Christ is risen! Indeed he is risen!
And after they had become silent, James answered, saying, “Men and brethren, listen to me: Simon has declared how God at the first visited the Gentiles to take out of them a people for His name. And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written: ‘After this I will return and will rebuild the tabernacle of David, which has fallen down; I will rebuild its ruins, and I will set it up; so that the rest of mankind may seek the LORD, even all the Gentiles who are called by My name, says the LORD who does all these things.’ Known to God from eternity are all His works. Therefore I judge that we should not trouble those from among the Gentiles who are turning to God, but that we write to them to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from things strangled, and from blood. (Acts 15:13-20)
As Christianity grew from being a mostly Jewish sect into a religion which incorporated Gentiles and Jews into one Body, the Church had to deal with specific problems caused by how the Jews understood the Law (Torah). The Apostles in council decided that the Law should not be imposed upon Gentile converts as it was not essential to salvation and in fact was an unbearable yoke even for the Jews themselves (Acts 15:10) and so it was wrong to impose it on non-Jewish converts to Christianity. It was not that the Law was wrong, for even the Lord Jesus did not come to destroy the Law, but it was misinterpreted and thus became a barrier to salvation. Orthodox scholar Daniel Fanous comments by first quoting Christ:
‘Do not think that I came to destroy the law… I did not come to destroy but to fulfill‘ (Matt 5:17). The word ‘fulfill’ in Greek is given as plerosai, meaning to ‘complete,’ or ‘make perfect.’ Before even uttering a single word of teaching Jesus makes his purpose extremely clear: I do not stand against the law; I have come to complete it.
[Jesus came to perfect the law, to complete it and bring it to perfection by rescuing it from the Jewish misunderstanding of the Law: the Jews read the Law too literally and thus missed its spiritual content especially in reference to the Messiah. Jesus endeavored to correct the popular Jewish misinterpretations of the Law:]
‘You have heard that it was said to those of old. . . But I say to you that…’
What would be our initial reaction? I suggest that first we would understand Jesus to be saying something new: ‘You have heard’ a thing of old, but now I am saying something else, something different. It is quite easy to come away from this with the conclusion that the old is over, and the new has begun. Should, however, we take our imaginings more holistically and contextually, our conclusion would radically differ. If we truly sat on those Galilean slopes then we would have also heard the statements that immediately preceded these. The statements in question are: ‘I did not come to destroy, but to fulfill…’ which we have seen previously. Now our imaginings take us elsewhere. Anything we have just heard must be taken as a follow on of ‘I did not come to destroy.’ That is, the saying ‘you have heard… but I say…’ cannot possibly ‘destroy,’ but necessarily must ‘fulfill’ the law. We may not and cannot take this text apart from its introduction. Each word must be appreciated in its context.
I am, of course, referring to the supposed six antitheses. (Matthew 5:21-48) So-called because these are six statements uttered by Jesus that said a thesis: ‘You have heard that it was said...’ against something else: ‘But I say to you...’ All six are found in the Sermon on the Mount in which they are introduced by the statements of Jesus unfulfilling the law, and are concluded by a call to perfection: ‘you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect‘ (Matt 5:48).
To begin, we should note that Jesus did not say in any of the six cases ‘Moses said,’ but rather, ‘you have heard that it was said.’ Thus Jesus’ words are not being placed in opposition to what Moses commanded in the law, but rather what was ‘heard.’ At hand, therefore, is a discussion of the interpretation of the law –what was ‘heard’ – not the law itself. . . . In the same vein, we question why Jesus preferred ‘you have heard it was said‘ and not ‘you have read that it is written’? If it was a matter of the law itself, then the argument should have proceeded upon what was written and not that which was said.
David Daube, a rabbinic scholar, offers another explanation . . . ‘there is good reason, then for translating the first part of the Matthean form by: ‘You have literally understood.’ This would introduce a debate of understanding, rather than law. In other words, the antitheses to the ears of the first-century Palestine would have taken the form of ‘you have understood the law to mean… but what it really signifies is…’ (TAUGHT BY GOD, pp 51-54)
The Jewish problem was not with the Law itself but how they heard the Law – how they interpreted and understood it. They took it far too literally and thus missed its spiritual importance.
Jesus said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” (Luke 10:26)
Fraternized 