Trying to catch up on the reading on the One Year Bible plan: I’m
two days behind. That’s a point where it’s easy enough to catch up but
another day or so becomes hard to catch up. The whole point of this for
me is not to read the Bible in bursts or even to get through the whole
thing in a year, but to develop the lifestyle habit of daily scripture
reading.
I’m in Exodus 30 now and the Lord is giving Moses a list
of very specific laws. In 30:17, he specifies how Aaron and the
priestly caste must wash their feet everytime they come into the
Tabernacle and gives the what else: “or they will die!” Then God makes
the law firm: “This is a permanent law for Aaron and his descendants,
to be observed from generation to generation.”
I’m reading a special One Year Bible,
where all of the daily readings are grouped together. There’s not too
much commentary and I tend to skip it but the editors did feel the need
to address the laws of the Old Testament head on and asked in one
sidebar “Do we need to follow these laws today?” The answer was yes and
no: “The moral law is still to be followed… The ceremonial laws no
longer need to be followed because of the final sacrifice for since has
been made by Jesus.”
God very clearly says in Exodus that the
laws he’s giving are permanent. I don’t really read much wiggle room in
there. Priests need to wash their feet… and kill a certain number of
lamb every year… and splatter the sacrificial blood around the alter a certain
way and… I know Jesus is the new law, etc., but still it’s kind of
funny how literal-interpretation Christians will shrug off a direct and
permanent order from God. It seems obvious that the religious
traditions in the Bible differ greatly, as do the modern lens we bring
to them and the two centuries of shifting Christian practices we’ve
brought to them.
Does anyone happen to know if there’s any religious group still trying to follow the details of the Mosaic Law? I wonder close do certain Orthodox Jewish groups get?
Why do “literal-interpretation Christians … shrug off a direct and permanent order from God”? The answer is that they are Gentiles, not Jews, and the Gentile-Christian relationship to the laws of Moses is literally dealt with in three places in the New Testament.
First, it is addressed in Acts 10:9 – 11:18. Here God uses a metaphor in a dream to declare to Peter that Gentiles are acceptable in the Church as Gentiles, without converting to Judaism. Peter figures out the meaning of the metaphor only belatedly.
Second, it is addressed in Acts 15:1 – 29. Here we are told how a general controversy arose in the early Church as to whether Gentile Christians should be made subject to the laws of Moses. And we are told the details of a discernment by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem, under the explicit guidance of the Holy Spirit, that Gentile Christians, unlike Jewish Christians, need only be subject to the laws given to Noah.
Third, it is addressed in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, who were struggling again with this same question. Paul’s answer was that we are saved, not by performing the works of the law of Moses, but by faith in Christ Jesus. This is more sweeping than the formula in Acts; it releases Jewish Christians as well as Gentile Christians from observance of the law, so long as their faith in Christ continues. (But it also carries an explicit expectation that the faith will bear fruit in good works.) This teaching explains why, for most of Christian history, Jews who converted to Christianity ceased to obey Mosaic law.
“Messianic Jews”, who are modern Jews who have accepted Christ as the Messiah, are self-conscious as Jews, not Gentiles, and so, ignoring Paul’s position in his letter to the Galatians, as well as Paul’s statement that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, they continue to obey the laws of Moses.
And yes, the Orthodox Jews, including the Hasidim, try to obey those Mosaic laws in every little detail. Washing their feet every time they come into the Tabernacle of Meeting, however, is not a concern, since the Tabernacle of Meeting ceased to exist in the time of Solomon, when it was replaced by the Temple, and the Temple has not been rebuilt since its destruction by the Romans.
Thanks Marshall, I didn’t realize that Acts 15 specifically divided up which Old Testament laws were still in force. Seems funny that Christians talk about the Ten Commandments and get so worked up about what Leviticus says about homosexuality. Maybe it will make more sense as I keep reading.
And just in case it’s not blindingly obvious to readers: whatever Bible literacy I have comes from isolated passages read in various bible study groups. Part of the reason I’m trying to stay the course with the One Year plan is so I’ll have a bit more context.
Hi, Martin! Nice to hear back from you!
To clear up a possible misunderstanding: Acts 15 didn’t do a dividing; it reaffirmed what was already present in the Old Testament. The rules laid out for Gentile Christians in Acts 15:29 duplicate those laid out in Genesis 3 (no following other guides than God; no sexual immorality) and Genesis 9:4 – 6 (no murder, and no eating flesh with the life-blood still in it). These were all rules incumbent on Noah, his clan, and their heirs — which meant, on all subsequent Gentiles as well as on all Jews. But there was never any hint anywhere in the Old Testament that the Mosaic law was meant to apply to non-Jews. Observance of the Mosaic law, in fact, was portrayed as something that separated Jews from non-Jews — and it is significant that the word the O.T. used for “separate” also meant “set apart”, or “consecrated”, or (by extension) “holy”.
