Matthew 5:17-18, not one jot or tittle
Contents
1. Parallel passages
1.1 Luke 16:17
Jesus having just finished presenting the parable of the shrewd manager, concludes by explaining that faithfulness is key, if a servant can be trusted in little then they can be trusted in much and that those who cannot be trusted with worldly wealth cannot be trusted with the riches of heaven (Luke 16:10-11). As Jesus continues to develop this theme by contrasting the service of God with that of Mamon, he invites sneers from some money-loving Pharisees (Luke 16:13-14), individuals whose claimed to be entrusted with God's word, but whose values were misplaced. Jesus then observes
(Luke 16:16-17 WEB)16:16 “The law and the prophets were until John. From that time the Good News of the Kingdom of God is preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it. 17 But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one tiny stroke of a pen in the law to fall.”
This is followed by a comment on the relationship between divorce and adultery, probably as a reflection upon service of Mammon being spiritual adultery, as Jesus teaching then returns to the topic of wealth.
1.2 Matthew 24:35
Whilst speaking about the apocalypse, Jesus uses a variant of Matt 5:18 to attribute the permanence of divine law to his own words, declaring “Most certainly I tell you, this generation will not pass away, until all these things are accomplished. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Matt 24:34-35 WEB).
2. Provenance of the passage
Vermes (2004, 355) notes a widespread view amongst scholars that these statements did not originate with Jesus, but were contrived by the Jewish church in Palestine to support their struggle against Paul and his gentile church. Yet, as Vermes points out (2004, 356), sayings that arose out of such a struggle were unlikely to survive unscathed through the transition to a gentile dominated church. Furthermore, the inclusion of a similar declaration of the Law’s permanence in Luke’s gentile-oriented Gospel (Luke 16:17) argues strongly against such an origin. Nor, he suggests, is it likely that a writer from such a church “would have freely invented it, and have produced a teaching which was so plainly embarrassing to their communities” (Vermes 2004, 379). Such statements, which are typical of the early Jewish exclusivity found in the church, are therefore certainly attributable to Jesus (Vermes 2004, 379).
3. The law and the prophets
On a few select occasions, such as the giving of the Ten Commandments, the word of God came directly, but more normally it was mediated through prophets. Thus, “the law and the prophets” was Judaism’s shorthand for the totality of God’s revelation through the pages of the Hebrew Bible (France 1995, 114, cf. Acts 13:15). Rabbinically-trained Paul uses it as such in his defense, “that after the Way, which they call a sect, so I serve the God of our fathers, believing all things which are according to the law, and which are written in the prophets” (Acts 24:14 WEB).
Matthew’s Gospel places the phrase “law and prophets” on Jesus’ lips three further times:
- As the focus of the Golden Rule (Matt 7:12), his variation on a classic rabbinic summary of the entire Law.
- In explaining that “all the prophets and the law prophesied until John” (Matt 11:13 WEB); Compare this with Luke 16:16 , where the parallel passage has “Law and the Prophets” (WEB).
- When confirming their basis (Matt 22:40), using two of the better known summaries of the Law from the Hebrew Bible, Deut 6:5 and Lev 19:18.
Thus wherever else Matthew portrays Jesus using the phrase “Law and the Prophets”, it appears to be in the typical manner of his peers, i.e. to represent the entire corpus of legally binding statements made by God.
4. The scope of the law that Jesus fulfilled
For Stott (2003, 71-2), the law and prophets contain three sub-sets that needed to be fulfilled: Torah, predictive prophecy and ethical precepts. However, debate has surrounded the precise scope the Law and the prophets as intended by Jesus in this passage (France 1995, 113). France, sees the argument pivoting on whether Jesus was referring to the validity of the the Hebrew Bible’s regulations, upon which the antitheses (Matt 5:21-7:12) were about to focus, or whether he was more generally affirming the Hebrew Bible without assuming its applicability to the new situation created by his coming. Vermes (2004, 406-7), seeing Jesus as “deeply convinced of the centrality and permanent validity of the Mosaic heritage” (2004, 406), argues strongly for the former. He notes that elsewhere (in Mark 10:19, Matt 19:17, Luke 18:20) Jesus claimed that “the divine gift of life in the Kingdom would depend on the fulfillment of the precepts of the Decalogue” (Vermes 2004, 407). Paradoxically, the two-source theory that Vermes espouses (2004, 219) when dealing with the Sermon on the Mount excludes the possibility (as proposed here) that Jesus delivered the Sermon as a single discourse intended to advocate proper compliance with precisely those Ten Commandments.
