The Historical Jesus and the Law:

The Form of His Activity and the

Impact of Social Reputation

TUCKER S. FERDA
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
Pittsburgh, PA 15206

Abstract: Historical Jesus research has traditionally concentrated on reconstructing

Jesus’ intentions and discerning his views on particular topics. That is especially true
when it comes to the question of Jesus’ relationship to the law of Moses. The dominant
question driving scholarly discussion is this: What did Jesus think and teach in respect
to the law? While the attempt to answer that question is important and should continue,
I contend that a narrow focus on Jesus’ thoughts and intentions struggles to account
for the extent of controversy surrounding Jesus in his ministry. That controversy is
better explained on the grounds that Jesus had developed the perception in some
quarters of being a radical and a lawbreaker, even though we can be confident, as much
of modem scholarship has shown us, that he aimed to uphold the law.

Key Words: aims of Jesus • controversy narratives • historical Jesus •

itinerancy • law of Moses

I n t h e o pe n in g volum e o f A M arginal Jew , John M eier fam ously m ade the

task o f historical Jesus research akin to an “unpapal conclave,” in w hich a Catholic,,
Protestant, Jew, and agnostic sit dow n to “ham m (er) out a consensus docum ent on
w ho Jesus o f N azareth w as and w hat he intended in his own tim e and p lace .” 1 M eier
here im plied, no doubt, tw o different objectives in this statem ent: reconstructing
“w ho Jesus o f N azareth w as,” as the one, and discerning “w hat he intended,” as the
other. But if one were to take M eier’s statem ent as a sum m ary o f the w ay that his­
torical Jesus research is often practiced, it is clear that that statem ent w ould speak

1John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1, The Roots o f the
Problem and the Person (ABRL; New York: Doubleday, 1991) 1.

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 THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE LAW 63

not of two different tasks but one. The reason is that most Jesus critics since the
beginnings of the quest have sought to answer the question of “who Jesus of
Nazareth was” by reference to “what he intended.” The quest fo r Jesus, in other
words, has been a quest fo r Jesus ’intentions.
It is possible to regard the quest for Jesus’ intentions as an essential endeavor
(which it surely is) and still lament with James Crossley that contemporary schol­
arship remains unduly fixated on “what Jesus thought or believed ,”12 Crossley
recently stressed that we must attend not only to Jesus’ aims but also to the ways
that Jesus himself was shaped by certain contextualizing forces. Crossley attempted
to do just that by highlighting the impact of the economic situation in Galilee on
Jesus’ message. The purpose of this essay is different from that of Crossley’s; the
contextualizing force in question is not the economics of Galilee but the nature of
Jesus’ public perception. But the overarching goal of going beyond Jesus’ inten­
tions or views is much the same.
The topic of this essay is one that is routinely subject to the quest for Jesus’
intentions: the question of Jesus’ relationship to the law of Moses. My goal is to
look at some important and overlooked aspects of Jesus’ social perception by oth­
ers—instead of his own views— and consider how that perception may have
impacted his ministry. My contention is that the typical focus on Jesus’ intentions
struggles to account for the extent of controversy surrounding Jesus in his ministry.
That controversy is better explained on the grounds that Jesus had developed the
perception in some quarters of being a radical and a lawbreaker, even though we
can be confident, as much of modem scholarship has shown us, that he aimed to
uphold the law.

I. The Form o f Jesus’ A ctivity

I begin with two points about Jesus that few critics would find controversial.
The first is that Jesus was an itinerant teacher. This is well established in the tradi­
tion and there is no reason to doubt it (e.g., Mark 1:21; 5:1; 6:1, 6, 45, 53; 8:10;
Luke 10:12-15; etc.). He may have been based for some time at Capernaum, but
he eventually started taking shorter and longer trips around the region.3 Although
we can say little in regard to the temporal and geographical extent of this itinerant
ministry, it is clear that the setting of Jesus’ teaching was varied and that he was
in certain places more frequently than others.

1 James G. Crossley, Jesus and the Chaos o f History: Redirecting the Life o f the Historical
Jesus (Biblical Reconfigurations; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 14 (italics original).
3 Jurgen Zangenberg, “Kapemaunr—Zu Besuch in Jesu ‘eigener Stadt,”’ in Leben am See
Gennesaret: Kulturgeschichtliche Entdeckungen in einer biblischen Region (ed. Gabriele Fassbeck
et al.; Sonderbande der antiken Welt; Mainz: Von Zabem, 2003) 99-103.
 64 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 80, 2018

The second is that Jesus did not teach the same things to all audiences.4 For
instance, Jesus did not call everyone to forsake all and follow him; he did not send
all out on mission; and, if there is anything historical about the Synoptic portrayal
of Jesus’ messianic identity, he did not proclaim to all forthrightly that he was the
Messiah but rather reserved that knowledge for his inner circle.
Despite widespread knowledge of these facts, their important implications for
Jesus’ public perception—and particularly his perception in regard to the law—
have been woefully underexplored. Jesus’ itinerancy makes it clear that, even
should we be able to reconstruct Jesus’ views or intentions on a particular topic,
we cannot always expect the same knowledge on the part of Jesus’ audience(s).
Indeed, in light of the form of Jesus’ activity, there were bound to be different views
about Jesus and his teaching circulating already during his ministry. This is not due
to anything in the content of his message (that is, its brilliance or opaqueness) but
only to the nature of his activity. Not all of Jesus’ hearers had the opportunity to
consider carefully everything he had to say about a particular topic. Disciples of
Jesus surely knew him in this capacity, and probably others who heard him often
around the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee did as well. But there must have
been many who had to form their view of Jesus when hearing him speak on
particular occasions or, for some, on the basis of hearsay. The ability to grasp Jesus’
intentions, then, was in some way contingent on the type of contact one had with
the Jesus movement. It is likely that, as the Gospels indicate, reports about Jesus’
teaching and activity spread throughout Palestine already during his ministry (e.g.,
Mark 1:28, 45; 3:8; 6:14; Matt 4:24; 11:2; Luke 4:14, 37).5 Unfortunately we do
not have access to these original oral evangels, but we know enough to say that,
whatever they entailed, they were not matters that Jesus ’intentions could ultimately
control. We can also say that numerous hearers of Jesus must have heard such
reports of him before ever seeing him and so had formed, as Gadamer once said
of books, a “prejudice,” or prejudgment, about him. They saw Jesus through a lens
that was not solely his own creation.
The important implication of the second fact—Jesus’ context-specific teaching
—has been hinted at in an underappreciated essay by Dale Allison. In “The Problem
of Audience,” Allison highlighted a genuine hermeneutical dilemma for Gospel
research: our inability to identify the original audience of Jesus’ teachings in some
cases means that the meaning of the utterance in question risks being transformed
or utterly lost. For instance, on Q 12:8-9 (“Anyone who acknowledges me before
others, the Son of Man will also acknowledge before the angels;. . . but whoever
denies me before others, the Son of Man will deny before the angels”), Allison
wrote:

4 Particularly important studies here are T. W. Manson, The Teaching o f Jesus: Studies in Its
Form and Content (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); and J. A. Baird, Audience
Criticism and the Historical Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969).
5 See here Michael Winger, “Word and Deed,” CBQ 62 (2000) 679-91.
 THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE LAW 65