The so-called Ten Commandments are considered exceptional because they are not observances of Mosaic law, but general moral strictures, statements of what is absolutely right and what is absolutely wrong. We might note that while they are ten in number in Exodus 20:3 – 17 and Deteronomy 5:7 – 21, they are twelve in number in Exodus 34:14 – 26, and they also appear in incomplete, or perhaps summary form at Leviticus 19:3 – 4,1 – 13, Psalm 15:3 – 5, and Hosea 4:2. This suggests to modern scholars that the ancient Hebrew/Jewish tradition actually handled them in a different way from the Mosaic code — perhaps making them into lists for little children to recite.
In Exodus, another key difference between the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic law is that the Commandments are spoken to all the people, not just to Moses. This is consistent with the idea, in Jeremiah 31:31 – 34, that the days are coming when God will write his law directly in everyone’s hearts, and no one will need his neighbor to teach him. The Commandments, then, were conceived not as tribal observances from Moses, but as implicit universals.
Thus it should not be all that surprising that the early Christians regarded them as in a somewhat different category from observances of the law. They were not a means by which Jews were set apart, but universals joining Jews and Gentiles in a common path of righteousness.
Yet even so, the Ten were not originally conceived as a formula that Christians all need to recite and honor. Paul asserted that all the interpersonal commandments are subsumed in the single injunction to “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Romans 13:9 – 10). Matthew and Luke recorded that Jesus affirmed much the same (Matthew 22:35 – 40; Luke 10:25 – 28). From this point of view, one could forget about the Ten and focus on the faith, hope and charity that bear the good fruits.
What’s happened is that there has been a gradual increase in the emphasis on the Ten Commandments as Christian history has progressed. Augustine popularized their use in the catechesis. Calvin, a man obsessed with laws and criminal punishments, honored them as a “whip” to the “stubborn ass of the flesh”. I believe we can thank Augustine and Calvin for much of the current passion for erecting copies of the tablets on courthouse lawns, posting the Commandments in classrooms, and the like.
As for the concern about homosexuality, it links to the fact that sexual immorality is one of the prohibitions of the Noachic Code, incumbent on Gentile Christians as well as on Jews (Acts 15:29 again). The Bible doesn’t proscribe homosexual activity only in Leviticus; Paul repeats the proscription in Romans 1:27, I Corinthians 6:9, and I Timothy 1:10, and it is also condemned in Jude 7. The implication, to anyone conversant with the overall logic of the New Testament, is that it is condemned because it is a type of sexual immorality.
I understand your interest in gaining more Bible-literacy. But I must confess to being a skeptic of the value of One Year reading programs. So many people start out with Genesis, and founder somewhere in Leviticus or Numbers or Deuteronomy among the prohibitions and the begats! Or else they read and absorb things, but learn them out of context; they read the Mosaic law, for example, without grasping it in the counterpoint of the prophets’ critique of priestly religion.
It’s perhaps worth pondering that when the early Christians set out to teach others how to be Christians, they didn’t say, “Start with Genesis.” They began with “Christ, and him crucified”, as Paul put it: in other words, the trifold message of Divine incarnation, Divine humiliation, and Divine triumph over sin and death. From there, one’s education went on to the Jesus teachings (the “Sayings Gospel”), the Jesus story (the Gospels as we have them), and the apostolic instructions to the generations (the teachings in Acts and the epistles). The Old Testament was treasured, but more as backstory than as anything central. I think there is wisdom in such an approach.
Your friend,
Marshall
Does anyone happen to know if there’s any religious group still trying to follow the details of the Mosaic Law? I wonder close do certain Orthodox Jewish groups get?
Well, I suppose in the best tradition of Jewish observance the proper answer to a question is another question, “What do you mean by ‘still trying to follow the details of the Mosaic Law?’ ”
Of the 613 commandments derived from Torah by classical rabbinic Judaism, a large number are inactive while The Temple is in ruins. Some were only operative if one lived in The Land (depending on whose definition of The Promised Land you considered operative), others were incumbent only on persons of a particular gender, marital, or occupational status, and still others were active during particular temporal phases.
Rabbinic Judaism holds all commandments as of equal importance (hence the question of “what is the greatest commandment?” is a non-starter among Jews) and that the idea of ceremonial vs. moral law is similarly nonsensical — God’s commandments were obligatory as long as the essential components for adherence were available to a Jew yesterday or today.
Finally, it is important to remember that elders, priests, prophets, scribes, then rabbis, have been understood as having the authority to define how to define what the mitzvot are in each time and place and how one might determine if observance was or was not acceptable to God and the community.
It is interesting to note that while sacrificial laws were suspended by the destruction of The Temple, as well, technically, as those that required the existence of The Temple directly or indirectly to achieve atonement, in the 1st Century AD one of the differences between Rabbanites and other normative Jewish groups was the voluntary assumption of commandments that were originally commanded to the priesthood. So seeing what communities are “closer” to the Mosaic law is much more complex than it might at first seem.…