Rabbinic Judaism and classical Protestantism had this in common -- they both held a high view of their sacred Scriptures, and they both aspired to be a religion of the book.

Not so with Jesus and first century Christianity!

Jesus was certainly well enough versed in Scripture to meet Bible-quoting Rabbis on their own ground. In these cases he used Scripture with great creativity and originality, especially to show that the spirit of Scripture must take precedent over the legal requirements of the written text. For example, mercy must take precedence over sacrificial requirements, human need must come before Sabbath regulations and love of neighbor has to be seen as the whole point of the Law and the Prophets. In some cases, Jesus did not hesitate to say that some laws or actions of the ancient Scriptures were inappropriate - such as "an eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth" justice, or acts of destroying people's lives - which says much as to what he believed to be those laws' origins.

There were four aspects of Jesus' public ministry which put him completely at odds with Judaism's religion of the Book:

1. As a sage and story-teller, Jesus did not take his point of departure by using a text of Scripture. In his core sayings and parables, the Scripture is conspicuous by its absence.

2. The province where he spent most of his public life and drew most of his support was in Galilee. This was a region noted for its more cavalier or lax attitude toward the religious traditions of Judaism. The crowd who followed Jesus, for instance, was declared to be under a curse because they were ignorant of the Torah or holy Scripture. (See John 7:49 ) There is no evidence that Jesus assumed the role of a Bible teacher to remedy their Scriptural deficiency. It is significant that the only people he chided for their ignorance and misuse of Scripture were the orthodox elite who knew it and were submitted to it in every minute detail.

3. Jesus did not write anything, nor did he instruct his apostles to write down what he said or did. There is nothing in the New Testament that indicates the New Testament or any book of sorts documenting his life and teachings was part of Jesus' vision, so consequently we are left without a single eye-witness to his history. This man had a profound antipathy toward a religion of the Book.

4. Jesus was continually challenged, "By what authority do you say this or do that". He never answered by appealing to the authority of the Bible or the Torah. He laid no claim to a prophetic vision nor to any kind of special revelation. But did Jesus claim authority, any kind of authority at all, even implicitly? Would it not be closer to the truth to say that what makes Jesus immeasurably greater than any other man is precisely the fact that he spoke and acted without authority - that is, without the authority of a written creed or faith - and in fact he regarded "the exercise of authority" as a pagan characteristic (Mark 10:42 Parr)

I can find no evidence that Jesus ever expected his audience to rely upon any authority at all - either his own or that of others. Unlike the scribes, he never appealed to the authority of the Rabbinic traditions, nor even the authority of Scripture itself. He never expounded the truth by interpreting or commenting upon the sacred texts we now call the Old Testament. His perception and teaching of the truth was direct and unmediated. He did not even lay claim to the authority of a prophet, the authority which comes directly from God. Unlike the prophets he did not appeal to a special prophetic calling or to a vision in order to authenticate his words. He never used the classical prophetic introduction, 'Thus says The Lord ...' And he refused to produce any kind of sign from heaven to prove that he could speak in the name of God. In the end, when he was faced direly with the question of what authority he might have, he refused to answer the question (Mark 11:33 Parr). People were expected to see the truth of what he was doing and saying without relying upon any authority at all. Linnemann, in her brilliant study of Jesus' parables, concludes that "the only thing that could give weight to the words of Jesus were the words themselves".

Jesus was unique among the men of his time in his ability to overcome all forms of authority-thinking. The only authority which Jesus might be said to have appealed to, was the authority of the truth itself. He did not make authority his truth, he made truth his authority. And in so far as the authority of God can be thought of as the authority of truth, Jesus might be said to have appealed to, and to have possessed, the authority of God. But when we speak of the authority of truth (and therefore the authority of God) we are once again using the word "authority" as a metaphor. Jesus did not expect others to obey him; he expected them to 'obey' the truth, to live truthfully. Once again it would be better to speak about power here rather than authority. The power of Jesus' words was the power of truth itself. Jesus made a lasting impact on people because by avoiding all authority-thinking he released the power of truth itself which is the power of God and indeed the power of faith. He never said He would set people free, he never said faith would set people free, he never said a written creed would set people free, he never said his salvation would set people free - he said the truth will set us free.

