Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS §14.4
presentation of a Jesus who 'criticized' the Torah, who abolished some of its precepts,
and who 'rejected' the Halakhah 'in a radical way'. 95
Unfortunately, the attempt to differentiate Jesus from Judaism precisely at
this point has still too often succumbed to the temptation to depict Judaism as the
darker foil against which the distinctiveness of Jesus could stand out more
clearly. The shadow of anti-Judaism has distorted all parts of the resulting depiction.
Bultmann could not avoid characterizing the Judaism of Jesus' time in
terms of 'legalism': it was what Jesus protested against — the understanding that
man's relation to God is a legal one; 'Jesus has wholly separated obedience from
legalism' . 96 We have already referred to the typical Christian maligning of Pharisees
as chief exponents of such legalism. 97 And it is not hard to find responsible
twentieth-century commentators who saw no problem in talking of Jesus' negation
or abrogation of the Law, or even of Jesus doing away with 'the law of the
Jews — and with it Judaism itself as a religion' ! 98 It was against such tendencies
and talk that Sanders uttered his major protest: Jesus was not anti-law or anti-
Pharisee; rather he stood within the diversity of interpretation and debate which
the Pharisees in particular already expressed. 99
saism . . .' (49, 69-70). Similarly H. Merkel, 'The Opposition between Jesus and Judaism', in
E. Bammel and C. F. D. Moule, Jesus and the Politics of His Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University,
1984) 129-44 (here 138-42).
95. Jeremias, Proclamation 204-11 (though he begins his treatment by affirming
strongly that 'Jesus lived in the Old Testament', 205); similarly Goppelt, Theology 1.87-105,
claiming that Jesus 'drew a sharp distinction between Torah and halakah' (89-90); Schräge,
Ethics 56-68 ('Jesus' sovereign freedom', 62). On the older version of this view, that Jesus distinguished
between the moral law and the ceremonial or ritual law, Sanders bluntly observes,
'We cannot find, in the Judaism of Jesus' day, any precedent for making [this] sort of distinction
within the law' {Jesus and Judaism 248). D. J. Moo, 'Jesus and the Authority of the Mosaic
Law', JSNT 20 (1984) 3-49, represents the more conservative concern to maintain that Jesus
never abrogated the law (Scripture).
96. Jesus and the Word 65-98, 126 (here 92); Theology 1.13-14.
97. See above, chapter 9 n. 49.
98. See, e.g., W. Gutbrod, nomos, TDNT 1060-61, cited in my Partings 98, with further
bibliography in 300 n. 2; the quotation is from Pannenberg, Jesus 255. For E. Stauffer, Jesus
was 'the one who announces a morality without legalism, which in principle is free of any tie to
the Mosaic Torah and Jewish obedience to the Torah' (cited by Theissen and Merz, Historical
Jesus 347; see also 348-49, 359). C. E. B. Cranfield does not hesitate to draw the conclusion
from Mark 7.15 that 'Jesus speaks as the one who is, and knows himself to be, telos nomou
(Rom. 10.4)' (St Mark [Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1959] 244). Becker takes Luke
16.16 as authentic in saying 'that the Law and the Prophets lasted until John and that they belong
to the time that . . . lies in the past' (Jesus 227); 'the Torah had to relinquish its
soteriological function to the Kingdom of God' (284; similarly Gnilka, Jesus 209-10); see also
above, chapter 12 n. 342.
99. 'I am one of a growing number of scholars who doubt that there were any substantial
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