5. The indestructible law
From the Hebrew Bible it is not hard to build a case for the permanence of the word of God and both Jesus and his contemporaries would have been acutely aware of that. A key text in this respect is Psalm 119, a protracted meditation on God's word, for those acknowledging afresh its significance for their lives. The psalm declares “Forever, O Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens” (Psalm 119:89, ESV), then, more tellingly still, “All your words are true; all your righteous laws [מִשְׁפָּט (miš·pāṭ)] are eternal.” (Psalm 119:160, NIV). A literal translation of Ps 119:160a is “the head of your word is truth”, where head is used 'is used here of the “sum total” of God’s instructions.' (NET, footnote 199). The word מִשְׁפָּט (miš·pāṭ) refers to both legal verdicts in general and, as in Ex 21:1, to specific sections of the Mosaic law itself. The poetry of the psalm thus parallels the truth of the totality of God’s instructions with the eternal nature of all His judgements.
In Exodus 21, the phrase “These are the laws [מִשְׁפָּט (miš·pāṭ)] you are to set before them” (Ex 21:1 NIV) acts as an introductory statement to a considerable section of legislation, embodied as chapters 21-23. For example these righteous laws that God, through Psalm 119, declares to be eternal, include legislation on slavery (Ex 21:22), not worshipping other gods (Ex 23:13), the offering of sacrifices and the observation of the three major Hebrew festivals (Ex 23:14), Sabbath observance (Ex 23:12) and sabbatical years (Ex 23:10-11), not bearing false witness (Ex 23:1-2), loving your enemies (Ex 23:4-5), the offering of first-fruits (Ex 23:19), giving of the first-born on the eighth day (Ex 22:29-30), blasphemy (Ex 22:27), charging interest (Ex 22:25), not afflicting widows, orphans or foreigners (Ex 22:21-22), forbidden sexual relationships (Ex 22:16, 19), recompense for theft and damage of property (e.g. Ex 22:1,6-7), personal injury and murder (Ex 21:18-19, 22), honouring your father and mother (Ex 21:17). Much of this legislation implicitly assumes the relevance of other sections of the Mosaic Law, including various of the commandments that are central to the Sermon on the Mount. Thus, the implication of Psalm 119:160, that these regulations are eternal, depends upon that also being the case for the legislation that underpins them.
The Mosaic Law provides not only moral commandments but also the legislative basis for Israel's sacrificial system. Christian authors will make much of the role of Jesus, as a righteous branch from David, fulfilling the promise that David would never lack a man to sit on the throne of Israel, but it is perhaps not so widely known how closely that promise is tied to another, in Jeremiah, that implies the eternal continuity of the sacrificial legislation.
'17For I, the Lord, promise: “David will never lack a successor to occupy the throne over the nation of Israel. 18Nor will the Levitical priests ever lack someone to stand before me and continually offer up burnt offerings, sacrifice cereal offerings, and offer the other sacrifices. 20“I, LORD, make the following promise: ‘I have made a covenant with the day and with the night that they will always come at their proper times. Only if you people could break that covenant 21could my covenant with my servant David and my covenant with the Levites ever be broken. So David will by all means always have a descendant to occupy his throne as king and the Levites will by all means always have priests who will minister before me.'”'
(Jeremiah 33:17–21, NET)
Thus, the same divine promise that guaranteed David's successor an eternal claim to the throne of Israel also granted the Levitical priesthood an eternal claim to minister sacrifices in accord with the Levitical aspects of Mosaic Law.
If Jesus was paying heed to what God said through the Hebrew scriptures, then it he could not have been speaking about any form of cessation of the Mosaic Law without himself discarding rather more than just a jot or tittle of it. Tom Wright correctly observes, that the kingdom could hardly overrule Moses and the prophets “without the covenant God contradicting himself” (Wright 2001, 289). Thus, Jesus did not do away with the Law in the sense that it ceased to exist, and, long after Jesus resurrection, Paul could still argue against accepting circumcision on the grounds that it bound the individual to keeping the whole Mosaic law (Gal 5:3). For Paul, the law had not been destroyed, in the sense of becoming irrelevant, but he could nevertheless cite ‘the law and the Prophets’ as witnesses to the possibility of righteousness apart from the Mosaic law, a righteousness appropriated through faith in Jesus Messiah (Rom 3:21). In other words, as a result of Jesus sacrifice, the pre-existing legal framework had been harnessed to usurp itself and provide faith in Jesus as a better route to salvation (the nature of that framework and how Jesus worked within it is explored in The Emmaus View).
