Conclusion
How Jesus Invites Us to Hear the Bible
One day Jesus told the crowds a parable about a farmer who scattered seed widely. Only a small proportion of the seed took root and yielded harvest, but that harvest far outweighed the seed initially sown. Jewish teachers used parables to illustrate points, but when their context did not make the parables self-evident, the teachers explained them. By contrast, Jesus admonished the crowds to hear, and then left them to ponder his riddle.
Luke remarks that afterward the disciples asked Jesus what the parable meant (Luke 8:9); in all three Synoptic Gospels, Jesus goes on to explain his teaching to them. The reason Jesus speaks in parables, Jesus explains, is that the precious mysteries of God’s kingdom belong only to those committed enough to seek them. 7 As in Isaiah’s day, the message does nothing for God’s disobedient people; it falls on deaf ears, whether because it hardens hearts or increases acountability without bringing transformation (Matt 13:11–15).
This in fact was what Jesus’s parable itself was about. Some failed to understand the message; others abandoned it in difficult circumstances; and still others became too distracted by matters of this age to give it its proper place (13:18–22). But the seed that more than compensated for the rest represented those who “heard the word and understood it” (13:23). 8 Who understood Jesus’s message? At this point, it was those who stayed after the crowds left and asked Jesus what his parable meant. The true meaning belonged to disciples—to those who followed Jesus closely and listened and asked until they understood. 9
Contrary to what some traditional academic exegesis assumes, reception matters. Moreover, contrary to what some popular postmodern interpretation assumes, the particular reception matters. 10 People received Jesus’s message in different ways, and Jesus did not reckon all these ways of equal merit. They needed the true understanding of his message that led to discipleship—to following the kingdom’s true king. This issue of reception is so important to Luke that it recurs in expanded form as Paul dialogues about the kingdom in Rome. Some people hear with closed ears, but others will hear (Acts 28:26–28).
Jesus read the Scriptures in a disciplined and sophisticated way that contrasts with the common abuse of popular Scripture verses today. Although he does not usually quote the context (at least not in the condensed version of his teaching available in the Gospels), he often does presuppose it. Yet, as we shall also note further below, attention to context did not keep Jesus from also applying Scripture to the present era, an example followed also by other NT narrative writers (and consistent with practices of many of their contemporaries).
Readers in synagogues read entire passages; those who prayed might recite entire psalms. Although scholars currently debate how widespread written literacy was in Galilee, and expositions often tied various texts together, attention to oral memory was an important part of synagogue culture and thus of public Jewish life. Sages often assumed the context of passages they cited. 11
Although one may cite some texts simply as representatives of the larger principles they embody, the Jesus of the Gospels often presupposes the context of passages that he cites. After a heavenly voice announces that Jesus is God’s son (Matt 3:17//Luke 3:22), Satan challenges or seeks to redefine the character of Jesus’s sonship. “If you’re God’s son,” he twices charges (Matt 4:3, 6; Luke 4:3, 9). The first time Satan challenges him to turn stones to bread. In response, Jesus quotes a text that not only addresses bread (Matt 4:4 and Luke 4:4, citing Deut 8:3) but also is part of a context that compares God’s relationship with Israel to a father caring for his son (Deut 8:5). That is, Jesus allows his sonship to be defined by a model in Scripture.
Jesus responds to each of the three temptations by quoting Scripture; unwilling to even entertain disobedience to his Father’s will, simply noting God’s command entails his course of action. In each case, he draws from the same general context as before (Deut 6:13, 16). By contrast, Satan also quotes Scripture, but he quotes it selectively and out of context. He challenges Jesus to throw himself down because angels will protect the righteous (Ps 91:11–12). The psalm’s context, however, refers to God’s protection from harm that comes to the righteous, not to throwing oneself in harm’s way.