Paul uses three Greek words which are related to Jewish Scripture - the only Scripture then in existence for either Jew or Christian.

The first is the word nomos, translated as law. This meant the Jewish Torah. In its narrower sense, the Torah meant the five books of Moses. But in the broader sense it meant the entire corpus of Jewish Scripture. (See John 15:24 and Galatians 3:21-23; 4: 21-30 for examples of how Law and Scripture are used interchangeably.)

The second word Paul uses is gramma It is generally translated as written code. A more exact translation would be written text. In Romans 7 Paul uses nomos and gramma ( law and written text ) to mean the same thing. That is to say, living by the written text is living under the law.

The third word is graphe. It means writing or Scripture. In one place in the New Testament gramma is translated as Scripture, and in many other places the verbal form of gramma refers to what is written in holy Scripture.

The point is that all three words ~ law, written text and Scripture -- are closely related and are used interchangeably. This may seem a very simple, even obvious point, but in the entire Christian tradition the radical implications of this point have been completely passed over. The Protestant tradition especially, with its great veneration of the Bible as the rule of life, is completely contrary to Paul, and thus indirectly to Jesus.

When Paul declares that believers in the gospel of Christ are not obligated to live by the law or the written text of the Jewish Torah, he means that they are not obligated to live by the Scriptures as a rule of life. For sure, Paul could appeal to the Scripture as a witness to Christ and as something that has been fulfilled by Christ. He could call it holy Scripture, just as he could declare that the law was "holy, just and good." Law or Scripture was an agent or child-minder put in charge until the coming of Christ (Galatians 3:21-25). But whether Paul talks in terms of the law, the written text, or Scripture, he is adamant that the Christian does not live by these things as a rule of life. Now that the Law of God is revealed in its fulness through Christ, there is no more need for the child-minder of the Law (scripture, whatever one chooses to call it).

Consequently one can read through all of Paul's letters to the young churches, and never once does he rebuke them for neglecting to live by the Scriptures, nor does he exhort them to a more diligent study of it. He lists many of their faults - in one letter a list of about twenty-two and in another about eighteen - but any suggestion of their failure to live up to the instructions of holy Scripture is never mentioned. The reason ought to be obvious. Paul did not believe in living according to the written text of a book, but by faith in the living Christ and the leading of the Spirit. (See Galatians 2:19~20; 3: 21-25; 5:18)

How could a devout Jew such as Paul, and a Pharisee at that, ever come to take the radical position that living in faithful obedience to the written text was no longer appropriate? How could he dare to say that living by the Torah or holy Scripture was like a woman living under a tyrant husband (Romans 7), or like being kept in the servitude of a childminder or even a jailer? (Galatians 3: 21-24)

So how, we ask again, did Paul start relating to the Bible so differently? What made him change his mind? It is not enough to say that the change was brought about by his new found faith because his opponents in the Jerusalem church were believers in that faith too. We will miss an important point here if we rush to the superficial answer that he was taught this law-free gospel by revelation, and that was all there was to it.

I suggest that Paul was led to change his view of Scripture just as other Christians have been dragged kicking and screaming to change their view of Scripture. How did Christians get rid of their Flat Earth world-view? Not by more Bible reading, surely! Luther chided Copernicus as "that big fool " for saying that the earth went around the sun. He scornfully dismissed the great man on the authority of the Bible which said that Jesus commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth. How come that eventually all Christians came to side with Copernicus rather than Luther on the matter of the new cosmology? They simply adjusted their interpretation of Scripture to meet the historical reality of the new facts.

Or take the matter of the age of the earth. For 90% of its history, the church has believed in a very young earth. Until the age of Darwin - another big fool in the estimation of most churchmen of his day and some even today who choose to deny truth - it was orthodoxy to believe in a world that was about six thousand years old. Most Christians now, in this age of the Hubble telescope, have come to terms with an enormously expanded concept of space and time. They take a 'day' as described in Genesis as being the same duration as a 'day' referred to the New Testament regarding to the 'day of salvation' - an era and not a 24-hour period; and why wouldn't they? It is the same word used on both occasions. Did Christians come to this new position by studying the Bible? You'd have to be joking! Rather, they were overtaken by the march of history which compelled them to interpret the Bible differently.