Jesus’ reference to destroying the law should, as Craig Keener notes (1993, 57), be understood in its Jewish context. Jewish teachers considered that by disobeying the law one rejected its authority and thereby ‘abolished’ it. Significant rebellion against the law carried strict penalties in first-century Judaism and it would have been an even worse crime to persuade others that the law was no longer in force (Keener 1993, 57). Jesus was therefore defending himself against the charge that he was disobeying the law or encouraging others to do so, or, as Vermes puts it, “the polemical edge to these sayings is due to frequent small-minded criticism voiced by narrow-minded country lawyers and leaders of village synagogues, incapable of grasping that the peculiar interpretation given by Jesus to certain commandments did not contradict, but deepened their meaning” (Vermes 2004, 407).
The Ten Commandments, and the prophetic utterances that upheld them, were direct words from God. Therefore the words of the ‘law and the prophets’ provided a dual witness to the revealed will of God. The rabbis might have spoken of disobedience abolishing the law, but as Isaiah makes quite plain, the word of God transcends the transient activities of men. ‘The voice of one who calls out, “Prepare the way of the LORD in the wilderness! Make a level highway in the desert for our God”’ (Isa 40:3 HNV) , as John the Baptist did (Matt 3:3), is followed, soon after, by
6 ‘The voice of one saying, “Cry!”
One said, “What shall I cry?”
“All flesh is like grass, and all its glory is like the flower of the field.
7 The grass withers, the flower fades, because the LORD’s breath blows on it.
Surely the people are like grass.
8 The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God stands forever.”
9 You who tell good news to Zion, go up on a high mountain.
You who tell good news to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with strength.
Lift it up. Don’t be afraid. Say to the cities of Judah, “Behold, your God!”’
(Isa 40:6-9 HNV)
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus, continuing John’s Isaiah 40-based Way-preparing agenda, went up a high mountain and raised his voice to declare good news to Zion in the form of the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-10). Then, adopting the familiar emphases of Isaiah 40, he stressed the permanence of God’s word (Matt 5:17-18) and contrasted it with the fading lilies of the field (Matt 6:28-30).
6. How did Jesus fulfil the law
Paul would later claim “Christ is the fulfillment of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom 10:4 WEB), but Christ’s claim to ‘fulfill’ (πληρόω, pleroo) the law has been widely interpreted. The Greek word pleroo has a breadth of meaning, that includes:
- To be completely filled, as when the fishermen saw their net was full (Matt 13:48) or the full number of martyrs had fallen (Rev 6:11);
- To completely finish an activity, as when Paul and Barnabas finished their journey (Acts 12:25);
- To accomplish something fully, like summing up the whole law in a single phrase (Gal 5:14);
- To do something without any omission, as in Paul fully preaching the Gospel (Rom 15:19) or to meet a requirement completely, as when Paul received the Philippians’ gift (Php 4:18) or he argued that Christians meet the full requirements of the Law (Rom 8:4).
Such is the diversity of opinion amongst commentators concerning these shades of meaning that it is worth considering them separately.
6.1 To be completely filled
In the Septuagint, the earliest use of πληρόω, pleroo, in Gen 1:22, where it carries this sense of quantitative fullness. Soon after come subsequent occurrences, as God sees the earth is full of violence (Gen 6:11) and then, as humanity starts again following the flood, when God tells Noah and his sons to “Increase and multiply and fill the earth and exercise dominion over it” (Gen 9:1b LES), i.e. to occupy all parts of the earth and to establish God's delegated rule over them.
Chrysostom saw “fulfill” as referring to drawing out and filling up the meaning of the Law, as if our picture of the Law remains incomplete until we see the part that Jesus plays within it. As regards the Torah, or revealed instruction, Stott concurs with Chrysostom’s conclusion (Stott 2003, 71-2).
6.2 To complete or bring to an end
Jesus’ final words “It is finished” (John 19:30 WEB) would seem to suggest an agenda that had some sense of finite end. However, whether he had this in mind when delivering this section of the Sermon on the Mount is uncertain. Paul would later claim “Christ is the fulfillment of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom 10:4 WEB). To express this fulfilment Paul does not use pleroo, but τέλος, telos, which caries more of an implication of finality, in the sense that Jesus was the goal of the law and with him it reached its completion.