Similarly, Jesus presupposes knowledge of the context on one occasion when he affirms as central loving one’s neighbor as oneself (Luke 10:26–28, citing Lev 19:18). Loving everyone is a massive task, so Jesus’s interlocutor wants to know who counts as a neighbor (Luke 10:29). Jesus responds by recounting the tale of the Good Samaritan (10:30–35), indicating that one’s neighbor includes Samaritans. In so doing, he undoubtedly evokes the context of Lev 19:18. Leviticus 19:34 goes on to command Israelites to love as themselves also the foreigners residing in the land. Surely this injunction would have to include Samaritans, who even observed some of the same biblical customs that Judeans observed. 12
Jesus honors the law (Matt 5:17–19); in fact, he implies, he honors the law at a level deeper than did the Pharisees (5:20). Nevertheless, Jesus regards some matters of the law as more central than others (Mark 12:28–31; Matt 23:23–24). This is not surprising; his contemporaries shared the same recognition. 13 I am not suggesting that Jesus regarded any of God’s word as dispensable (Matt 5:17–19; Luke 16:17); neither did other Jewish sages. 14 But everyone has some hermeneutical grid through which they prioritize their reading, and Jesus’s stated grid is significant. (Various circles provide various grids or centers for Scripture. 15 I believe that God himself and his seeking, redeeming love are central—his heart revealed through his acts in history and ultimately in Christ, most specifically in Jesus’s death and resurrection.) 16
The Torah itself included statements that summarized the heart of what God wanted most (Deut 10:12–13), and so did the prophets (Mic 6:8). Later tradition claimed that the early Jewish sage Hillel summarized the heart of the law in a manner similar to Jesus’s teaching that we call the golden rule (Luke 6:31; esp. Matt 7:12). 17 First-century sages also debated which commandment was the greatest; although no consensus was achieved (the most common was apparently honor of parents), one rabbi later than Jesus came close to his view, citing love of neighbor. 18 Jesus’s joint emphasis on love of God and love of neighbor (Mark 12:28–34), 19 however, became a distinctive hallmark in his movement. Others valued love, but multiple circles of Jesus’s followers consistently highlighted this as the supreme commandment (Rom 13:9–10; Gal 5:14; Jas 2:8; cf. 1 Cor 13:13). This remains true even if some circles of his followers today may have forgotten this, excusing this neglect by our priorities on precise doctrine or careful observance of other commandments. 20
When Jesus criticized the scholars of his day, it was sometimes because they had missed the forest for the trees. Pharisees were known to be meticulous in tithing; 21 Jesus declares that this is well and good, but they have neglected justice and God’s love (Matt 23:23//Luke 11:42). Matthew records that Jesus’s denunciation includes the warning that they had neglected these “heavier” matters of the Torah (Matt 23:23).
Although both Matthew and Luke specify justice and God’s love, Matthew also mentions “mercy” or “compassion,” a term that appears twice earlier in his Gospel in quotations from Hos 6:6 (Matt 9:13; 12:7). On both occasions Jesus deploys the Hosea text against the biblically knowledgeable Pharisees. 22 In the first case, the Pharisees have criticized Jesus for table fellowship with sinners; Jesus insists that reaching sinners with God’s transforming power takes precedence over fears of contamination (9:11–13). In the second, Pharisees criticize Jesus for allowing his disciples to glean grain on the sabbath; Jesus responds that he has authority to define the sabbath and that his disciples’ hunger matters more than Pharisaic boundaries around the Torah (12:1–8).
The Hosea text highlighted in Matthew’s Gospel is not marginal but reflects the spirit of the prophets, both from Hosea’s era (such as Isaiah and Amos) and later:
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings! (Hos 6:6, NRSV)
Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. . . . Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. (Isa 1:13, 17, NIV)
Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for people to humble themselves? Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed and for lying in sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD? Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? (Isa 58:5–6, NIV)
I loathe and reject your religious festivals. I refuse the fragrance of your sacred assemblies! Though you offer up to me your offerings and grain offerings, I won’t take pleasure in them; and when you offer fattened livestock to secure peace, I won’t pay any attention. Take away from me the clamor of your songs; I’m not listening to the music of your harps! Instead, let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a steady brook. (Amos 5:21–24)
When I brought your ancestors out from Egypt, what I talked to them or commanded them about wasn’t a burnt offering or sacrifice. No! This is what I ordered them: Heed my voice, and I will be your God, and you will be my people. Follow in all the way that I commanded you so that it may be well for you. (Jer 7:22–23)
Jesus is not against sacrifices (Matt 5:23; Mark 1:44), but he does view the law’s particulars through the lens of its heart. That is, he sees the Torah from the heart of the God who gave it. Indeed, the narrative context in which God gave the law genuinely was redemption and grace. Thus God prefaced the Ten Commandments by reminding his people that he had graciously liberated them from slavery (Exod 20:2; Deut 5:6). 23
Likewise, after granting Moses’s petition and forgiving his people for the sin of the golden calf, God graciously gave them the unmerited commandments again (Exod 33–34; Deut 9:25–10:5). In the midst of this narrative, God reveals his character to Moses, making his “goodness” pass before him (Exod 33:19). The Lord is “a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and great in covenant love and faithfulness to his word. He carries out his covenant love for thousands of generations, 24 forgiving evildoing, transgression, and sin.” God “doesn’t leave the guilty unpunished; he visits the evildoing of parents on children and grandchildren up to the third and fourth generation” (Exod 34:6–7), but his covenant love is to the thousandth generation (Deut 7:9)—so much greater is his mercy than his anger.