[T]he saying has quite different meanings depending upon the audience we assign to
it. If we envision Jesus’ declaration as a general religious proposition, as it might be
if he had originally uttered it before a large Galilean audience, then it would entail that
whoever accepts Jesus is saved, and that whoever does not accept him is not saved.
. . . [H]owever . . . [if] Jesus spoke Luke 12:8-9 (Q) to his coworkers . . . [t]he word
would then be a warning to stick to their task.6

Allison’s overall purpose in offering such insights was to complicate the historical-
critical task and to showcase, as the title of his article indicates, a “problem” for
our interpretive efforts. True as that is, the problem runs deeper than that. “The
Problem of Audience” was surely an issue in the Sitz im Leben Jesu as well. When
Jesus delivered context-specific sayings, an interpretive challenge would emerge
not suddenly in the post-Easter period but as soon as that teaching was passed on
apart from its original setting. This, also, is a matter over which Jesus’ intentions
would have little control.
The preceding leads to a significant conclusion: modem critics are not the
only ones faced with the difficult task of reconstructing and interpreting Jesus’
views on various topics. There is an interesting parallel between the type of knowl­
edge that historians can have of Jesus today and the type of knowledge that can be
expected of some of Jesus’ original hearers. For then as well as now, many come
at Jesus with prejudgments about him. For then as well as now, the material for
reconstructing Jesus’ views is by nature varied, as it was intended for varied audi­
ences. It cuts across public proclamation, teaching to his immediate followers,
conflicts with opponents, and probably ad hoc statements that were not repeated.
Jesus may have been a systematic thinker (that is debatable),7 but, as Jesus critics
frequently admit, his mission was not about producing systematic positions on
various theological topics in his day. His “views” came to the surface as circum­
stances required, and so they must be pieced together from disparate evidence.
The necessity of reconstruction means that what is known—and, perhaps
more importantly, what is not known— is of major hermeneutical significance.
That is true both then and now. The history of interpretation of the Gospels is
instructive here. To anticipate our next section: we find in Christian exegesis of the
Gospels, from ancient to modem times, a countless number of perspectives on
Jesus’ view of the law.8 Why is this? It is at least partly due to the fact that we, like
some of Jesus’ original hearers, do not have the whole picture. We have only

6 Dale C. Allison Jr., “The Problem of Audience,” in idem, Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest
Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (New York: T&T Clark, 2005) 27-55, here 42. See also the
important study by John S. Kloppenborg, “Memory, Performance, and the Sayings of Jesus,” Jour­
nal fo r the Study o f the Historical Jesus 10 (2012) 97-132.
7 See Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter, The Quest fo r the Plausible Jesus: The Question o f
Criteria (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002) 7.
8 Beginning, of course, with the Gospels themselves, William R. G. Loader comments, “No
two gospels are identical in their approach to Jesus’ attitude toward the Law” (Jesus’Attitude
towards the Law: A Study o f the Gospels [WUNT 2/97; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997] 509). See
 66 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 80, 2018

snapshots. Lrom our vantage point one can easily emphasize or downplay certain
particulars, or simply end up at the wrong conclusion because of our ignorance.9
Readers make sense of the micro evidence (such as individual sayings) on the basis
of their macro perspective on Jesus and what he was about, which may be well or
ill informed. Hence, diversity of opinion, diversity of perception, is a necessary
consequence of the form of the tradition, which itself stems in part from the nature
of Jesus’ activity.

II. Difficulties w ith Jesus and the Law

I doubt that these points affect all of the Jesus tradition equally. It seems likely
that Jesus had something of a “stump speech” about the kingdom of God that was
agreeable to generalization, and that talk of “the kingdom” activated and played
off preexisting cultural registers that were known and in use.10 Moreover, it is
likely that Jesus reused teachings and parables in different contexts, as many critics
have argued. Indeed, in regard to the major thrust of Jesus’ public ministry, it is
doubtful that a frequent hearer of Jesus in Capernaum and a one-time hearer of
him somewhere else in the Galilee would end up with significantly different con­
clusions.
Not all of the tradition is like that, however. Certain aspects of the ministry
require special focus on context, subjectivity, and perception because of the nature
of Jesus’ activity. Jesus’ relationship to the law of Moses is such an aspect. One
important reason is that Jesus was not a halakic teacher per se. This is not con­
troversial. Most agree that Jesus did not travel around with the intention of
expounding and debating his particular positions on pressing legal topics of his
day.11 Jesus may have had fairly systematic interpretations of Torah worked out in
his head, but his mission was not ultimately about reproducing such for his hear­
ers.12 As almost all historians agree, Jesus’ fundamental mission was to
announce the dawning of God’s kingdom, and toward that end he touched on
various legal topics as circumstances required. It is not a coincidence, then, that
Jesus’ views most often emerge indirectly in the controversy stories, which are not

also Helmut Merklein, Jesu Botschaft von der Gottesherrschaft: Eine Skizze (3rd ed.; SBS 111;
Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1989) 94.
9 On our ignorance of Jesus’ intellectual context, see John P. Meier, “The Historical Jesus
and the Historical Law: Some Problems within the Problem,” CBQ 65 (2003) 52-79.
10 See Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, eds., Konigsherrschaft Gottes und
himmlischer Kult: ImJudentum, Urchristentum und in der hellenistischen Welt (WUNT 55; Tubin­
gen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991).
II See, e.g., Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal o f the
Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) 28; William Loader, “Jesus and the Law,”
in Handbook fo r the Study o f the Historical Jesus (ed. Tom Holmen and Stanley E. Porter; 4 vols.;
Leiden: Brill, 2011) 3:2745-72, here 2769.
12 See Ernest W. Saunders, Jesus in the Gospels (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967)
205 .
 THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE LAW 67

intellectual debates about halakah like those found in later rabbinic literature.13
The conflicts, rather, are responses to the prior activities of Jesus concerning
handwashing (Mark 7:5; Matt 15:2; cf. Luke 11:38), Sabbath observance (Mark
2:24 parr.; 3:2 parr.; Luke 13:10-17; 14:1-6; John 5:2-18; 7:14-25; 9:1-17; cf. Gos.
Thom. 27), and fasting (Mark 2:18 parr.; cf. Matt 16:16-18; Gos. Thom. 14, 27,
104).14 It was with some justification that Gustaf Aulen wrote, “[T]he cause for
the irritation present among the Jews of Jesus’ time does not seem to have been
his teaching. Primarily at issue was his behavior, his way of acting.”15
What this means is that the “ad hoc and unexplained quality of Jesus’ various
pronouncements on legal/moral questions,” as Meier lamented, is due in part to
the nature of Jesus’ activity.16 Meier himself concluded as much, pointing to Jesus’
charismatic activity: “The religious charismatic intuitively knows God’s will both
in general and in particular, and that is sufficient reason for the charismatic’s pro­
nouncements and commands. . . . [Such] may be the only explanation for Jesus’
varied statements on the Law.”17 This, however, is the striking thing: such con­
cessions come at the end of a six-hundred-plus-page monograph focused almost
exclusively on reconstructing what Jesus thought about particular legal matters.
That interest remains the dominant objective in Jesus research on this topic.18 The
typical course of action is also widely shared: one takes Synoptic and Johannine