6.3 To accomplish fully
Stott (2003, 71-2) suggests that Jesus fulfilled the requirements of the prophets by satisfying the expectations of the the extensive body of predictive prophecy and typology that related to the Messiah. Certainly, at the outset of his discipleship, John has Philip refer to the law and the prophets as shorthand for the body of material containing such Messianic predictions (John 1:45). Luke reports the resurrected Jesus referring to the law and the prophets in a similar way, when he informed his disciples “this is what I told you, while I was still with you, that all things which are written in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms, concerning me must be fulfilled.” (Luke 24:44 WEB). Jesus subsequent needed to open the disciples minds to understand how this worked, implies that the implications of fulfilling the Law and the prophets were as obvious as first-century Judaism generally might have thought.
Speaking of the completion of the exile that Jeremiah had prophesied, 2 Chronicles 36:21 LXX uses pleroo in this sense, to express that God's decree concerning the period of exile had been executed in full.
6.4 To do without any omission or to completely meet a requirement
As far as the law is concerned, failure to comply with any aspect of the law also represented a failure to meet its requirements. Jesus, having been born under the Law (Gal 4:4) was, therefore, bound by all its requirements. To be considered righteous Jesus had to keep all aspects of the law, as those who frequently tried to trip him up or catch him out were all to aware. At times he appears to deviate from his contemporaries understanding of the law, yet even then Jesus appears to be working within his own, solidly scriptural, understanding of God's legislative framework.
Stott, having identified the requirement for Jesus to obey the scriptures ethical law, concludes that Jesus fulfilled it by keeping it (Stott 2003, 71-2). Like so many others, he passes over the not insignificant issue that the ethical law was bound up with cultic and sacrificial law. Yet he could, with confidence, have pointed to Hebrews’ discussion of the relationship between the cross and the temple sacrifices (Heb 10:11-12). Jesus’ role within the priesthood of Melchizedek and the nature of the sacrifices of the day of atonement, once properly understood, hold the key to the legal efficacy of the cross.
France, rejecting absolutely the idea of that fulfill related to obedience, highlights that the usual usage of fulfill (πληρόω) in Matthew, as in the LXX, relates to ‘bringing into being that which was promised’ (France 1995, 114).
Bonhoeffer, pointing out that Jesus himself instructed others to obey the Law, suggests that Jesus intended to fulfill Israel’s divinely ordained law by keeping it (Bonhoeffer 2001, 74-6). His intention was, suggests Bonhoeffer, to become a bridge between his disciples and the requirements of the Law. Of the Law, he writes “God is the giver and its Lord, and only in personal communion with God is the Law fulfilled,” thus “Jesus, the Son of God, who alone lives in perfect communion with him, vindicates the law of the old covenant by coming to fulfil it” (Bonhoeffer 2001, 75). Thus, in following Jesus, his disciples obey the law as certainly as Jesus himself did.
Jesus not only complied with the law, but actively encouraged others to obey it. For example:
- Immediately following the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew’s Gospel presents an example of Jesus instructing a leper to obey the sacrificial Law as a testimony to the priests (Matt 8:4);
- Later in Matthew, Jesus condemns the Pharisees for focusing on the minute details of law, whilst neglecting its weightier provisions (Matt 23:23);
- In Luke, Jesus commends a lawyer for understanding the commandments, before adding that he needs to obey them (Luke 10:25-28);
- Having been asked about the legality of divorce, he points to the scripture that underlay Moses ruling (Mark 10:2-9);
- When questioned whether he pays the temple tax, he does not argue that it is no longer relevant, but that his position should provided exemption from it for both him and his disciples (Matt 17:24-28);
- Jesus confers upon his disciples the authority to bind and loose, authority which, in its original 1st Century context, was concerned with the approval or rejection of legal decisions (Matt 16:19, 18:18).
Paul’s radically different approach arises from the seismic changes that Jesus’ death wrought upon the legal scene, but it is still thoroughly grounded in the law and obedience of it.
