We call it the New Testament. That suggests a connection with some past organisation. And the parables and teaching of Jesus had that novel quality. The Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son have found a place in our collective memory because they help us see things in a new way. Jesus enabled his disciples to make the most of what they already had in the understanding of God and his ways.
Jesus confirmed this approach at the beginning of his adult life. ‘Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I did not come to abolish but to complete,’ he said (Matthew 5.17)
In other words, if we wish to understand Jesus’ teaching and gain a fair idea of what Christianity is about, we must look at Jesus’ predecessors. That means finding out what part Moses and Isaiah and others played in the history of Jesus’ ancestors. Jesus’ teaching was novel but it was not entirely disconnected from the Ten Commandments and the promise ofo a Messiah, an anointed one.
When we enter the Jewish Scriptures, we enter a world exactly like and yet strangely different from the world of Jesus. The Jewish people had become a client state; they had to watch their Ps and Qs when the Romans wee about and their high priests made the most of an authority that did not come directly from God.
Jesus’s statement about completion would not make his presence and his teaching comfortable. His disciples would find him raising awkward questions about religious belief and about his part init. He had not come to introduce liberal democrat modes of government. He had not come to give his seal of approval to the theatre as a means of education. He had not come to endorse the artist’s canvas as a way of seeing the world. Jesus came as a prophet to complete work already begun. We cannot understand him without some knowledge of his predecessors.
One of his followers described him as offering fulness of life. (John 10.10) If it seems that later generations misunderstood this as requiring limited interests and shrivelled outlooks, we can only remember that sound-bites and one-liners have their limitations. They are no part of true Christian faith.
NEW REVELATION
Among those who find the Christian faith wanting, as it is set down in the Old and New Testaments there are those who have added their own prescribed books to the accepted ones : ‘Science and Health’ by Mary Baker Eddy and ‘The Book of Mormon’ by Joseph Smith.
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