Jesus Applied Scripture to His Day
Jesus could translate the point of Scripture in the language of his day. Thus when he quotes the commonly recited “heart and soul and strength” of Deut 6:5, he expands this to include the “mind” (Mark 12:30). This is fully natural, since Jesus would have known that, given the biblical association of thinking or understanding with the heart in Hebrew, the Greek term translated “mind” was included in the Hebrew expression. 25 (I am assuming that in public disputes with leaders in Jerusalem, Jesus would speak Greek, even though I believe that he ordinarily spoke Aramaic in the Galilean countryside.) 26
Jesus obviously knew that Moses and Isaiah had lived long before he spoke. He likewise knew that the contemporaries of Moses and Isaiah were dead. Nevertheless, where appropriate, he was prepared to apply to his own day their approach to their contemporaries, because God’s word continued to address the human condition. “Isaiah was right to prophesy this about you hypocrites,” he tells the Pharisees and scribes (Mark 7:5–6). “Moses wrote this because of the hardness of your hearts,” he explains to some Pharisees (10:5).
Because leaders of Jesus’s people were acting like those in Jeremiah’s day who expected God’s sacred temple to shield them from his judgment, Jesus also applies to them words from Jer 7:11: “You have made it a ‘robbers’ den’ ” (Mark 11:17). Of course, in the Gospels Jesus sometimes cites texts that directly pertain to him, but in other cases, like these, he applies principles true of God’s people in earlier times to analogies in his own era.
Jesus’s critics often charge him with violating the Torah; his replies make it clear that he regards himself not as violating the Torah, but as violating his critics’ interpretive traditions about the Torah. In some of these cases, such as healing on the sabbath, Jesus actually violates only one line of Pharisaic tradition concerning what remained in his day a live debate among Pharisees. 27
Jesus’s responses to their criticisms reveal something of his hermeneutic. If a priest gave consecrated bread—which was set apart only for the priests—to David because he was hungry, this narrative shows that this priest valued feeding a hungry servant of God more highly than he valued the normal rule of the sanctuary (Matt 12:3–4). 28 Priests in the temple work on the sabbath, Jesus points out, and this is no violation (12:5), an argument that some other Jewish teachers in fact used to make certain other exceptions. 29 In light of Jesus’s divine authorization, he has authority to make comparable exceptions (12:6–8). The context in Matthew also suggests a contrast: Jesus offers a better “rest” (11:28) than the Pharisaic interpretation of the sabbath.
Some were dedicating to the temple resources that God would rather have them use to support their aged parents (Mark 7:9–13). 30 Jesus opposed using religion as a mask to neglect our God-given obligations to our families. (We should practice stewardship well enough to be able to give as much as possible, but contributing to the church building program should not lead us to neglect feeding our children or caring for a neighbor made destitute by abandonment or other tragedy. In light of Jesus’s example in John 2:1–11, the needs of friends also come before religious rituals.) 31
Likewise, Jesus reasons that it is lawful to heal on the sabbath. Unwilling to defend themselves on the sabbath, some earlier Judeans were slaughtered by their enemies, so Jewish authorities reasonably decided that it was lawful even to fight and kill on the sabbath if one was attacked. 32 But it was also certainly lawful to save a life on the sabbath, and Jesus reasons that, because restoring is greater than harming, it is consistent also to heal on the sabbath (Mark 3:4). Although the strict wilderness Essenes disagreed, most people believed that it was appropriate even on the sabbath to rescue a person or animal that had fallen into a pit or well (Matt 12:11–12; Luke 14:5). 33 Indeed, it was acceptable to water an ox or donkey on the sabbath; how much more to release from Satan’s oppression on the sabbath a member of the ancestral covenant (Luke 13:15–16)? Jesus demands what he deems consistency in interpretation, regards the law as graciously designed for the greater good of people, and thus is more interested in the spirit of the law than in making a fence around it to avoid accidental violation of its letter.
