Restoring the Jewishness of the Gospel by David H. Stern Ph. D

Author:David H. Stern, Ph. D. [Stern, David H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Messianic Jewish Communications

4. New Covenant Laws and Practices

In fact, the New Testament does not leave us entirely in the dark on the question of what is the New Covenant halakhah. On the contrary, the New Testament actually states a number of diney-torah (specific judgments as to how to apply the Torah) or halakhot (applications of Law), and these are generally arrived at by thoroughly rabbinic ways of thinking. Here are five examples:

a. John 7:22-23

In this passage Yeshua presents a din-torah that the mitzvah of healing takes precedence over that of refraining from work on Shabbat. In making this decision as to which of two conflicting laws holds in a particular situation, he was doing much the same thing as did the rabbis who developed the Oral Torah. In fact, Yeshua referred in this passage to a well-known such decision which can be found in the Talmud, tractate Shabbat, pages 128aff.

The rabbis were confronted with the conflict between the law against working on Shabbat and the commandment that a man should circumcise his son on the eighth day of his life. The conflict arises from the fact that cutting and carrying the tools needed to perform a b’rit-milah through a public domain are kinds of work forbidden by the rabbis on Shabbat. They decided that if the eighth day falls on Shabbat, one does the necessary work and circumcises the boy; but if the circumcision must take place after the eighth day, say, for health reasons, it may not be done on Shabbat in violation of the work prohibitions; one waits till a weekday.

Yeshua in defending his ruling used what Judaism calls a kal v’homer (“light and heavy”) argument, known in philosophy as reasoning a fortiori (“from greater strength”). Its essence is the expressed or implied phrase “how much more…!” John 7:23 says, in effect, “You permit breaking Shabbat in order to observe the mitzvah of circumcision; how much more important it is to heal a person’s whole body, so you should permit breaking Shabbat for that too!”

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