Jesus Christ - a most Holy Heretic

That having been said, as with any other fundamental issue of religious dogma, discord remains as
to the actual content of these 613 laws. After all, the Bible does not specify how its texts are to be judged
or weighted, and scholars are therefore still left to wonder: Are orders given by God to one particular
individual in the texts to be cross-applied to the rest of humanity? Are divine requests permanently
binding if it appears that they can only be fulfilled in one particular place &/or time? Are we to count
commandments by the verses in which they fall or by the particular prohibitions they announce
(prohibitions which are at times enunciated over several verses)? And what about the Mitzvot that still have
religious significance and yet have not been observable since the fall of the 2 nd Temple, or the commands
that only seem viable within the land of Israel, or those that only apply to Jewish priests (the Kohanim) –
or only to men – or only to women? As Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra once astutely stated: “Sages number
the 613 Mitzvot in many diverse ways … and yet in truth there is no end to their number.”
Of course, for the purpose of this treatise it really doesn't matter how many Mitzvot there were in
Jesus' time (much less how many of those rules are still applicable today). No, it is only important for us to
see how Jesus treated those laws and how he felt about them; only important to show without any
shadow of any doubt that Jesus openly confronted & intentionally amended them all. And to prove this
point, I will be examining the Gospels in light of everything Jesus did against or said about the Law
throughout his ministry 8 – first looking at the general statements he made about Old Testament
regulations, and then breaking the Mitzvot into their primary categories to show how Jesus more
specifically critiqued & thereby altered the same.
8 Let the reader NOTE that I do so primarily using the NRSV translation of the texts – of the dozens of translations I have
studied, the one I find to contain by far the most “neutral” scholarship, and thus the one by far most useful for scholarly
discourse. NOTE as well that this tome makes no additional claims – neither that its postulation is the only acceptable
one, nor that Jesus Christ actually intended to be the great reformer of Judaism that the texts show him to have been, nor
that he even existed at all in the flesh. No, this work has one aim and one aim only – namely, to show that the texts of the
biblical Gospels show Jesus to have been a thorough critic of all major facets of Judaic Law & Jewish tradition, that he
attempted to be an avid reformer of the same thereby, and thus that he would never support even a “jot or tittle” of the
many contemporary, hyper-conservative, Old Testament based views championed by many Christian evangelicals today.
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