Jesus's Legal Theory: Textualism vs. Purposivism
The Gospels portray Jesus as hyper-focused on legal text, skeptical of oral tradition, and inclined toward strictness.
“NO VEHICLES IN THE PARK.”
Imagine for a moment that you’re a local park superintendent. It’s your responsibility to ensure park rules are followed, and you very much want to fulfill this responsibility. Of course, you also know that park rules have a deeper purpose: they’re designed to keep the park beautiful, to ensure parkgoers feel welcome and safe and can relax and recreate.
One of the rules you’re charged with enforcing is this one, emblazoned on a park sign: NO VEHICLES IN THE PARK. Five simple words. It seems straightforward, right? But in concrete situations, questions multiply quickly.
Does the rule forbid bicycles? Skateboards?
What about wheelchairs and baby strollers?
Remote-controlled toy cars? Drones?
Suppose there’s a medical emergency and an ambulance needs to access the park.
A dad in a minivan wants to drop off a bunch of kids and soccer equipment—can he enter temporarily so the kids don’t have to schlep their gear?
City officials want to mount a decommissioned tank on a park pedestal as war memorial—is this allowed?
Every one of these situations involves a “vehicle” of some sort “in the park,” which is literally forbidden by the rule. And yet, in view of the rule’s purpose—a welcoming and safe park environment—some of these situations not only seem fine but actually further the rule’s purpose. Wheelchairs and strollers ensure old and young alike can enjoy the park with ease. Bicycles are quiet and promote recreation and exercise. The mounted tank is immobile and provides a focal point for gatherings and civic pride. The ambulance of course should be allowed—it’s necessary for safety, even if the siren and flashing lights temporarily diminish the quiet environment.
Is it possible to accommodate these situations while staying faithful to the rule?
As the superintendent, you didn’t make the rule. You only interpret and enforce it. So you have two basic options. You can be a textualist or you can be a purposivist.
The textualist approach is to interpret and enforce the rule according to its terms—its text.
The rule says no vehicles, and it means no vehicles. It’s dangerous to give people (especially government officials) too much interpretive discretion. If they can ignore the plain text in favor of the rule’s unexpressed “intent” or “purpose,” there’s no limit to the creative liberties they’ll take. They’ll craft exceptions that swallow the rule. They’ll adopt interpretations that further their own preferences and favor certain interest groups. If you as the superintendent are a cyclist, you’ll interpret the rule to permit bicycles but prohibit skateboards. This is an arbitrary distinction at war with the rule’s text, and it will only breed resentment—the very opposite of the community harmony the rule aims to promote. If the law doesn’t govern everyone equally, people will lose respect for it, and they’ll see lawmaking and law enforcement as exercises of power rather than principle.
Still, under a textualist approach, the tank memorial is okay because once immobilized on a pedestal, the tank isn’t a “vehicle” anymore. And the ambulance should be allowed—not because it’s not a “vehicle” (it clearly is), but because the need to preserve life overrides the no-vehicles rule.
The purposivist approach recognizes that all rules are purposive.
Law is tied to life, and you can’t interpret a rule without understanding the human activities the rule is designed to foster or restrict. Interpretation requires understanding the intent of the lawmaker and the purpose of law so these can be faithfully carried out. Sometimes this will mean the rule’s literal text must yield to its deeper purpose. After all, language is limited—it can’t possibly account for every shade of meaning or every possible application. But this doesn’t mean interpretation is untethered and free-wheeling. Rather, the lawmaker is presumed to be reasonable and to have intended reasonable results, and the task of the interpreter is case-by-case discernment to bring those results to fruition, avoiding absurdity and injustice.
We can distinguish between different kinds of vehicles, for example, by their recreational benefits and safety risks: so maybe bicycles are okay, but drones are not. Skateboards should be confined to a particular area. The tank memorial presents no safety risks at all. Ambulances are allowed because they promote safety. And so forth. Elaborating these sub-rules may start to look like you’re making rather than interpreting law, but that’s unavoidable and, indeed, desirable.
Sometimes these different interpretive approaches get mapped onto another distinction—that between strictness and leniency. On this mapping, textualism is considered strict, rigid, and inhumane, while purposivism is considered lenient, flexible, and compassionate.
But this isn’t necessarily so. A textualist ban on bicycles in the park might seem harsh toward cyclists. But if pedestrians enjoy the park as a vehicle-free zone, allowing fast-moving bicycles in the park under a purposive approach necessarily increases the risk of harmful collisions. Sometimes, strictness protects and leniency harms. In some situations, strict adherence to the legal text is more compassionate and humane.
So what was Jesus—a textualist or a purposivist?