For nearly two millennia the church used the Bible to legitimise religious intolerance, the institution of slavery, and the deprivation of all kinds of human rights, especially the rights of women. As late as the first half of this century the Popes were still denouncing the right of freedom for the individual conscience as a pestilent error because it allowed everyone to go to hell in his own way. Less than two hundred years ago, churchmen were still waving the Bible around in support of slavery. Doesn't even the Ten Commandments say to let slaves have a Sabbath rest? Not emancipation, just a day of rest! Doesn't Paul instruct slaves to obey their masters, and masters to treat their slaves kindly? As for women, the New Testament seems clear enough. "I do not allow a woman to teach." "Let women be silent in the church, and if they have any questions, let them ask their husbands at home."

There are not many Christian dinosaurs left who want to live by the letter of holy Scripture on any of the above points. What caused Christians to start discovering religious tolerance, a case for abolishing the institution of slavery or equal rights for woman in the Bible? Obviously these new ways of reading the Bible were forced upon the church by the march of history. The old views had simply become incompatible with a more enlightened human consciousness which grew out of the historical process. Change was not brought about by new revelations coming from the Bible. It was simply a matter of historical reality and truth forcing Christians to interpret their Bibles in a way that was more compatible with an age of scientific and social progress.

And so it was with Paul too. Even before he became a Christian, the gospel had been making significant inroads among the Gentiles. According to Acts 10, Gentile believers received the witness of the Spirit without becoming converts to the Jewish Torah. These new historical events demonstrated to Paul that God made no distinction between people on the basis of whether or not they kept the Law. These people had no knowledge of Scripture yet God did not hold this against them. So he adjusted his interpretation of Scripture to comport with historical reality. Some of his Jerusalem brethren were slower to sense this new direction of history, and some of them never did accept the law-free gospel going to the Gentiles.

Besides finding a few things in the Old Testament which would have legitimised the new situation - such as the story of Abraham believing God and being counted righteous before he was circumcised - Paul found things in his own Rabbinic tradition to legitimise the new situation. To start with, the best Rabbinic tradition said that Gentiles were not required to become Jews and keep the Law in order to share in the life of the world to come. This tradition said that if they lived by the general revelation given in the Noachian commandments, God would accept them.

Further, there was a Rabbinic teaching which said that those who died were no longer under the Law. So Paul argues in Romans 7 that believers have been mystically united to Christ's death and are therefore no longer under the Law. And finally, there was a tradition among some Rabbis which said that the Law would be superseded in the new age of the Messiah. So Paul could reason that the Law was in place only until the coming of the Messiah, and now that he has come "we are no longer under the supervision of the Law." (See Galatians 3:19-25)

Yet the impact of the new historical developments in the world cannot fully explain Paul's passion for a law-free Gospel, nor the vehemence with which he defends it. To appreciate this we have to look at Paul's own personal history. This is what lay behind his great antipathy to life under the authority of the written text of the Torah. As Paul presents it, his very dedication and zeal for the Law turned him into a persecutor of innocent people. As he describes the situation in Romans 7, the Law had such complete dominion over him, that he could not see that anything was sin unless he could read it in the written text, and he could not see that anything was good unless that too was spelled out to him in the Book. The good that in his inmost soul he aspired to do he did not do, and the evil which he hated he did in spite of himself. Like every pious Jew, he aspired to have the Law/scriptures clothe him as with a robe of honour, but instead he was forced to lament that it clung to him like a wretched, stinking corpse.

Paul was not arguing that the Law was an ass, but that it deceived him and made him into a religious ass who went on a rampage causing havoc and harm to innocent people. Paul did not discover what evil was by an even more scrupulous attention to the Book of rules, but by confronting a superior society and a new kind of humanity which could even forgive and accept him in spite of his crimes against the risen one and his people.

The worst evils are not committed by those who say, "An evil force made me do it", but by those who like Paul the persecutor say, "God made me do it". "The Bible made me do it." "The Law made me do it." "I was just carrying out orders from above." That's what all the men at Nuremberg said before they were hung. And what did good John Calvin say when he burned Severtus at the stake for denying the Trinity? "The Bible made me do it." What was Luther's excuse for his disgraceful conduct with Zwinglius over the Lord's Supper? "The Bible made me do it." What reason did that Jehovah's Witness' father give for letting his daughter die for want of a blood transfusions "The Bible made me do it." The pages of history are stained with the inhumanities, persecutions, injustices and just plain follies of Christians trying to live by the Bible.