Tragically, Jesus’s contemporaries failed to recognize the time of their visitation (Luke 4:18–20, 23–24, 28–29; 12:54–56; 19:44). Although they claimed to know the Word in Scripture, John’s Gospel laments that they failed to recognize the full embodiment of that Word when he appeared among them (John 1:11; 5:37–40). Do we ever act like Jesus’s contemporaries, missing the heart and purpose of God’s commandments as we seek to protect only or primarily the letter?
As a later chapter will explore (see pp. 246–55), application to our own setting and lives is a biblical way to handle Scripture, provided we draw the right analogies. My scholarly work focuses on the exegetical tasks that help us understand what the text meant in its first contexts, but God’s Spirit also helps the church understand how we can apply that original sense in appropriate settings today.
Whereas the law said, “You shall not kill,” Jesus says, “You shall not want to kill” (Matt 5:21–22). Whereas the law said, “You shall not betray your spouse by being unfaithful,” Jesus says, “You shall not betray your spouse by wanting to be unfaithful” (5:27–28) or “by abandoning your marriage covenant” (5:31–32). Jesus’s interest is not just in what we do, but in who we are, not just in our behavior but also in our motivation.
In the same way, the law warned against calling God as a witness that one’s promise was true and then breaking it; but Jesus points to the ultimate ideal behind the warning. “Have such integrity that you do not need to call as witness God or anything he created” (5:33–37). The law limited revenge to legal retribution in kind—an eye for an eye, for example. By contrast, Jesus goes beyond this by doing away with revenge; one should love the other person more than one’s honor or even basic possessions (5:38–42). The law enjoins love of neighbor; Jesus enjoins love of enemies (5:43–47).
And lest anyone construe Jesus legalistically, attending only to what he specifically mentions, he cites God’s moral perfection as a model and goal (5:48; cf. 5:45). Intention matters at an even deeper level than the law can address. Indeed, it matters at a deeper level than most people are sometimes honest about. For example, although we should expose our good works to others for the purpose of glorifying God, we should never do it to glorify ourselves (5:16; 6:1–2, 5, 16). Only God and perhaps our own hearts will know the difference.
Jesus takes the law further than its letter to the ultimate divine desire for people behind it. Since the time that Jesus spoke these words we Christians have often understood his teaching legalistically, and have thus missed the spirit behind them—God’s heart for us. Civil law cannot make people righteous; it can only limit their sin. Noting this limitation is not meant to disparage Israel’s civil laws; it is simply an observation about genre, since civil law cannot address—or at least enforce its will on—the human heart. Jesus goes beyond civil law to ethics.
The best of contemporary Pharisaic ethics would have agreed with Jesus on many of these points. Pharisees, too, emphasized kavanah, the intention of the heart. 34 Yet Jesus warns that his hearers’ righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees by going to the heart (5:20). If anything should make us nervous, this should. The Pharisees shared many of Jesus’s ethics in principle; they themselves agreed that the heart must be pure. Yet only the kingdom could transform their hearts. 35 It is not enough for us to agree with Jesus’s ethics in principle; we must let his reign transform us.
But while civil laws cannot transform us, in the law God often already pointed toward the ideal. The law might prescribe right behavior, but those who delight in it, who let it dwell in their heart so as to want what God wants, will develop that same character in their hearts. The final commandment in the Ten Commandments was, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house . . . your neighbor’s wife . . . or anything else that is your neighbor’s” (Exod 20:17). So it was not enough just to avoid stealing from your neighbor (20:15) or committing adultery with his wife (20:14) or killing him (20:13) or bearing false witness against him (20:16) to get his property. You weren’t even supposed to want it, because you are supposed to love your neighbor as yourself. That’s what Jesus says also: he explains what God always wanted, of which Israel’s civil law could be only an outline or shadow pointing to God’s fuller plan.