13 See Tom Holmen, Jesus and Jewish Covenant Thinking (BIS 55; Leiden: Brill, 2001)
88-274.
14 If the dispute story about divorce in Mark 10:2-12 commemorates some event in the life of
Jesus, then it is necessary to suppose that Jesus is here questioned about divorce because of reports
about his fonner repudiation of the practice. See John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the
Historical Jesus, vol. 4, Law and Love (AYBRL; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) 121,
124. Contra Jacob Kremer, “Jesu Wort zur Ehescheidung,” in Geschieden, Wiederverheiratet,
Abgewiesen? Antworten der Theologie (ed. Theodor Schneider; QD 157; Freiburg: Herder, 1995)
51-67, here 53-54.
15 Gustaf Aulen, Jesus in Contemporary Historical Research (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976)
55.
16 Meier, Law and Love, 652.
17 Ibid., 655.
18 Just a sampling: David Friedrich Strauss, Life o f Jesus Critically Examined (trans. George
Eliot; 4th ed.; London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1902) 297-300; Gunther Bomkamm, Jesus o f Nazareth
(trans. Irene McLuskey and Fraser McLuskey; New York: Harper & Row, 1960) 96-109; Douglas J.
Moo, “Jesus and the Authority of the Mosaic Law,” JSNT 20 (1984) 3-49; Peter Fiedler, “Die Tora
bei Jesus und in der Jesusiiberlieferung,” in Das Gesetz im Neuen Testament (ed. Karl Kertelge; QD
108; Freiburg: Herder. 1986) 71-87; Barnabas Lindars, “All Foods Clean: Thoughts on Jesus and
the Law,” in Law and Religion: Essays on the Place o f the Law in Israel and Early Christianity
(Cambridge: James Clarke, 1988) 61-71; Alan Watson, Jesus and the Law (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1996); James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Christianity in the Making 1; Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) 563-83; Dale Allison, “Torah, Urzeit, Endzeit," in idem, Resurrecting
Jesus, 149-97; Meier, Law and Love, 75 (for a clear statement on this issue); Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus
o f Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was (trans. Linda M. Maloney; Collegeville, MN: Liturgi­
cal Press, 2012) 190-215; Thomas Kazen, Scripture, Interpretation, or Authority? Motives and
Argument in Jesus' Halakic Conflicts (WUNT 320; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013); Andre
 68 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 80,2018

material that may be considered relevant to the question at hand, considers each
datum individually, and seeks to identify wider theological coherence among the
whole. By these means one “reconstructs” Jesus’ views. To be sure, I do not assume
that that effort always will end in frustration. But I do raise a simple question: Why
should we think that the difficulties in the tradition only make matters challenging
for modem historians? Is it not inherently likely that the “ad hoc and unexplained
quality of Jesus’ various pronouncements” also generated questions, confusion,
and diverse perceptions in his own time and place?

III. A Big-Picture Solution

An important reason to answer yes is that such a perspectival angle on the
topic helps to explain the opposition that Jesus faced.19To see this clearly we need
to note that our sources preserve something of a historical conundrum for us.
According to my research, this conundrum has not been explicitly named as such,
though once named it clarifies many of the views on Jesus and the law that have
emerged throughout the years. This conundrum closely parallels another one that
concerns the end of Jesus’ life. In that latter case, we have a disjuncture between
what happened to Jesus in Jerusalem and the content of Jesus’ message as it has
been preserved: Jesus was executed as a political insurrectionist, and yet his
message is not of that kind.20 Thus, the effect (execution) does not have a reasonable
cause in what Jesus thought he was doing. There are a number of ways to resolve
the conundrum, one of which is to deny that it exists and posit that Jesus actually
was a revolutionary (hence agreement between intention and outcome).21 It is more
likely, however, that Jesus intended something nonrevolutionary but that he was
perceived as either intending or being swept up by (unintentionally) a more
subversive end. It is not important to defend that here.
We are faced with a similar dilemma when it comes to legal/moral controversies
between Jesus and the sages of his day. It is this: according to the presentation of
the Gospels, which is where we must start and end our investigation, this opposition

LaCocque, Jesus the Central Jew: His Times and His People (ECL 15; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015)
131-68.
|1) For a more extended argument on this front, including this material, see my forthcoming
volume, Jesus and the Galilean Crisis, LNTS (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark).
20 On this question, see Craig A. Evans, “From Public Ministry to the Passion: Can a Link Be
Found between the (Galilean) Life and the (Judean) Death of Jesus?,” in idem, Jesus and His Con­
temporaries: Comparative Studies (AGAJU 25; Leiden: Brill, 2002) 373-88.
21 This view has made a recent comeback. See Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, “Jesus and the Anti-
Roman Resistance: A Reassessment of the Arguments,” Journalfor the Study ofthe Historical Jesus
12 (2014) 1-105. Note how Bermejo-Rubio addresses this conundrum directly: “a harmless and
peaceful man turns the well-attested fact of the crucifixion into an unfathomable conundrum”
(p. 74).
 THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE LAW 69

became quite harsh and vitriolic.22 Yet, when we look at the content of Jesus’
teaching about the law, it is hard to find what could have generated that response.
Hence, there is a disjuncture between effect and cause. One could try to deny that
the conundrum is real. One could contend, on the one hand, that Jesus’ teachings
about the law really were offensive enough to generate such controversy. 1 do not
think that this view is viable, for reasons that will become clear below.23 On the
other hand, one could argue that we search in vain for a historical solution in the
life of Jesus because the controversies are projections from the situation of the later
church.24 This is a more serious objection. But as more and more recent criticism
has begun to acknowledge, it fails to tip the probability scale. Numerous recent
critics have generally found more history in these controversy narratives than did
Rudolf Bultmann and other early twentieth-century researchers, and for good
reasons.25 Notable are these: (a) the simple fact that the Gospels can reflect later
realities does not imply that these controversies are entirely devoid of historical