The classical Protestant doctrine of "the second use of the Law" (meaning that the Law's function is to point out sin) is a complete fallacy. It is based on an interpretation of Romans 7:6 and Galatians 3:24 which has nothing to do with the real historical context. As for the classical doctrine of the so called "third use of the Law", ( meaning the Law is a rule of life) that is what Paul's opponents were teaching among his converts at Galatia. Damn you Judaisers, he wrote in letters of fire. Damn your living by the rules of the Torah. Damn your keeping holy days. Damn your circumcision. I hope you put your sharp knives to better use and lop it all off! That was the gist of his protest.

In short, Paul was vehemently against living under the Law/scriptures. He was against the ethics of a written text. He wouldn't have a bar of a rule-book religion. If we don't understand this we haven't even gotten into the vestibule of Paul's house of thought. As for Christians making a new Law out the things Paul wrote in one-off letters, that would have to be the ultimate betrayal of the man and the most appalling use of his writings. It would be like turning Adam Smith's libertarian economics into a socialist text book in the academy of Karl Marx.

The so called Gospel of John (author/authors unknown) was written about the end of the first century AD. It is generally recognized as the most anti-Jewish document in the New Testament. It reflects the complete break which had recently been made between the synagogue and the church. Up until the disastrous war with the Romans in 70 AD, a conflict which resulted in the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, the Jewish wing of the church had continued to participate in Jewish life and worship. The Nazarenes, as they were generally called, for the most part lived amicably with their fellow Jews. After all, the Nazarenes were just one of many Jewish sects which were tolerated within Judaism.

After the destruction of the temple, this relatively relaxed attitude toward divergence from orthodoxy began to change. When the national identity was threatened by the dissolution of the temple cult, the nation felt that it could not afford the luxury of division. It seemed too that Judaism had lost almost everything which held it together and gave it a sense of identity except its sacred Scripture. At this time of crisis, Rabbinic Judaism, emphasizing a religion of the Book, assumed the ascendancy.

On the other hand, the church was teaching that the Book had found its true meaning and fulfillment in Christ. For the church, Torah had taken a very subordinate position to him. This caused a growing tension with Rabbinic Judaism. Eventually, round about 88 AD., the Jewish Christians were expelled from the synagogues. That was the situation which formed the back-drop to the Fourth Gospel.

The Book of Jubilees, written way back in the second century BC, had declared that the Torah was the agent by which God created the world. Torah was also said to be the light which lights every man coming into the world. So too a lot of other teaching within Judaism likened the Torah or Scripture to the bread and the water which had miraculously sustained Israel in the wilderness for forty years. The Torah was lauded with such titles as the good Shepherd and Light of the world. All this was re-emphasised by Rabbinic Judaism in the post-70 AD era.

The Fourth Gospel takes up Judaism's expressions of praise for the Torah, and systematically applies them all to Christ. He, and not the Bible, is the Word of God. He, and not the Torah, is the agent through which God created the world. He, and not the Torah, is the true Light which lights every man coming into the world. He is the true Bread from heaven which gives eternal life. He, and not the Book, is the Light of the world, the Water of everlasting life, good Shepherd and everything else claimed for the Torah.

The Fourth Gospel accuses Rabbinic Judaism of searching the Scriptures in the mistaken belief that in them they find eternal life. (John 5:39) Life, according to this Gospel, is found in a Person, not in a Book. So too, the revelation of God takes place in the flesh of a living Person and not in a Book. Only the son of God can make the Father known, and whoever sees the son sees the invisible God. A book plays no part in the revelation of who God is. That is the theology of "John".

The Fourth Gospel is a sharper and more sustained refutation of the religion of the Book than Paul's. Without a shadow of doubt, the church at the close of the first century was not advocating a religion of a Book. The church in this era had no New Testament to replace the Old, nor did it see a need to have one. The widely scattered groups had at best only small pieces of what later became the New Testament, and some of them had none of what was included in the Canon three centuries later.