The Kingdom Restores God’s Ideal
Some Pharisees asked Jesus whether a man could divorce his wife (Mark 10:2), perhaps because they had heard about Jesus’s stricter-than-the-law view on divorce (Matt 5:32//Luke 16:18). Matthew’s wording reflects the language debated among Pharisaic schools in precisely Jesus’s day: “Can a husband divorce his wife for any cause?” (Matt 19:3). The generally more lenient school of Hillel (more progressive or more liberal, depending on your standpoint), with whom Jesus agreed on several other issues, would in fact have answered, “Yes.” They emphasized the word that I have translated “something” (i.e., anything). By contrast, the stricter Pharisaic school of Shammai construed Deut 24:1 as allowing divorce if a man found something shameful in his wife. The term in Deut 24:1 that I would translate “shameful” has to do with sexual exposure, so Shammaites approved divorce only for marital unfaithfulness.
Jesus recognizes what the law of Moses says (Mark 10:3–4), but he warns that this is less than God’s ideal. “He wrote this command for you because your heart is so hard” (10:5). Jewish teachers already recognized that civil laws could not enforce God’s ideal, and, considering how these laws should work, they even added rules to help ensure that no one came close to breaking them. Whether or not they agreed with Jesus, they could understand what he meant when he viewed permission to divorce (which the law technically accorded only to a husband) as a concession to human weakness.
Jesus not only regards the law of Moses as demanding less than God’s ideal, but he points to a picture of what God’s ideal is like. Jewish thinkers sometimes envisioned the future kingdom in light of the primeval paradise, 36 and Jesus here sees God’s purpose for humanity, consummated in the kingdom’s values, modeled already in creation. He appeals to God’s plan for marriage from the beginning, modeled in his institution of marriage (Mark 10:6–9).
Jesus was not the only Jewish thinker to appeal to Genesis 2 for a model for marriage; we find that also in the Dead Sea Scrolls. 37 Nevertheless, his hermeneutic does not have to be unique to be valuable. The law deals with humanity as it is, but God ultimately wants humanity to be as it should be. Jesus’s hermeneutic recognizes the law as God’s word for Israel, but that it was a limited word. The true ideal, to which Scripture itself bears witness, is higher.
As I argued at book length elsewhere, 38 Jesus is speaking here in general terms; inspired interpreters felt free to qualify this teaching for specific situations. Thus Matthew makes explicit a probably originally implicit exception for the situation of the spouse’s unfaithfulness (Matt 5:32; 19:9), and Paul also qualifies Jesus’s saying for the situation of a spouse abandoning the marriage (1 Cor 7:15). Just as Jesus quotes the law in Matthew 5 and then expressly qualifies it with, “You have heard, but I say” (Matt 5:21, 27, 33, 38, 43), so Paul quotes Jesus and then qualifies his teaching for an exceptional circumstance in 1 Cor 7:10–16. The language of 7:15, in which the believer “is not bound,” echoes the exact language of ancient divorce contracts for freedom to remarry.
But both Paul’s exception and the Matthean one address the person whose marriage is broken by the other party; neither permits the believer to break up their marriage. That is, the hortatory point of preserving marriage is not diminished by these qualifications. The qualifications simply advance the point for which Jesus opposed divorce to begin with: to protect a spouse from betrayal of the marriage covenant (see Mark 10:11).
If we read Jesus the way that Paul did (as we should, because Paul exemplified for us that hermeneutical model), we might regard some other situations as analogous forms of betrayal—a wife being beaten by her husband or a husband being poisoned by his wife—but in each case, the marriage is being broken, ultimately irreparably, 39 by the other person. The point in all this is not to look for reasons to end a marriage, but to follow Jesus’s principle of faithfulness to one’s marriage. The exceptions are never excuses for a believer to break their marriage; they are only provisions for when the marriage bond is severed from the other side.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is criticized by the religious establishment. He eats with sinners. His disciples do not fast. They pluck ears of grain on the sabbath. Jesus is not part of the religious establishment and does not seek to inculcate their favor and become part of that establishment. From the beginning, he ministers predominantly among the poor, the infirm, the socially marginalized, and others who could offer him no political support. He lived and ministered the way he died: embracing weakness and trusting his Father to vindicate him (cf. 2 Cor 13:4).
