CHAPTER 15 - Jesus’ Jewish Ethics
CHAPTER 15
Jesus’ Jewish Ethics
“The chief demand in God’s law is: ‘Heed, O Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one. You must love the Lord your God with every fabric and fiber of your being.’ The demand that comes second to this one is, ‘You must love your neighbor as you love yourself.’”
MARK 12:29-31
Jesus’ ethics are inseparable from his demands for discipleship, and the priority of preparing for the kingdom that pervades his teaching. This chapter is thus, in a sense, a continuation of the previous one. Here we survey some more of Jesus’ teaching on possessions; love; divorce; korban; and the beatitudes. We conclude with some other randomly selected sayings that illustrate how pervasively the criterion of Jewish environment supports the earliness of this sayings material.
Last of all I will survey some of Jesus’ purity practices. I reserve these for the end because my examples here focus on Jesus’ behavior more than on his sayings, and because purity practices provide the best transition to the controversy narratives in the following chapter.