For that question to make sense, we have to do some retrofitting. Textualism and purposivism are modern legal categories, with particular resonance in the United States in light of our written Constitution and strong traditions of separation of powers and judicial review. We can’t just backward-project our contemporary questions onto ancient Scripture.
But the text-purpose divide shows up in other cultures with written legal codes, and it has close analogues in Second Temple Jewish debates.
First, there was a contrast between written Law and oral tradition.
The Sadducees—the aristocratic Temple sect—refused to go beyond the written Torah, rejecting anything not written and tending toward a literal interpretation of the text. They denied the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the dead, and even angelic beings. As Acts 23:9 informs us, “[T]he Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit, but the Pharisees acknowledge them all.” It’s fair to say the Sadducees were committed textualists.
The Pharisees—the popular holiness sect—“acknowledge[d] them all” because they recognized the authority of both text and oral tradition. That oral tradition, they claimed, originated with Moses and was passed down to successive generations: “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly” (Pirkei Avot 1:1.) This oral Torah, alongside the written one, was normative for Jewish life.
The Pharisees affirmed the resurrection of the dead because that doctrine, while not explicit in the Torah, was an oral tradition transmitted from Moses and mediated through the Prophets. Thus do we find Paul (a self-identified Pharisee) claiming in Acts 24:14-15, “I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the Law and written in the Prophets, having a hope in God, which these men themselves accept, that there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust.”
The second contemporary analogue was a contrast between strictness and leniency.
This isn’t the same as the text vs. tradition dichotomy. The Sadducees had lenient textual readings; the Pharisees had strict traditional readings; and among the Pharisees themselves, different schools tended toward either strictness or leniency. In the Second Temple period, the most famous divide was that between the stricter House of Shammai and the more flexible House of Hillel. These two rabbinic sages, older contemporaries of Jesus, are the subject of a famous tale:
There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand…. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” (Shabbat 31a (some punctuation added).)
Shammai’s view is that you can’t appreciate the Law, much less fulfill its requirements, unless you understand it in all of its complex detail through a long process of study. Trying to reduce the Law to a soundbite is foolish, and for that, Shammai nearly beats the man with a rod!
For Hillel, by contrast, all that complexity has a discernible moral purpose or telos—“neighborliness.” The Law takes time to learn, but Hillel is willing to be patient: offer the big picture first, fill in the details later. He converts the man, then bids him study.
Text vs. tradition, strictness vs. leniency. It’s within this Second Temple matrix that we need to understand Jesus’s interpretive approach.
Jesus was not a purposivist.
If you put the question to Christians—laity, pastors, scholars, etc.—most will say Jesus was a purposivist, not a textualist. He was a compassionate, “spirit of the Law” guy. He went “beyond” or “behind” the Law to effectuate its purpose. He set the letter of the Law aside or ignored it for the sake of a “higher” ethic of love or grace. He cared more about the big picture, less about details—people over rules, relationships over “religion,” etc.
This view is wrong for several reasons.
First, it wrongly presumes that the Law was not loving or graceful, that love and grace must be established in contrast to or over against the Law.
But that’s a false dichotomy. As my last essays have laid out, the grace of God inheres in the Sinai covenant, and genuine heartfelt love of God and neighbor is explicitly commanded. These aren’t invisible or latent purposes “behind” the Law—they are the Law. Jews then and now understood grace and love in light of the Law, not in spite of it. The Sermon on the Mount shows that Jesus did, too.
Second, this view conflates purposivism with harm-reduction and compassion.
But there’s no necessary relationship between these. Jesus was indeed compassionate, but that doesn’t mean he was a purposivist. Often his compassion led him toward strictness. That brings us to the third point.
Casting Jesus as a purposivist is wrong, above all, because it ignores the evidence.
The Gospels portray Jesus as hyper-focused on the text of Scripture and the explicit requirements of the Torah. His most consistent critique of the Pharisees is not that they’re too strict, but that they’re too lenient because they privilege oral traditions over written requirements and allow implied rules to trump explicit ones. Jesus is closer to a modern-day textualist than most Christians appreciate—and in ways that modern readers should find jarring.
In the next essay, I’ll fill out this last point, with a focus on three legal discourses in the Gospels:
Matthew 22:23-33: A debate with the Sadducees over resurrection, in which Jesus creatively deploys a Sadducean interpretive method—hyper-literal textualism—to affirm a theological tenet of the Pharisees.
Mark 7:5-13: A debate with the Pharisees over the relationship between written Law and oral tradition, in which Jesus takes the view that that explicit rules trump implied ones.
Matthew 19:3-9: A debate with the Pharisees over the permissible grounds for divorce, where Jesus uses what we might call an “originalist” interpretive method to resolve an intertextual conflict.