Vermes (2004, 355-56) observes that, if Matthew’s Gospel is seen as a Palestinian Christian response to Paul’s approach to the law, then gospel suggestions that John the Baptist marked an end to the law and the prophets (Matt 5:18; Luke 16:17) appear as later glosses, whose primary aim was to diminish the force of the current passage. Personally I would prefer to interpret such passages differently, as Jesus’ observation that John and his ministry were the outcome of the legal and prophetic precedents that preceded him.
7. Not one jot or tittle
Jesus’ sense was probably that nothing of the text itself would be removed, nor would it become any less certain in its proclamation.
The KJV’s jot and tittle refer to the smallest details of the English language, where a jot is an anglicism of the Greek iota, and a tittle is the tiny dot on an i.
The Greek refers to an ἰῶτα (iota) and κεραία (keraia), where the iota was the ninth letter of the alphabet, a single upright stroke, and the keraia refers to both an apostrophe, used to distinguish numerals from letters, and to ‘little horns’, which are generally embellishments intended to assist the reading of the text, as they do in a serif font.
As the iota (ι) was the smallest Greek letter, but the law was written in Hebrew, Jesus was presumably referring to the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the Hebrew yod (י) (Keener 1993, 57). The removal of a yod was possibly of particular significance to Jesus, for, thanks to Neh 8:17, he shares the Hebrew version of his name with Joshua. Joshua had originally been called Hoshea, a name without a yod, but Moses called him Joshua (Numbers 13:16), with a yod and meaning saviour. The rabbis of later periods preserved a tradition that when God renamed Sarai,שָׂרַי, to be Sarah, שָׂרָה, (Gen 17:15), which involved removing the name's yod, Sarah then complained for generations until God inserted the yod into the name of Joshua, יְהֹושֻׁעַ (Keener 1993, 57-8). Joshua, with yod in place, led Israel into their promised land, but remove the yod and you have Hoshea again, a name now infamous for its associations with the loss of Israel (the Northern Kingdom, 2 Kings 17:6). Yod was also, at times, used as an abbreviation for the Tetragrammaton, the consonants of the divine name, of which it is was the first letter (Toy and Broyde, 2002, 57).
Where the gospel text uses the Greek keraia, it is likely that Jesus was referring to tagin, תגין, textual decorations, known as crowns, that were reserved only for use on the Torah scrolls, in other words the definitive copies of the law. The the law was not dependent upon them, however the crowns probably served as ornamental diacritical points, highlighting the differences between various similar letters (Eisenstein and Toy 2008, 666-7). This would have served to make the public proclamation of the Torah less prone to error.
The location of tagin were prescribed by a tradition known as the Sefer ha-Tagin, that, it was claimed, preserved the location of the tagin as revealed to Moses. Their scrupulous preservation was considered necessary as to deviate might mean the Law would loose its efficacy (Eisenstein and Toy 2008, 666-7). The great Rabbi Hillel claimed that "He who makes a common use of the crown [taga] of the Torah shall waste away" (Ab. iv. 7) and loose their share in the world to come.
8. All is accomplished
The passage appears in some respects to be a typical parallel poetic construct, of the type that abounds in the Hebrew Bible, each passage containing a reference to destruction, a reference to persistence and a reference to completion. Hence -
(Matt 5:17-18 WEB, format mine)
- “Don’t think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets.
- I didn’t come to destroy,
- but to fulfill.
- For most certainly, I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away,
- not even one smallest letter or one tiny pen stroke shall in any way pass away from the law,
- until all things are accomplished.”
From this it is apparent that what was to be accomplished (γίνομαι) was the fulfilment of the law and the prophets. The sense is thus that the law will stand until it brings all things into compliance with the will of God. Such a concept is entirely consistent with the perspective of the Hebrew Bible, that God’s word transcends and outlives all human wisdom (e.g. see Isa 40:7-8, Ps 119:89, 96, 160).
France notes that the word translated “accomplished” is used in connection with events (France 1995, 115) and calls attention to the occurrence of a very similar phrase in Matthew 24, where one finds “Most certainly I tell you, this generation will not pass away, until all these things are accomplished.” (Matt 24:34 WEB).
Paul points out, in Galatians, that just as the Law of Moses did not nullify the earlier covenant with Abraham, so the promise to the patriarch’s seed still held firm. Therefore, the law “was added because of transgressions, until the seed should come to whom the promise has been made” (Gal 3:19 WEB). He thus identifies the law as a device for keeping charge until the establishment of the Messianic kingdom and provides a target event for Matthew’s “accomplished”.