Of course, the players in our world today are different. Whereas in some periods of history the religious establishment belonged to Western power structures, that is typically not the case now. And yet in other respects I still surmise that if Jesus were doing the same sort of ministry today, he would not start by cultivating favor with our denominational leaders or scholars; certainly not with political or academic establishments either. I believe that he would start with children in the projects, with teenagers on the most impoverished Native American reservations, or the world’s shantytowns. 40 He might look more like a street outreach worker in Teen Challenge than a political activist. He would start from the bottom up. That is not to criticize the rest of us—most of my time now is spent as a scholar. But it is to put our respective and needed roles in the kingdom in a larger perspective.
Jesus’s Christological Interpretation 41
Jesus’s preaching about the kingdom has implications for his own identity; 42 Jesus seems to claim that the kingdom is present in him (Matt 12:28//Luke 11:20). 43 He claims to be greater than King Solomon or the temple (Matt 12:42//Luke 11:31). The earliest strands of the Jesus tradition indicate that Jesus taught that his disciples would have a role in the messianic kingdom (e.g., Matt 19:28//Luke 22:30), a promise that would naturally imply that he attributed to himself a messianic role. 44 Jesus surely recognized the frequent connection between Jewish eschatology and biblical expectations of an end-time Davidic ruler and that his growing following and invitations to follow could not but have stirred speculations. 45 Such teachings cohere well with the secure information that Jesus was executed on the charge of claiming to be Israel’s rightful king. 46
The later church or Jesus’s Jewish followers could have chosen for Jesus a more militant steed, but Jesus chose a beast of burden that would convey the image of Zech 9:9, 47 which later teachers and probably Jesus’s contemporaries regarded as Messianic. 48 Many scholars who observe the actions believe that Jesus was announcing that he was indeed a king, but not a warrior-king. 49 Jesus may have responded ambivalently to the title of Messiah because his mission defined the concept differently than the popular title would suggest. 50
A central characteristic of the expected Messiah was his royal descent from David. But in Mark, Jesus begins to hint his messianic identity publicly at Mark 12:6, 51 yet quickly implies an identity greater than that of David in 12:35–37. Jesus is no mere David redivivus, no mere warrior king like David, but one far greater than David. If he is David’s “lord,” enthroned not simply in Jerusalem but at God’s right hand, how can he be his “son”?
It seems unlikely that early Christians would have created an ambiguously worded tradition that could be used to challenge Jesus’s Davidic descent, hence his messiahship. 52 Jesus’s messiahship was precisely a point of debate with their Jewish contemporaries, and Jesus’s wording here could be used against his movement’s case on that point. Why would Mark, who clearly affirms that Jesus is Christ (Mark 1:1; 8:29; 9:41; 14:61–62) and seems to also affirm that he is son of David (Mark 10:47–48; cf. 11:10), take this risk if not following genuine tradition? That Psalm 110 became widespread in a wide range of early Christian circles 53 probably suggests that a common authority, namely Jesus, stands behind its usage.
Indeed, in Mark’s context, Jesus had just used the title “Lord” for the only true God of the Shema (Mark 12:29–30); Jewish interpreters commonly linked texts on the basis of common key words. 54 Even in the original psalm, if the psalmist spoke to a lord besides Yahweh, a lord who would be enthroned at God’s right hand as his vice-regent, then this king was someone greater than an ordinary royal descendant of David. Some in the psalmist’s day might have understood the image on the Near Eastern analogy of divine kings. 55
Jesus knew passages in their full literary context, although he did not live in a setting where one needed to recite that context to evoke it. But Jesus did not simply exegete Scripture—he lived by its message and explained that message in fresh and relevant ways. Jesus recognized that some matters of the law were “weightier” than others—these revealed God’s heart behind the laws, and therefore offered a hermeneutical key—an interpretive grid but not a canonical filter—for reapplying them.
Jesus applied Scripture to his day in ways that often violated conventional religious understanding. Whereas some approached the laws as lawyers, concerned with protecting the letter of the law as well (in principle) as the spirit, Jesus’s concern was especially with the point behind the law, points more demanding and all-encompassing than the Mosaic-period concrete applications of those principles. Most distinctive, of course, is Jesus’s understanding of his own identity in light of Scripture.