Note 5 — Chapter II · MODES OF CONSERVATIVE FALLACY

Here the tribute goes to a Pharisee; in another connection it redounds to the other butt of Christian disparagement, the Scribes. As our editor points out, the collocation of the commands to love God and one’s neighbour is even in Luke (x, 25–27) assigned not to Jesus but to a Scribe. But this too is found in the Testaments. “That the two great commandments were already conjoined in the teaching of the Scribes at the time of our Lord we may reasonably infer from our text,5 which was written 140 years earlier, and from the account in Luke.”6 And here too, a century before the Christian era, we have a Jewish predication of the salvation of the Gentiles,7 in the patronizing Jewish sense.