22 See John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 3, Companions
and Competitors (ABRL; New York: Doubleday, 1991)338. See also \u \en , Jesus in Contemporary
Historical Research, 61-63; Heinz Schiimiann, “Die Redekomposition wider ‘dieses Geschlecht’
und seine Fiihrung in der Redenquelle (vgl. Mt 23,1-39 par Lk 11,37-54): Bestand—Akoluthie—
Kompositionsformen,” SNTSU 11 (1986) 33-81; Eckhard Rau, “Jesu Auseinandersetzung mit
Pharisaem iiber seine Zuwendung zu Siinderinnen und Siindem: Lk 15,11-32 und Lk 18,10-14a als
Worte des historischen Jesus,” ZNW 89 (1998) 5-29; Maurice Casey, An Aramaic Approach to Q:
Sources fo r the Gospels o f Matthew and Luke (SNTSMS 122; Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002)64-104.
23 Proponents of this view often set Jesus above his Jewish context; see, e.g., Helmut Merkel,
“The Opposition between Jesus and Judaism,” in Jesus and the Politics o f His Day (ed. Ernst
Bammel and C. F. D. Moule; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 129-44, here 44:
“Once we become aware of how often Jesus burst through the bounds of conventional thought and
behaviour, we must regard a conflict between him and the representatives of the traditional order as
unavoidable.”
24 See Rudolf Bultmann, Histoiy o f the Synoptic Tradition (trans. John Marsh from German
5th ed.; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1963) 39-61; Gosta Lindeskog, Die Jesusfrage im neuzeitli-
chen Judentum: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Arbeiten und Mitteilungen
aus dem Neutestamentlichen Seminar zu Uppsala 8; Uppsala: Lundquist, 1938); Paul Winter, On
the Trial o f Jesus (2nd ed.; SJ 1; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1974) 175; Arland J. Hultgren, Jesus and His
Adversaries: The Form and Function o f the Conflict Stories in the Synoptic Tradition (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 1979) 19, 39; though see also 19, 198-99; Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (San Fran­
cisco: Harper & Row, 1978) 22-23, 29, 153-57; E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1985)291.
25 Crossley is right to note that “the Synoptic disputes are fairly typical halakhic disputes,
which do not seem to have been of interest to the early church outside of the Gospel tradition” (Jesus
and the Chaos o f History, 51). See also Craig S. Keener, Historical Jesus o f the Gospels (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) 225-27; Eckhard Rau, Perspektiven des Lebens Jesu: Plcidoyer fu r die
Ankntipfung an eine schwierige Forschungstradition (ed. Silke Petersen; BWANT 203; Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 2013) 51-56, 247-50; Casey, Jesus o f Nazareth, 313-52; Chris Keith, Jesus against
the Scribal Elite: The Origins o f the Conflict (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014) 127-52.
 70 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 80,2018

value;26 (b) the Synoptic Jesus does not simply mirror the actions of later gentile
or loosely observant Jewish Christians;27 (c) the controversy stories, taken col­
lectively, are like pictures that do not fit the frames that have been placed around
them. Mark, for instance, has used these stories to advance his own liberalizing
perspective on the Mosaic law as a whole, but they are very ill-suited for that
agenda.2S Traditional materials have been made to serve a larger theological
agenda for which they must be stretched in order to fit.
My suggestion is that we resolve the conundrum in this way: Jesus did not
intend to break the law and did not teach others to do so, but he was thought by
some to be a lawbreaker on account of the company he kept and certain things that
he said to his followers.29 The opposition to Jesus that developed, then, was not
merely a clashing between different “views” of the Torah. It was a response to the
concrete reality of his growing movement and concern about what that entailed.
For a field as well trod as Jesus studies, in which any totally new proposals
are probably wrong, this suggestion has the advantage of combining insights of
old and new research on the question. Recent research is probably near the mark
on the question of Jesus’ intentions by hesitating to say that Jesus really had
offensive things to say about the law— for example, that he intended to abolish the
law or declare it null in some way. That must be right, for otherwise the early
decades of Christian origins are inexplicable.30 But older research, especially as
found in the nineteenth-century Lives of Jesus, is probably on target in the common
estimation that, in the eyes of the learned, Jesus had an offensive if not damnable
perspective on the law and that, on this account, the growth of his movement
sounded alarms.31 The reasoning for this was flawed, because it was assumed that
Jesus actually held such offensive opinions about the law (notice, again, the focus
on Jesus’ intentions) as informed by later Christian views of grace and internal

26 See A. E. Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints o f History (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982)
51; Joachim Gnilka, Jesus o f Nazareth: Message and History (trans. Siegfried S. Schatzmann;
Peabody: Hendrickson, 1997)268.
11 On this point, see Rainer Riesner, Jesus als Lehrer: Eine Untersuchungzum Ursprung der
Evangelien-Uberlieferung (WUNT 2/7; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981) 36-37; Martin Pickup,
“Matthew s and Mark’s Pharisees,” in In Quest o f the Historical Pharisees (ed. Jacob Neusner and
Bruce D. Chilton; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007) 67-112, here 111.
28 Two examples: (a) The episode of picking grain on the Sabbath (e.g., what is permissible
on the Sabbath) becomes, eventually, an opportunity for Jesus to express his lordship over the Sab­
bath itself (2:28). See here Meier, Law and Love, 267-93. (b) Mark turns the controversy over hand
washing into an opportunity for Jesus to abolish the food laws (7:19). See Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8:
A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary’ (AB 27; New York: Doubleday, 2000) 447-
48.
29 Harvey was right to argue that Jesus’ conduct perhaps raised the question of legality, but he
did not breach the law as such (Jesus and the Constraints o f History, 11-35).
30 So Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 267-69.
31 E.g., Ernest Renan, The Life o f Jesus (London: Triibner, 1864) 230-35.
 THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE LAW 71

righteousness. The controversies between Jesus and his opponents were really
between “Christianity” and a caricatured “Judaism.” But the general insight, I
submit, should be affirmed, because it best explains why Jesus was worth paying
attention to and taking the effort to oppose.

IV. Argum ents on the Details

In defense of this suggestion I turn to Chris Keith’s study Jesus against the
Scribal Elite, which, to my knowledge, is the first to reflect seriously on the
following:
[W]e may grant Jesus’s healings, exorcisms, and particular perspective on Torah
would have garnered him attention from the scribal authorities, but only under the
circumstance that Jesus’s opinion mattered in the first place. And with regard to the
circumstance that Jesus’s opinion did matter, unlike that o f thousands and thousands
o f other Jews in the Second Temple period, we may ask the simple but poignant
question “W hy?” Why did the authorities care at all what Jesus thought or did? Why
did they not dismiss him as a harmless madman?

It is a great question. We may presume that so few modern historians have asked
it because they, naturally, have been interested in Jesus’ views and have assumed
that everyone else in Galilee was too. Keith puts the matter in a more realistic
historical framework, which is what raises the quandary: since Jesus was a Galilean
peasant, possibly illiterate, and was certainly not the first to disagree with Pharisees
and scribes on this or that, why the ruckus?
Keith admits that opposition to Pharisees on issues like hand washing, fasting,
and tithing (if we can indeed reconstruct Jesus’ “views” on such matters at all) can
probably “explain why there was conflict to a degree.”32 But he is right to suspect
that there is more going on here than “disagreement,” at least to get the controversy
started. Although he is not the first to do so, Keith situates the controversies in an
honor/shame value system and notes that what we find in the Gospels are not mere
intellectual disputes but rather “calculated rhetorical ploys designed to upstage and
humiliate the other party.”33 That is, the hoped-for effect is not just to change Jesus’
legal opinion but to affect his public reputation. That seems to me exactly right.
Keith’s thesis, however, that the purpose of these rhetorical ploys was to expose
Jesus’ lack of “scribal literate status,” is not wholly compelling. It is more plausible
that, if we consider these controversies alongside other evidence in the Gospels
about the opposition Jesus faced, “authorities care(d) at all (about) what Jesus

