Note 58 — Chapter IV · JESUS AS THE MESSIAH.1

A happier distinction is that between really Mosaic institutes, and their traditional amplifications.58 It is certain that the sabbath cures of Jesus, his neglect of the pedantic ablutions before eating, and the like, ran counter, not to Moses, but to later rabbinical requirements, and several discourses of Jesus turn upon this distinction. Matt. xv. 3 ff., Jesus places the commandment of God in opposition to the tradition of the elders, and Matt. xxiii. 23, he declares that where they are compatible, the former may be observed without rejecting the latter, in which case he admonishes the people to do all that the scribes and Pharisees enjoin; where, on the contrary, either the one or the other only can be respected, he decides that it is better to transgress the tradition of the elders, than the commandment of God as given by Moses (Matt. xv. 3 ff.). He describes the mass of traditional precepts, as a burthen grievous to be borne, which he would remove from the oppressed people, substituting his own light burthen and easy yoke; whence it may be seen, that with all his forbearance towards existing institutions, so far as they were not positively pernicious, it was his intention that all these commandments of men, as plants which his heavenly Father had not planted, should be rooted up (xv. 9, 13). The majority of the Pharisaical precepts referred to externals, and had the effect of burying the noble morality of the Mosaic law under a heap of ceremonial observances; a gift to the temple sufficed to absolve the giver from his filial duties (xv. 5), and the payment of tithe of anise and cummin superseded justice, mercy, and faith (xxiii. 23). Hence this distinction is in some degree identical with the former, since in the rabbinical institutes it was their merely ceremonial tendency that Jesus censured, while, in the Mosaic law, it was the kernel of religion and morality that he chiefly valued. It must only not be contended that he regarded the Mosaic law as permanent solely in its spiritual part, for the passages quoted, especially from the Sermon on the Mount, clearly show that he did not contemplate the abolition of the merely ritual precepts.