Jesus's Legal Theory: An Introduction
Jesus taught that all of the Law had a moral dimension and all of it must be kept.
Jesus had a legal theory.
That is, Jesus had particular views on the nature, purpose, and functional domain of law, and he had an interpretive framework for analyzing, critiquing, and reforming the legal system of which he was a part.
This much is evident from the Synoptic Gospels (and to some extent, the Gospel of John), which portray Jesus as an eager participant in legal debates of his day. Sometimes it’s because a question is posed to him. Other times, he is himself posing the question, offering a critique, or inveighing against some rule or practice he regards as wrong or unjust.
That these are legal debates—and not, for example, philosophical debates—I take as a given. Second Temple Judaism, the era and thoughtworld Jesus inhabited, presumed that God had established a covenant with Israel, that the covenantal blessings entailed reciprocal obligations binding on both individuals and the nation as a whole, and that fidelity to the covenant required careful attention, interpretation, and elaboration to ensure its demands were fulfilled.1 Jesus himself conceived of Israel’s covenantal obligations as “law,” indeed as “the Law,” and that conception shaped the questions he asked and the discussions and debates in which he engaged.
But what exactly the law is and what it requires aren’t always clear. Legal rules, by their very nature, are underdetermined. They can articulate what is expected or required in general terms, but they cannot specify outcomes for every possible situation. Underdeterminacy flows from the inherent limits of human language and human foresight. Even a divinely given law like the Torah—the Five Books of Moses that undergird Jewish law—is underdetermined in this way.
So every legal system needs interpreters. It needs lawyers, judges, and anyone else willing to engage in the legal enterprise. Interpreters confront and clash over questions generated by the undeterdeterminacy of law.
What happens when two or more principles come into conflict? Which principle controls or overrides the other?
Suppose social conditions change so that a rule, or a particular application of a rule, no longer makes sense. A law made for one time and place, or one group of people, might not apply to another.
The application of a rule may be faithful to the “letter” of the law—it may be literally correct—but it produces an unforeseen, undesirable, or unjust result. What then?
What weight is to be given to precedent and tradition? What if a traditional practice or understanding conflicts with a law’s text or plain sense?
These are perennial questions common to every legal system. And they are exactly the sorts of questions Jesus wrestles and engages with in the Gospel accounts.
In concrete scenarios, these questions generate cases and controversies. The controversies are resolved through legal reasoning—the logical application of accepted (or contested) principles to the situation at hand. The resolution itself becomes part of the body of law accessible to interpreters (hence “case law”), establishing new rules that then generate yet more controversies requiring resolution. And so it goes.
To understand Jesus as a legal interpreter is not to say the Gospels’ portrayal of him precludes philosophical questions or questions of theology, ethics, virtue, politics, science, or much else besides. Jesus’s life and teachings shed light on all of these.
But I’d like to argue that the primary register of Jesus’s thought is the domain of law. Law, as expressed through the covenantal framework, is the means by which God revealed himself at Sinai. It was a primary medium through which Israel, and particularly Second Temple Jews, understood their faith. And it supplied the social and cultural milieu in which Jesus taught, debated, and discoursed. If you want to understand Jesus, you need to understand his legal theory—his approach to law in general and to Jewish law in particular.
There’s a threshold objection we need to address. Didn’t Jesus do away with the law—oppose it, bring it to an end, make it unnecessary? Didn’t he view the law as an impossible burden, a legalistic yoke to be discarded in the name of “freedom” and “grace”? The short answer is no. Emphatically no. That was not Jesus’s view. And defending that answer is no small part of this series of essays. But it suffices for now to point out that, even if that were a correct reading of Jesus’s teaching—even if his project were one of opposition to the law as such—that itself would be a legal theory. It would be philosophical framework within which Jesus approached, analyzed, and critiqued law and the legal system. One way or another, Jesus had a legal theory. The only question is, what was it?
I’d like to posit that Jesus’s legal theory can be described by the phrase Morally Fulsome Lawkeeping. Each word bears weight, and they’re best explained in reverse order.
Lawkeeping: Jesus taught that the Law must be kept. And by the Law, I mean the Torah, the written law given to Israel at Sinai and contained in the Five Books of Moses. Where I intend this narrow definition, I’ll try to use the definite article and a capital letter—“the Law”—to distinguish it from the concept of “law” more generally.
Fulsome: Jesus insisted that all the Law be kept—ethical and ritual requirements, commandments both large and small.
Morally: Jesus believed that the Law had a clear moral thrust, that even the most seemingly trivial rule had a moral component or was designed to teach a moral lesson, and that to fulfill the Law meant attending to the Law fully—to both its literal form and its moral content.
In my view, the concept of Morally Fulsome Lawkeeping best explains the legal discourse data available to us in the Gospel accounts. Even as I defend this view, however, I’ll try to be honest about its limits—especially where Jesus slips the bonds of legal argument and is operating within different paradigms altogether (prophetic, eschatological, etc.).
First, though, we need to do some ground-clearing. That’s the subject of the next essay, “Seven Misconceptions About the Law.”
See E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism 422, 427 (1977) (calling this framework “covenantal nonism,” through which both “the gift and demand of God were kept in a healthy relationship with each other”).