How did the Christian Church, especially in the Protestant version of sola scriptura, manage to do a full circle back to Judaism's religion of the book? What led it to develop a Christian "Torah" in the place of the Jewish one, and thereby substitute a new tyranny in the place of the old one?

In political revolutions there is a natural tendency for today's liberator's to become tomorrow's oppressors. Each revolution inevitably evolves into a new establishment. Such is the case with religion and The Church. The protesting sect that was thrown out of the Rom,an Catholic Church to form the Protestant movement became an established church which now lives to defend its own orthodoxy against any new sect. So what happened to the original Christian movement is nothing new. Even Chairman Mao searched for a key to an on-going revolution which eluded the other Communist regimes.

What we want to do in this section is to understand the dynamics at work in the subtle substitution of religion in the place of revelation, of Torah in the place of the living Word, and salvation via a system instead of salvation by faith.

(a) The Failure of Tradition

In his book, The Meaning and End of Religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out that no great spiritual leader founded a religion or preached one. On the contrary, he says, "they severely criticized or attacked the religious environment in which they found themselves." (p. 128) For example, "Zarathushta did not preach a religion. The only religious traditions and practices that he knew he attacked, with an ardor born of his vivid faith." (Ibid. p. 88.)

Zarathushtra, Buddha and Jesus did not believe that ultimate truth can be adequately expressed in the mundane form of a written text. Theirs was a new and dynamic vision, a personalised encounter with something or Someone ultimate and transcendent. Their charismatic insight, conviction and faith moved others to follow in their footsteps. In each case a movement was born. Wanting to cherish the insight and faith of their prophet, the followers would begin the process of gathering the memories of the teaching, and embarking on a process of conceptualizing, systematizing, creedalising and institutionalising their particular spiritual tradition.

To the Hebrews, this written out teaching or instruction is what they called Torah. (Torah literally means teaching or instruction.) Its force is somewhat diminished when translated into the Greek word nomos, and then further diminished when translated again into the English word law. So when we read the word Law in our English New Testaments, we need to be aware that it means religious teaching, and not just the rules of that teaching but the stories as well. (See Galatians 4 as a good example of how Law includes not just rules but stories too.)

The Torah - the written text of the religious tradition - is at best a witness to the living Word, but at worst it becomes a substitute for it. Devotion to a religious tradition or the document containing that tradition has a tendency to take the place of the living encounter which gave birth to the tradition in the first place.

The New Testament, of course, proclaims that salvation comes by faith in Christ rather than by doing the works of the Torah. The new community of faith soon became altogether too confident that they could tell the difference between faith in Christ and devotion to a Torah. They could not see that they were developing a Christian Torah to replace the Jewish one. Faith was too easily substituted for the faith, that is, the Christian teaching or instruction. Salvation by faith in Christ came to mean salvation by making all the right noises about Christ. Hence the endless disputes and Church Councils defining ever more precisely the person of Christ, his nature(s), his position in the Trinity, what religious texts were God-inspired etc. All this became another Torah to live by and another religion to follow as a means of salvation.

Take as another example, the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. Being acceptable to God in spite of his being unacceptable came to Luther with the power and conviction of a mighty personal revelation. The spirit of his faith attracted a following and spawned a movement. His insight into the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith alone was systematised, creedalised, sloganised and institutionalised. This created a Lutheran Torah. Then it became all too easy to put faithful adherence to this teaching in the room of the original spirit of faith.

As W.C. Smith puts it, "Some even talk of being saved by Christianity, instead of by the only thing that could possibly save us, the anguish and love of God ... A Christian who takes God seriously must surely recognise that God does not give a fig for Christianity ... God does not reveal religion; he reveals himself ... faith ... is concerned with something, or someone, that far transcends anything that be denominated a religion". (Ibid, 127-8)

A minister recalls encountering a clergyman who was deeply committed to the Westminster Confession of faith. He confided to the minister that he was experiencing considerable angst keeping his congregation straying from the Confession, including practical matters such as the role of women in the church. He was amazed by the minister's suggestion that living under the rigid rule of Westminster Torah was no different in principle to living under any Torah, including the Jewish one.