32 Keith, Jesus against the Scribal Elite, 11. See also Michael F. Bird, “Jesus as Lawbreaker,”
in Who Do My Opponents Say That / Am? An Investigation o f the Accusations against Jesus (ed.
Scot McKnight and Joseph B. Modica; LNTS 327; London: T&T Clark, 2008) 3-26, here 16-24.
33 Keith, Jesus against the Scribal Elite, 148. For similar thoughts here, see Zeba Crook,
“Honor, Shame, and Social Status Revisited,” ,/BZ, 128 (2009) 591-611. here 601-2.
 72 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 80, 2018

thought or did” because o f genuine concern about the growth o f a movement

surrounding a man perceived to be a radical and a lawbreaker.
The perception o f Jesus as a danger is probable when we reconsider his
reputation as a “friend o f tax collectors and sinners.” This phrase, which certainly
arose as an accusation and not a self-description, has often been trivialized by
interpreters who thought that the offense was about Jesus associating with common
people: “the dregs” o f society, or the “people o f the land.”34 E. R Sanders success­
fully showed that such reconstructions often caricature Jesus’ contemporaries in
order to make Jesus stand out as one who uniquely and offensively extended God’s
grace beyond its former limits.35 Sanders was also right that the offense was
probably not purity either: socializing with the unclean. In the L X X , dpaptaAoi
refers not to “commoners” or “impure ones” but “the wicked” (Cpyttn),36 that is, those
who willfully violated G od’s law and abandoned the covenant. It is probably the
same here. Jesus was accused o f fraternizing with “the wicked.”37
The offense, however, is still not clear. Sanders recognized that “no one would
have objected if Jesus persuaded tax collectors to leave the ranks o f the wicked:
everybody else would have benefited.”38 That is true. But Sanders’s own proposal,
which stemmed from this correct insight, is not convincing and has fallen under
heavy scrutiny.39 Sanders’s claim was that people objected because Jesus essentially
declared that these sinners were sinners no more on account o f their allegiance to

34 E.g., Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology: The Proclamation o f Jesus (trans. John
Bowden; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971) 112. To be fair to Jeremias, however, he fully
understood that “sinners” meant those who “failed to keep the Law” (see p. 111). See, more recently,
N. T. Wright, Christian Origins and the Question o f God, vol. 2, Jesus and the Victory o f God (Min­
neapolis: Fortress, 1996) 264-68; Craig Blomberg, “The Authenticity and Significance of Jesus’
Table Fellowship with Sinners,” in Key Events in the Life o f the Historical Jesus: A Collaborative
Exploration o f Context and Coherence (ed. Darrell L. Bock and Robert L. Webb; WUNT 247;
Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009) 215-50, here 243-44 (“the notorious riff-raff of this world” and
“outcasts of society”).
j5 See Jeremias, Proclamation o f Jesus, 2 (“his message of God’s love for sinners . . . was so
offensive to the majority of his contemporaries that it cannot be derived from the thinking current
in his environment”); Saunders, Jesus in the Gospels, 206-8; Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the
Teaching o f Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967) 97; Riches, Transformation o f Judaism, 99,
108.
36 Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 177-78.
j7 Ibid., 179. Cf. Hultgren, Jesus and His Adversaries, 111; John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew:
Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 2, Mentor, Message, and Miracles (ABRL; New York: Double­
day. 1994) 149, 211-12; Greg Carey, Sinners: Jesus and His Earliest Followers (Waco, TX: Baylor
University Press, 2009) 7; LaCocque, Jesus the Central Jew, 153-54.
38 E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure o f Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993) 236.
39 Cf. Dale C. Allison Jr., “Jesus and the Covenant: A Response to E. P. Sanders,” JSNT 29
(1987) 57-78, here 71; Bruce D. Chilton, “Jesus and the Repentance of E. P. Sanders,” TvnBul 39
(1988) 1-18; Keener, Historical Jesus o f the Gospels, 44-45; Crossley, Jesus and the Chaos o f His­
tory, 106-11.
 THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE LAW 73

him. That is, Jesus did not require them to adhere to the normal patterns of
repentance, including visiting the temple.40As is the norm with scholarship on this
question, Sanders went immediately for Jesus’ intentions. The offense was, one
could say, Jesus’ “theology of sinners”—a theology that, Sanders assumed, all
parties involved knew full well.
I agree with Sanders that the charge of “sinners” is serious and is a fair
description of Jesus’ association with people assumed to have abandoned the
covenant.41 But it is not clear why Jesus’ view of these sinners is as important as
Sanders and most other researchers on this question have thought. It is reasonable
to conclude that Jesus, like John, had issued a call for nationwide repentance in
view of the coming end.42 In light of this, it is natural to see those who hearkened
to him as the firstfruits of the ingathering of the exiles and a fulfillment of prophetic
expectation that the end would see the conversion of the wicked to God.43 He may
even have sought out “the wicked” for that reason. Mark 2:17, if substantially
historical, would capture this well (“I have come not to call the righteous but
sinners”), as would his calling of “fishers of men” (Mark 1:16-20 parr.) and
statements concerning “the lost” (Matt 10:6; 15:24; Luke 15:4-9, 24, 32; 19:10).
But I doubt that we can know much more about Jesus’ “view” of sinners beyond
this. The evidence leaves room only for guessing. Given the rest of what we know
about Jesus’ high ethical standards, it would make sense that he expected these
“sinners” to now live righteous lives. But we do not know how, at that point, he
assessed them, nor do we know anything of their subsequent progress.44 In any
case, our knowledge of Jesus’ view here, or our lack of it, is really beside the point,
because there is no reason that Jesus’ opponents should see matters from his
perspective. It is evident that, from the outside, they saw people who failed to
conform to God’s law, regardless of their verbal claims, personal allegiances, or

40 For an attempt to salvage some of Sanders’s key insights (which, to my mind, still struggles
to make sense of Mark 1:40-44. as well as Matt 5:23-25), see Tobias Hagerland, “Jesus and the Rites
of Repentance,'"NTS 52 (2006) 166-87.
41 James D. G. Dunn is right to note the polemical nature of the language, but he overplays it
as rhetoric alone and does not overturn Sanders’s fundamental insight here ("Pharisees, Sinners, and
Jesus,” in The Historical Jesus in Recent Research [ed. James D. G. Dunn and Scot McKnight;
Sources for Biblical and Theological Study 10; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005] 463-89, here
475-82). Note, e.g., Mark 2:15-17 parr, (“sinners” used by evangelists and Jesus); Luke 7:31-34
(“this generation”).
42 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 498-500; Casey, Jesus o f Nazareth, 282-84.
4j See Rau and Petersen, Perspektiven des Lebens Jesu, 51 (on Jesus’ outreach to sinners for
“die Sammlung des Gottesvolkes”).
44 One thinks of Oscar Wilde’s prose-poem, “The Doer of Good,” in The Poetical Works o f
Oscar Wilde (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1913)298-99, in which Jesus comes upon four people
he had formerly healed (the leper, a blind man, Mary Magdalene, and Lazarus). The leper had
become a reveler, the blind man had become lustful, Mary had become a lawbreaker, and Laza­
rus now despairs of life. This raises an interesting historical question.
 74 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 80,2018

