faction believed that circumcision and Jewish customs were still important, even for Gentiles. Being predominantly Jewish and centered in Jerusalem, it was almost certainly the earlier of these two forms of Christianity. As Galatians presents the matter, Paul seems to have been teaching the Gentile Christians of Antioch not to be overly concerned with Jewish customs. According to the text, Cephas [Peter] visited Antioch from Jerusalem and accepted the new converts' way of living, until James sent men from Jerusalem to teach them otherwise, whereupon Peter sided with the men from Jerusalem, presumably the headquarters of Christianity at the time. Barnabas also sided with the men from James. Paul vehemently accuses them of hypocrisy in this letter, allegedly written by Paul himself!
So even the New Testament that we possess, edited and compiled to present Christian history in the best light possible, reveals some tension beneath the surface between various Christian factions. Either Paul or people like the character of Paul were spreading the new religion to Gentiles and had decided that they could win more converts and make greater appeal if they relaxed expectations and came up with theological justifications for relaxing those expectations. There seems to have been a time when a more traditional, Jerusalem-based, Jewish version of Christianity started coming into clashes with a newer, more Gentile-friendly version of Christianity in the other provinces of the Roman empire outside Judea. The Jerusalem Church seems not to have approved, initially, of the way these new Gentile converts were living.
After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple in 69-70 CE, the influence of both Jerusalem and the Temple (along with its laws and sacrifice system) upon both Christianity and Judaism faded fast. Rabbis would dominate the rest of Jewish history, and "Pauline" Christianity would dominate the rest of Christian history, teaching the "abolition" of the Mosaic law.
Galatians was written at some point, either by a historical Paul or by a later pretender forging an authoritative literary precedent for his sect's beliefs for the specific purpose of addressing the issue of the place of Mosaic Law in Christianity.
The writer of Acts not only paints a rosy, miracle-filled picture of early Christian "history," but also noticeably whitewashes the "controversy" over Jewish law and customs, presenting a positive, sanitized version of events, completely exonerating Peter and James from any 'wrongdoing,' 'hypocrisy,' or any opposition to Paul. Read through Acts 10-15, 21, esp. 15, and compare it to Galatians. In Acts, there is no showdown whatsoever between Peter and Paul! Peter is never a hypocrite in Acts, as Galatians makes him out to be (Gal 2.13, Gk. hypokrisei). In fact, Peter wasn't even in Antioch at all in Acts' version. Acts has Peter heroically oppose the mistaken men who question Paul's work with Gentiles, saying, "Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?" (15.7-11). How is that for a contrast with Galatians?! Not only that, but the men who caused trouble in Antioch did not come from James at all, according to Acts, but were simply "some" anonymous "men" (15.1) "to whom" James and the Apostles and elders "gave no instruction." Acts depicts James, like Peter, as completely on Paul's side from the beginning. James, like Peter, heroically stands up to the anonymous mistaken men, saying, "It is my judgment that we do not trouble those who are turning to God from among the Gentiles, ... For Moses ... is read in the synagogues every Sabbath" (15.13-21). Moreover, the Apostles are here represented as being of "one mind" and are led by "the Holy Spirit" to send an encouraging letter to the Gentile believers, saying,
"For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these essentials: that you abstain from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication; if you keep yourselves free from such things, you will do well. Farewell." (15.28-29)
And when the men at Antioch read the authoritative letter from the Apostles, "they rejoiced because of its encouragement." Problem solved; no big deal!
Acts presents Peter as a champion of Gentile conversion even before the Antioch incident, and has God reveal to him in a vision that he no longer needs to abide by Mosaic/Jewish dietary restrictions (Acts 10). And Acts presents constant miracles to make the history of Christianity appear wonderfully glorious and completely divinely guided. Acts is also distinctly non-Jewish. It even emphasizes an opposition between the Apostles/Church and "the Jews," as if the original believers were not themselves Jews. e.g. "But the people of the city were divided; and some sided with the Jews, and some with the apostles" (Acts 13.4).
There are further discrepancies between the epistles and the book of Acts (e.g. carefully compare and contrast the Pauline version of his "Damascus Road" experience with the 3 versions in Acts. Galatians 1.13-24; Acts 9.1-31; 22.1-21; 26.12-23), but those described above should suffice to show that there was at one time a genuine controversy in Christianity regarding the Mosaic law, and that the more time went by, the more that controversy was covered up. Even part of the whitewashed version in Acts imagined that the Mosaic law would continue to be heard by Christians on Sabbaths/Saturdays at synagogues (15.21). That, too, eventually ceased to happen, as Christianity became increasing Gentile, changed observance of the Sabbath to Sun-day, and became increasingly anti-Semitic – all of which would have been incredibly sinful in the eyes of the Jewish "prophets" of earlier centuries.
V. Modern Christianity:
Some Christian denominations in more recent centuries have attempt to reinstate varying amounts of the Mosaic law – e.g. Seventh-day Adventists and Grace Communion International (GCI), formerly the Worldwide Church of God (WCG). They may be overly credulous and naive, believing that the bible really is completely inerrant and "God's word," but they do have a scriptural basis for their beliefs.
VI. Summary:
The Old Testament "prophets" emphasized the greatness and lasting relevance of the Law of Moses, even for Gentiles of future generations and the "end times." These "prophets" and their god never called for an end to the Law, or for it to be "fulfilled and then abolished" or rendered impertinent by a spiritual savior. They would have been scandalized by the later claims of Christianity. It is most likely that Jesus himself, assuming he did exist, never would have called for the abolition of the Law of Moses. Matthew 5 depicts Jesus as supporting continued observance of the Mosaic law even until heaven and earth disappear (nasty apocalypticism!).
As time went on and Christianity became increasingly Gentile-dominated, it moved further and further from its Jewish roots and de-emphasized the relevance of the Law in the lives of believers.
However much this would have shocked the "prophets," historically speaking, they were mostly false prophets anyway. Their vision of future political greatness for a restored Israelite/Jewish monarchy and the Mosaic law never saw fruition, and quite ironically, most versions of Christianity do not even realize what those prophets actually hoped for. But no well-educated person would really want to see the Mosaic law re-established; it is primitive, outdated, and far from being divinely inspired, it repeats "eye for an eye" justice (lex talionis) and other notions common in Middle Eastern law going back to Hammurabi, Ur-Nammu, Urukagina, etc. long before the Moses figure of Jewish legend (https://sites.google.com/site/investigatingchristianity/home/otchrono#Moses). Furthermore, most modern Jews would not wish for the "Mosaic" law to be re-established now either, nor do they want a king, as most of the "prophets" hoped for.
May the Mosaic Law rest in peace.
Scriptural citations:
Pro-Law Prophets: Isaiah 2:1-4; 8:20; 19:21; 42:1-9; 42:24-25; 51:4; 56:6-7; 60:1-22; 66:19-23 (calling for the importance of New Moons and Sabbaths even for future times; contrast the New Testament Colossians 2:13-17, which says New Moons and Sabbaths do not really matter.); Jeremiah 33:17-18; Ezek. 37:24; Ezek. chapters 40-48; and Micah 4:1-3.
Pro-Law Jesus: Matthew 5.17-20.
Anti-Law Epistles: Rom. 10.4; Eph. 2.15; Heb. 10.1; Gal. 3.24-25; Col. 2.13-17; Galatians 2.11-14.
Acts 15, and 21.