Updating the Torah

Background

I read a fantastic blog post called “Is God allowed to update the Torah?”. The author (Aron Wall) is responding to a comment on an earlier post. This grandparent post makes an argument that Christianity is true based on the cumulative value of eyewitness testimony of the resurrection of Jesus. The comment on this post sidesteps this line of argumentation and essentially grants the Christian claim that Jesus may have been raised from the dead. However, the comment argues, the resurrection is specious to someone who examines the claims of the New Testament through the lens of the Hebrew Bible (aka “the Old Testament”):

The resurrection is irrelevant.

God appeared to a nation and gave them 613 commandments. He said they were eternal, everlasting, binding for all generations. There is NOT ONE about worshiping God’s son or the Messiah. (Exodus 4:22 says God’s son is Israel.) There are horrifying threats for deviating from these commandments in Deuteronomy 28. The thirteenth chapter is devoted to prophets who can perform “signs and wonders” and advocate the worship of gods “whom your forefathers did not know.” Their forefathers did not worship Jesus. Deut 13 explicitly grants the possibility of miracles in false traditions and says, “Do not hearken unto that prophet.” It says nothing about surviving an execution as an exception or some big standard.

Why do Christians think the resurrection cancels/changes the Torah? According to what standard? (No, the prophets didn’t say so: https://prooftexts.wordpress.com Most of these aren’t just wrong, they’re cringe-worthy. The prophets received their authority from the 5 Books of Moses. Whatever the prophets were saying, it wasn’t to subtract from theses books and approach God via some unheard-of intermediary.)

Sabbatai Tzvi, too, was considered by many to be the Messiah. He performed signs and wonders. He had his own St. Paul (Nathan of Gaza) who interpreted his conversion to Islam as some humiliating atonement. He still has followers. So what? Miracles don’t cancel the Torah. The only reason to think otherwise is because your Bible already has a New Testament attached.

In response, Aron makes several arguments addressing the concerns in the comment.

Re. Matters of Interpretation

The original post (OP) states

First of all, your method of interpretation, which sees very few Messianic prophecies in scripture, and assumes that if there is a literal application there cannot also be a secondary symbolic application, is simply not in line with traditional Jewish rabbinic interpretation. Why can’t some passages refer to both Israel and the Messiah, for example?

Because there is no indication in the text of a dual prophecy. The plain presumption in a prophecy is a single fulfillment. I assume a Christian would object to Mormons claiming that Christian prooftexts actually have additional fulfilments in Joseph Smith. On what basis can a Christian say that Ezekiel 37 is not both a prophecy about the Book of Mormon and the reunification of Israel and Judah?

Furthermore, there are difficulties with the proposed dual fulfilments. As an example, the Gospel of Matthew famously claimed that the Messiah was prophesied to be born of a virgin birth and uses Isaiah 7:14 as a prooftext:

Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel

Setting aside the translation issues of this verse and accepting the Christian translation for the sake of argument, those who claim that this prophecy has a dual fulfillment must reconcile whether the miraculous virgin birth only occurred once or not. There would be some theological problems if Isaiah predicted a virgin birth for two different children. The Christian solutions for this issue are varied and unconvincing to me, mainly because of authorities.

I find arguing about hermeneutics nearly pointless because we have differing authorities governing our interpretations. A believing Christian accepts that Matthew has the authority to interpret Isaiah 7:14 as referring to both Jesus and a child in Ahaz’s day, and I do not. So when I read Matthew’s claim that Isaiah 7 predicts Jesus’s birth I don’t see sound exegesis or amazing prophecy, I see eisigesis.

Re. Can the Commandments Change?

God appeared to a nation and gave them 613 commandments. He said they were eternal, everlasting, binding for all generations.

In response the OP says:

… I do get that there are passages in the Torah which may seem, at first sight, to state that the laws of the Torah are eternal and immutable. (Although the precise translation of these words in the Hebrew can be tricky…)

The OP makes the argument that the Torah predicts new divine instructions, new prophets and divine revelation were accepted by Jews post-Torah, and the loss of the Ark of the Covenant necessarily means that a part of the Yom Kippur ritual can never be observed again - therefore:

So clearly, some of the commandments in the Torah can be changed.

I want to avoid quibbling about the definition of “changed” here, but I don’t agree that the historical reality of Jewish law and practice changing over time is equivalent in magnitude or principle to the Christian abolition of Shabbat, circumcision, etc. Both of these are specifically called a בְּרִית עוֹלָם (b’rit olam/eternal covenant) - why would the Torah call these signs an eternal covenant if they are actually “obsolete and growing old”?

The OP makes a point about translation difficulties surrounding the words ‘olam and ‘ad to cast doubt on the intended meaning of “eternal statutes” and cites an article containing the following curious phrase:

The simple, basic truth is that Classical Hebrew, the Hebrew of the Old Testament Scriptures, has no term that carries the concept of “eternity.” There are phrases that carry this concept, such as “without end,” but there is not a single word that carries the concept of eternity as there is in English

This claim deserves its own blog post, but it is a remarkable one for a Christian to make since these Hebrew words are used throughout Tanach to describe how God is eternal. Mormons use the exact same argumentation when denying (c"v) that God is the only eternal God.

Speaking of modifications, Jeremiah goes on to say that God will make a New Covenant with Israel, in which the Torah will be written on their hearts instead of simply in a book … Pretend for a moment that you’ve never heard of Jesus, that you are a Jew reading this passage before Christianity started. Isn’t it clear that any New Covenant, just by virtue of being New, must necessarily imply some sort of changes to the old way of doing things?

Reading Jeremiah 31 with no knowledge of Christianity would absolutely not lead me to imagine Pauline Christianity, nor the “New Covenant” described in Hebrews 8. I would take the promise on its face when it describes how it differs from the Siniatic covenant: the Torah will be inscribed on our hearts. There is simply nothing in view here describing the abrogation of the Torah or the commandments.

To be continued

This post took me longer than I wanted to write, so I’ll make a follow up to finish my thoughts. In the meantime please look at Arons blog, it’s full of interesting content.