(b) The Failure of Written Text

It appears that the early church understood Paul and the Fourth Gospel's break with the Law only on a very superficial level. In the climate of anti-Semitism which deeply infected the church, it became all too easy to think that it was the Jewish character of the Law which made it an instrument of bondage. Early church fathers such as Ignatius, Justin and Irenaeus railed against any "Judaising" Christians who were still disposed to live according to Jewish ways. On the authority of St. Paul, life "under the law" was said to be cursed, presumably because it was Jewish. But at the same time these church fathers saw nothing wrong is subjecting their communities to the rigid rule of new Christian laws. Whilst they derided the observances of the Jewish calendar, they imposed the most stringent observances in respect of the Christian calendar. The hair-splitting doctrines of the church became more oppressive than the Rabbinic stipulations about right living.

Christianity failed and continues to fail to understand Paul's critique of life "under the law." He did not break with his old existence because it was Jewish. That part to him remained "holy, just and good" The deficiency of the law, according to Paul, lay in its form as "written text." (See Romans 7 and 2 Corinthians 3 ) No written text can give life, says Paul, not even if it is written by the super apostles in Jerusalem! Not even if it is written with God's own finger like the Ten Commandments! And we might add, not even if there was a verbally inspired Bible! ( John 5:39) The real new testament, declares Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, cannot be written in ink. It can only be written by the spirit of God in people.

That which is laid out in a written text is laid out like a corpse. It may have the form of the truth just as a corpse has the form of a person. This may sound like a harsh judgment, but what it is intended to show is that the written text is an inadequate vehicle for the spirit of God. It should never be equated with God's Word which the New Testament says is "spirit and life."

Human life too transcends any written code. Millions of laws are enacted, revised, updated and redrafted through the legislative bodies of the world. The task is never done because it is not possible to create a system of law which does justice to the infinite variety of human situations. There will always come a time when carrying out the written code will lead to the neglect or abuse of the neighbour; there will always be a situation when blind obedience to what is written will be without human sensitivity and compassion, even (or especially) when it is God's law. As an old wisdom saying puts it, "Law is for the guidance of the wise and for the blind obedience of fools."

Spirit is always greater than letter. In his epic Chesapeake, James Michener tells the story of how a little Quaker woman was the first to raise her voice against the institution of slavery in the United States. Churchmen tried to silence her with Biblical proof-texts in support of slavery. "Won't you agree," they argued with her, "that you contradict St. Paul. She frankly acknowledged that she did, but said that slavery was clearly contrary to the spirit of the Nazarene Teacher. In the Christian culture of her day, it took a lot of courage and conviction to place spirit in opposition to the written text.

If living by the law proves inadequate even in civil life where the rule of law is pre-eminently suited, it is even more inadequate in the spiritual life. The regime of a Torah will make a person religious but it cannot make a person spiritual. Perhaps the only domain where the law is suited for having absolute jurisdiction is in playing games or on the sports field. No game is possible without rules, and being victor or victim according to the arbitrary rules is the nature of the game.

I can't resist making a comment on literary research, especially the Jesus research. Some of the scholars working in this field are big on what have been called "the rules of the road," that is, the scholarly methodology. They work to a kind of literary Torah to identify the authentic sayings of Jesus. But there are times when the best laws of literary criticism break down too and can even get in the way of getting to the historical Jesus.

Take as an example the Matthean passage which has Jesus say, "You are petros [meaning rock], and upon this rock I will build my church." The old Protestant argument about two different rocks in this statement, a petros masculine rock and a petra (feminine) rock, is literary nonsense because of course the first word rock had to be masculine because it was the name of a man. The statement is just a neat literary play on words. But the Catholic use of this Scripture flies in the face of the whole spirit of this son of man whose entire life and teaching was against any hierarchal orders of superiors and inferiors. The very idea of Jesus designating a chief apostle among the rest is a total misfit and flies in the face of everything He taught. So if one is to dig in the cave of history for the authentic Jesus, let him use the best tools available in literary and historical criticism, but let him also understand that most of all the cave needs to be illuminated with the candle of Jesus' spirit.

If, therefore, the human spirit transcends the confines of any written code, and if not even God can make a law which is adequate for every human situation, then how can mere Scripture encompass the spirit and life of God's Word?