even prior temple activities. And that is enough. They were “sinners.” We should
note that the concern here about Jesus would be real. If Jesus’ call to repentance,
in the minds of these opponents, “did not actually work very well in practice,” his
association with them could easily be taken as aiding and abetting sin (see Lev
19:17; 1 Cor 5:11 ).45 He would indeed be, from this perspective, a “friend of
sinners.” Opposing him is understandable. Interestingly, Luke preserves a striking
irony here that highlights the issue: the evangelist presents the opponents of Jesus
as self-righteous elitists (7:39; 10:29; 14:7; 16:14), all while maintaining a clear
redactional tendency to stress that Jesus’ followers really were moved to changed
lives.46 Concern that these repentant “sinners” did not remain as they were before
is natural and probably motivated some to oppose Jesus.47
In my view, the offense of Jesus was not just that he held a radical theological
opinion about “sinners and tax collectors” in the kingdom. Not only do I doubt that
we can know what he thought in such detail about the matter, I am not sure why
we must assume his opponents did either, or why they would care. We know
enough to say that, aside from what Jesus thought or intended, those opposed to
him saw that he found a welcome audience among some who had a shaky com­
mitment to God’s covenant with Israel. He had been successful in recruiting their
likes to his cause. We have here perspectival responses to social realities, not
merely debates about theological ideas.
It is this kind of reputation, I submit, that makes intelligible attacks on Jesus’
character and background. Jesus was likely called a “eunuch” (cf. Matt 19:12)48
and a false prophet (cf. nkavato in John 7:12, 25-27, 40 and Deut 13:6),49 maybe

43 Quotation from Crossley, Jesus and the Chaos o f History, 110. Crossley’s own view is
tainted by a narrow identification of “sinners” with “the rich” (e.g., “the very people representative
of the economic injustices in [say] Galilee”). More plausible is the recent argument of Mark A.
Powell, “Jesus and the Pathetic Wicked: Revisiting Sanders’s View of Jesus’ Friendship with Sin­
ners,” Journal fo r the Study o f the Historical Jesus 13 (2015) 188-208.
46 Luke 3:10-14 (in the preaching of the Baptist); 5:32 (he adds eic; perdvoiav to Mark 2:17’s
“I have not come to call the righteous but sinners”); 15:7 (unique to Luke); 18:9-14 (unique to Luke);
19:1-10 (unique to Luke). Consider how different the parable of the Prodigal Son would be if the
father had traveled to embrace the wayward son while still “in dissolute living.” See also John 5:14
(“Do not continue to sin, lest something worse happen to you”); 8:11 (“go and sin no more”).
47 It seems likely that, if Jesus uttered something like the parable of the weeds (Matt 13:24-30)
or the parable of the dragnet (Matt 13:47-50), it was in response to precisely such concerns. The
point is that the final judgment will sort out the good from the bad—such is not his responsibility.
48 See Josef Blinzler, “Eisin eunouchoi: Zur Auslegung von Mt 19.12,” ZNW 48 (1957) 254-
70; Dale C. Allison Jr., Jesus o f Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998) 182-
84.
49 Graham N. Stanton, “Jesus of Nazareth: A Magician and a False Prophet Who Deceived
God’s People?,” in Jesus o f Nazareth, Lord and Christ: Essays on the Historical Jesus and New
Testament Christology (ed. Joel B. Green and Max Turner; Grand Rapids: Eerdinans, 1994) 164-80.
 THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE LAW 75

an “illegitimate child” (John 8:41; 9:29).50 We do not know if Pharisees or scribes

were involved in such ad hominem attacks. Some Pharisees or scribes probably
were involved in the accusation that Jesus cast out demons “by the prince of
demons” (Mark 3:22-30; Q 11:15-23).51 This is a remarkable accusation that must
tell us something about the interpretive perspective of those challenging Jesus, for
there was nothing inherently objectionable about healing or exorcising (as Jesus
points out in context).52 They view the exorcisms in the worst possible light. It is
evident that, although these accusations were perhaps spoken directly to Jesus,
they were intended for others to hear and take note of.53 Their illocutionary force
is “stay away from Jesus.”54
What made Jesus worth attacking and calling names in this manner? We can
presume it was not because these opponents were evil and blinded by hate. And it
probably was not because Jesus himself was just that interesting. The tradition
makes the most sense if we apply Augustine’s hermeneutic of charity: there seems
to have been some concern about the impact Jesus was having on fellow Galileans.
It is worth noting that all of the controversy stories in the Gospels, as responses to
Jesus’ activities, presuppose a certain stage of his ministry when he had already
called disciples and begun to amass some public reputation. That is important
because it means “Jesus,” to these opponents, was not a solitary individual who
happened to hold some challengeable opinions about the Torah; rather, he was the
head of some recognizable movement. There is a social dynamic to these conflicts.
In addition to these insights, we should note that hearing some of Jesus’
sayings about discipleship and other topics could have easily bolstered his negative,
transgressive reputation among some audiences.55 Important to remember here is
that not everything Jesus said about the law should be regarded as his public
teaching about the law. As mentioned above, the Gospels preserve a complex

50 See Bruce D. Chilton, “Jesus, le mamzer (Mt 1.18),’’N TS46 (2001)22-27; Scot McKnight,
“Calling Jesus Mamzer," Journal fo r the Study o f the Historical Jesus 1 (2003) 73-103.
31 Jesus’ question “By whom do your sons cast them out?” (Q 11:19; my italics) would be an
odd thing to ask the crowd or some anonymous objector.
32 See Graham H. Twelftree, In the Name o f Jesus: Exorcism among Early Christians (Grand
Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007) 35-54; Justin Meggitt, “The Historical Jesus and Healing: Jesus’
Miracles in Psychosocial Context,” in Spiritual Healing: Scientific and Religious Perspectives (ed.
Fraser Watts; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 17-43, here 20-22.
53 That is, they are forms of deviant labeling. See here Bruce J. Malina and Jerome H. Neyrey,
Calling Jesus Names: The Social Value o f Labels in Matthew (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge. 1998).
54 Dwight D. Sheets, “Jesus as Demon Possessed,” in Who Do My Opponents Say That I Am?,
27-49, here 33: "The function of the [Beelzebul] accusation was to bring about the eradication of
Jesus.”
55 This is the reputation that we must presuppose if we conclude that Matt 5:17 (“Do not think
1 have come to abolish the law . . . ”) goes back to Jesus, since it responds to an implicit or explicit
criticism.
 76 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 80,2018

mixture of material that touches on the law as Jesus encountered various audiences
in various contexts. Jesus did not place the same demands on all.
It is noteworthy, then, that a pattern emerges in our sources. What were
potentially Jesus’ most offensive or radical statements about the law—or at least
have been so read throughout the history of interpretation—were probably said to
disciples. To whom did Jesus say, “Let the dead bury their own dead” (Q 9:60)?
The Gospels tell us: a potential disciple.56 Jesus does not intend to establish a
universal rule of behavior for how one’s parents should be treated after death. This
is important because, if it were a general rule, this saying could be taken as a
violation of the fifth commandment to honor one’s father and mother, especially
in light of the importance of burial piety in Second Temple Judaism.57 The same
could be said of the imperative to “hate father and mother” (Q 14:26; cf. Gos.
Thom. 55, 101). This statement clearly inverts the fifth commandment to “honor
your father and mother” (Exod 20:12; Deut 5:16: tlp a tov Ttatepa aou Kai tr)v
pr|Tepa aou), which must have been rhetorically intentional.58 But, again, it is quite
unlikely that this was intended as general ethical advice for the public. The topic
concerns the breaking up of families and thus naturally has to do with Jesus’ call
for some to forsake all and follow him.59 Jesus himself had apparently shunned his
own family in favor of a new “Active kinship group,” which was controversial (cf.,
e.g., Mark 3:34-35). Those who had adhered to him became his “brother and sister
and mother.” It is also possible that Jesus’ prohibition of divorce (which Moses
allowed; see Deut 24:1-4; Jer 3:8) was directed to those who followed him:
“Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her”
(Mark 10:11-12). Jesus had both men and women in tow (see Mark 15:40-41; Luke
8:1-3) who may have left their families to do so. Thus, the temptation to divorce
a former spouse and marry another could have been real.60

