Accommodation to the
beliefs of his hearers
The use of Scripture as a
court of appeal in controversy is undoubted, but it again suggests the
possibility that Jesus is simply taking his contemporaries on their own ground
without committing himself to the correctness of their premises. In other words,
that again we have ad hominem arguments, aimed more at discrediting his
opponents than laying foundations on which to build eternal truth. Indeed may
we not go even further, and suggest that (since his aim was the positive one of
leading his contemporaries forward from their valuable, though imperfect, Old
Testament conceptions of the character of God) he deliberately refrained from
unsettling them by questioning their conception of the inspiration of their
Scriptures, allowing the gentler processes of passing time gradually to bring home
to them the imperfect character of what they had hitherto revered?
Plausible though this is, it
seems impossible to accept it as being Christ’s real view. In other respects he
does not show himself unduly sensitive about undermining current beliefs. He is
not slow to denounce Pharisaic traditionalism; in the Sermon on the Mount, for
instance, he carefully distinguishes between the divine law and later false
deductions; on another occasion he honours the scribes and Pharisees who ‘sit
on Moses’ seat’ upholding the law of God, yet rebukes them for binding ‘heavy
burdens, hard to bear’ (Mt. 23:2-4). He is not slow to repudiate nationalist
conceptions of Messiahship. He is prepared to face the cross for defying
current misconceptions. Surely he would have been prepared to explain clearly
the mingling of divine truth and human error in the Bible, if he had known such
to exist. The notion that our Lord was fully aware that the view of Holy
Scripture current in his day was erroneous, and that he deliberately
accommodated his teaching to the beliefs of his hearers, will not square with
the facts. His use of the Old Testament seems altogether too insistent and
positive and extreme. What (according to the Gospel records) he actually says
is that the ‘scripture cannot be broken’ (Jn. 10:35); ‘Not an iota, not a dot,
will pass from the law’ (Mt. 5:18); ‘It is easier for heaven and earth to pass
away, than for one dot of the law to become void’ (Lk. 16:17). There is a
tremendous moral earnestness when he says to the Pharisees, ‘Well did Isaiah
prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “This people honours me with
their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching
as doctrines the precepts of men”. . . You have a fine way of rejecting the
commandment of God, in order to keep your tradition! ... making void the word
of God’ (Mk. 7:6-13). It is no mere debating-point that makes him say to the
Sadducees, ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the
power of God’ (Mt. 22:29). When speaking of the irretrievable separation in the
after-world, he puts into the mouth of Abraham these words, ‘They have Moses
and the prophets; let them hear them .. . If they do not hear Moses and the
prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead’
(Lk. 16:29-31). As we have already seen, when he quotes instances of the
fearful judgments of God, he does so to bring home the seriousness of
contemporary issues. (John Wenham, Christ and the Bible [The Christian
View of the Bible 1; Surrey: Eagle, 1993], 26-28)
To Support this Blog:
Email for Amazon Gift card: ScripturalMormonism@gmail.com
Email for Logos.com Gift Card: IrishLDS87@gmail.com