56 This is widely recognized; see, e.g., Martin Hengel, The Charismatic Leader and His Fol­
lowers (trans. James Greig; New York: Crossroad, 1981) 4 n. 4, 73; Keener, Historical Jesus o f the
Gospels, 205-6; Mario Cifrak, ‘“Lass die Toten ihre Toten begraben’ (Q 9,60): Das Motiv der
Zogerung in der Nachfolge Jesu,” Anton 87 (2012) 11-24.
57 Attempts to show that Jesus here does not violate the law may be correct. See Markus
Bockmuehl, Jewish Law in Gentile Churches: Halakhah and the Beginning o f Christian Public
Ethics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000) 23-48; C. T. Fletcher-Louis, ‘“ Leave the Dead to Bury Their
Own Dead’: Q 9.60 and the Redefinition of the People of God,” JSNT 26 (2003) 39-68. Yet it is
clear that that judgment requires us to see things from Jesus’ perspective: for example, he evokes
nazirite devotion to God (so Bockmuehl’s tentative suggestion), or he regarded those outside his
group as “spiritually dead” and not entitled to proper treatment under the law (so Fletcher-Louis).
58 See Peter Balia, “Did Jesus Break the Fifth (Fourth) Commandment?,” in Handbook fo r
the Study o f the Historical Jesus (ed. Holmen and Porter), 4:2973-3022, here 2969-71.
59 See C. Heil, “Was ist ‘Nachfolge Jesu’? Antworten von Q, Matthaus, Lukas— und Jesus,”
BK 54 (1999) 80-84; Michael Lattke, “The Call to Discipleship and Proselytizing,” HTR 92 (1999)
359-62.
60 For this idea, see Allison, “Problem of Audience,” 43-44.
 THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE LAW 77

Not one of these claims is novel, but in other discussions the question of
interest to critics is again Jesus’ intentions. What was Jesus’ view of the law? How
did he square this radical statement with that conservative statement? These are
important lines of inquiry, to be sure. We should assume that Jesus knew what he
was doing, and it is highly unlikely that he was intentionally violating/superseding
the law.61 It is just as important, however, to consider how such sayings and their
corresponding activities could have been perceived by others, and particularly by
outsiders who may not have had Jesus’ full perspective on the topic at hand (which,
of course, we do not either).62 This is a matter over which Jesus would not have
control. It should not surprise that some accused Jesus of being a “drunkard and a
glutton.” The line is straight from Deuteronomy 21, with revealing subtext:
If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother,
who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall
take hold of him [VZ'Dm] and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that
place. They shall say to the elders of his town, “This son of ours is stubborn and
rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard [N3D1 V?1T].” Then all
the men of the town shall stone him to death. (Deut 21:18-21)

This is a serious charge, on a par with the accusation of being a “friend of tax
collectors and sinners.”63 As a “glutton and drunkard,” Jesus is a “rebellious son”
and a breaker of the fifth commandment. The claim is that he violates the law of
Moses. The accusation does not square with Jesus’ own intentions (presumably),
but it is a readily understandable way to make sense of what we have discussed.

V. Parallels
This situation, if accurate, would present rather striking parallels with the
ministry of Paul. Paul, like Jesus, was “soundbiteable.” In Romans, Paul had to
respond to accusations that he was an antinomian preacher and had said some
radical things about grace (Rom 3:8, 31; 6:1; see also Acts 21:20-21). As critics

61 For a few good ideas, see Merklein, Jesu Botschaft, 93-130; Moo, “Jesus and the Authority
of the Mosaic Law,” 3-49.
62 It could have increased suspicion about Jesus if it was known—and it seems likely it was—
that Jesus reserved special teaching for his closest followers. See Andre Gagne, “Sectarianism,
Secret Teaching, and Self-Definition—Relational Features between Jesus, the Disciples, and the
Outsiders,” in Jesus in Continuum (ed. Tom Holmen; WUNT 289; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012)
223-42. John 18:19-21 (“I have spoken openly to the world . . . 1 have said nothing in secret”) is
surely, like John 12:27, a reaction against earlier tradition about Jesus (e.g., Mark 4:10-12,22; Luke
10:21-22; 12:2-3).
63 See Howard Clark Kee, “Jesus: A Glutton and Drunkard,” in Authenticating the Words o f
Jesus (ed. Brace Chilton and Craig A. Evans; NTTS 28; Leiden: Brill, 2002) 311-32, here 329;
Joseph B. Modica, “Jesus as Glutton and Drunkard,” in Who Do My Opponents Say That I Am?,
50-75.
 78 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 80,2018

have recognized, some of these misrepresentations sound a lot like some of Paul’s
own one-liners in Galatians and even elsewhere in Romans.64 The claims make
sense. It is likely that Jesus had to face a similar problem. The risk of mis­
representation may even have been greater for Jesus when it came to certain issues,
since he left nothing in writing and everything known about him was passed around
by word of mouth. Notice what we have considered so far: “let the dead bury the
dead,” “hate your father and mother,” “whoever divorces his wife and marries
another commits adultery.” These are not well-crafted positions on pressing legal
issues (while they may have stemmed from such). They are soundbites that can be
taken in drastically different directions depending on the context into which one
places them. The original context, we must assume, is not only opaque to us who
read the Gospels now but also for those who were not followers of Jesus, since all
of these were probably instruction for disciples. Consider, in addition, the following:
• “the Law and the Prophets were proclaimed/prophesied until John” (Luke
16:16; Matt 11:13)
• “there is nothing outside of a person going into him that is able to defile
him, but the things which come out from a person are the things that defile
the person” (Mark 7:15)
• “Sabbath was made on account of the man, not the man on account of the
Sabbath” (Mark 2:27)
• “tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you
(chief priests and scribes) do” (Matt 21:32)
These sayings are similar in that a slight variation here, a minor difference in
context there, could create a totally new meaning.65 In fact, that is exactly what
has happened in the Gospels. The evangelists disagree on what to make of the
sayings, each molding the words to correspond to his own vision of Jesus’ person
and task. For instance, Matthew placed Q 16:16 in an eschatological context so as
to clarify that John the Baptist is Elijah who is to come, whereas Luke had it express
the uniqueness of the kingdom message to oppose the Pharisees. Mark understood
7:15 to mean that Jesus “declared all foods clean,” whereas Matthew took it to be
far less dramatic and still within the hand washing and purity concerns that began
the conflict (Matt 15:11).66 Critics have typically diagnosed these differences as a

64 See Isaac J. Canales, “Paul’s Accusers in Romans 3:8 and 6:1,” EvQ 57 (1985) 237-45;
F. Stanley Jones, "Freiheit" in den Briefen des Apostels Paulus: Eine historische, exegetische und
religionsgeschichtliche Studie (GTA 34; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck& Ruprecht, 1987) 111, 116-17.
65 For an insightful reflection on this hermeneutical issue, see David E. Aune, “Oral Tradition
and the Aphorisms of Jesus,” in Jesus, Gospel Tradition and Paul in the Context o f Jewish and
Greco-Roman Antiquity (WUNT 303; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013) 256-302.
66 See Wolfgang Stegemann, “Hat Jesus die Speisegesetze der Tora aufgehoben? Zur neuesten
kontroversen Einschatzung der traditionellen Deutung des sog. ‘Reinheitslogions’ von Mk 7,15,”
in Jesus— Gestalt und Gestaltungen: Rezeptionen des Galilaers in Wissenschaft, Kirche und
 THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE LAW 79

problem67 and have regarded our struggle to get at the ipsissima verba Jesu as a
barrier to historical reconstruction. On one level that is true, if one’s interests are
solely the intentions of Jesus. To my mind we have little hope of knowing what
Jesus actually meant by several of these sayings, if they even go back to him. But,
on another level, our inability to know exactly what Jesus said, and then what he
may have meant, probably tells us something important about the ministry of Jesus.
For the plight cannot be unique to us. The difficulty probably characterized the
reception of such sayings from the beginning.68
There is another parallel with Paul that has to do with opposition. Paul was a
controversial figure in his time not because he was the only one casting grace into
a sea of legalism but because he was having success among the gentiles by not
requiring them to adopt the sign of Abraham’s covenant—circumcision—and
other distinctive markers of Jewish identity. Paul was controversial, then, because
the expansion of his ministry was thought to entail the spread of an anti-Torah
message. On the Torah, Paul’s views are different from Jesus’, to be sure, as their
ministerial settings and goals were literally miles apart. But opposition to Jesus
can be explained on similar grounds: in the context of a wholly inner-Jewish
dispute, some could view the spread of Jesus’ message as a challenge to the
authority of the Torah. The Gospels, of course, have framed opposition to Jesus in
a highly negative manner. The Pharisees even scheme his death (Mark 3:6). The
evangelists think they know the motives of those opposed to Jesus, which are not
noble (e.g., Mark 2:6-7; 3:5 [moptbaa trjc; Kapfitai; auturv]; 8:11 [7ietpa(ovTec;];
12:13 [aurov aypeuacoaiv A.6yq>]; 15:10 [cpOovoc; of the chief priests]). Here the
evangelists may mislead us. But if we put the controversies into the narrative
advanced here, there is nothing inherently suspicious about Galilean sages seeking
ways to oppose Jesus publicly.69 Sanders wrote, “We can hardly imagine the

Gesellschaft. Festschrift fu r Gerd Theifien zum 70. Geburtstag (ed. Petra von Gemiinden, David G.
Horrell, and Max Kiichler; SUNT 100; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013) 29-50.
67 So, e.g., Meier, Law and Love, 9.
68 Although Dunn focused on Jesus’ views of the law in Jesus Remembered, he did pen these
sentences concerning purity (p. 576): “Jesus’ teaching was heard differently. Some heard Jesus as
not content to debate issues of purity solely at the level of ritual but pressing home the concerns
behind such law and halakhoth to the more fundamental level of purity of motive and intention.
Others heard Jesus, when the teaching was rehearsed within wider circles of discipleship, as validat­
ing or commending a more radical conclusion, to the effect that Israel’s purity law no longer applied
to the followers of Jesus.”
69 This is true especially if some thought it a duty to guard ancestral traditions, as seems
presupposed in Phil 3:6 and Gal 1:13-15 (and perhaps Philo Spec. 2.253, though the group identified
here is not clear). It seems dubious to deny that Pharisees had interests in instructing common
people (4QpNah 3.5-8; Josephus A.J. 13.10.6 §§297-98; 18.1.3 §15), which is not the same as say­
ing they “controlled” Judaism or were necessarily esteemed by the people (which Sanders protests).
See Martin Hengel and Roland Deines, “E.P. Sanders’ ‘Common Judaism,’ Jesus, and the Phari­
sees,” JTS 46 (1995) 1-70.
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Pharisees policing Galilee to see whether or not an otherwise upright man ate with
sinners.”70 That is a rhetorically powerful statement that is, on further thought,
tendentious. The scenes in the Gospels are indeed highly stylized, and Jesus’
opponents are one-dimensional. But that is hardly the end of the matter. Many
Pharisees, we may presume, cared for the law and treasured the covenant, and there
is no reason to think they would agree with Sanders’s perception of Jesus as “an
otherwise upright man.” Could not one see it as God’s good work to oppose a man
who had broken up families, fraternized with “the wicked,” and presumably said
other offensive things about the Torah?

VI. Conclusion
The basic claim of this essay is straightforward: if indeed Jesus was engaged
in harsh legal disputes with the sages of his day and was the victim of various
criticisms and ad hominem attacks (which is likely), then there must have been
some reason that Jesus was worth paying attention to and taking the effort to
oppose. As it is unlikely that his own views of the law were offensive enough to
merit that kind of response, it is more plausible that one aspect of his public
reputation is to blame—the reputation that he was a radical in regard to the law
and that an alarming number of people were sympathizing with him. To my mind
this hypothesis not only makes the best sense of the content that has been preserved
in the Gospels, but it also accounts for the form of Jesus’ teaching on the law that
was a consequence of his itinerant ministry.
There is something striking about this conclusion, if it is near the truth: it
suggests a plot line of the ministry that sounds a lot like the old Lives of Jesus. It
was more or less a truism of nineteenth-century historical criticism that Jesus’
ministry progressed from early successes to growing opposition, and that the sages
challenged Jesus publicly because they saw him as a libertine who was leading the
people astray (noting his popularity). A similar narrative starts to emerge from my
analysis as well. We cannot, of course, like the nineteenth-century critics, stand
inside this development and chart it in detail. But we can look at outcomes and
work backwards to probable cause, as do historians with the crucifixion of Jesus
and many other issues in the study of Christian origins.

70 Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 178; see also 265. He is followed by Meier, Law and Love,
274-75. On Pharisees in the Galilee, see Sean Freyne, Galilee, from Alexander the Great to Hadrian
323 B.C.E. to 135 C.E.: A Study o f Second Temple Judaism (University of Notre Dame Center for
the Study of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity 5; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1980) 305-34; Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 306-8; James F. Strange, “Archaeology and the
Pharisees,” in In Quest o f the Historical Pharisees (ed. Neusner and Chilton), 237-54; Bradley W.
Root, First Century Galilee: A Fresh Examination o f the Sources (WUNT 378; Tubingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2014) 64, 81.
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