“When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, what commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (The Wesley Study Bible, NRSV, 1194)
The gospel of Matthew was believed to have been written sometime between 50AD and 70AD by Jesus’s disciple Matthew approximately 20 years after Jesus’s resurrection. Matthew, also referred to by his Hebrew name …show more content…
This passage occurs in one of his debates with the Pharisees and Sadducees about the law of Moses. The religious elite were growing weary of Jesus’s influence over the people and were looking for ways to trick Him into saying something they could condemn him for.
It is important to understand the difference between the Pharisees and the Sadducees in understanding this passage. Sadducees were the religious elite. They were the conservative Jews that only accepted the written law of Moses as having authority. They were a religious group however they had very strong political ties. Sadducees mainly focused on work directly in the Temple. They did not believe in resurrection of the body, angels or spirits and did not believe of the meting out of rewards and punishments after death. They believed all these things to be a corruption of the authentic faith of Israel.
The Pharisees were the religious lay leaders. They were more representative of the common man. They believed in the authority of the laws of Moses, what we now call the Old Testament and the tradition of the elders. They believed that worship in the Temple was one component of many Mosaic observances. The Pharisees and Jesus disagreed on the interpretation of the Jewish law and what interpretation of it represented the authentic tradition of Israel. It is the traditions of the Pharisees that influences the Jewish religions of
The gospel of Matthew was believed to have been written sometime between 50AD and 70AD by Jesus’s disciple Matthew approximately 20 years after Jesus’s resurrection. Matthew, also referred to by his Hebrew name …show more content…
This passage occurs in one of his debates with the Pharisees and Sadducees about the law of Moses. The religious elite were growing weary of Jesus’s influence over the people and were looking for ways to trick Him into saying something they could condemn him for.
It is important to understand the difference between the Pharisees and the Sadducees in understanding this passage. Sadducees were the religious elite. They were the conservative Jews that only accepted the written law of Moses as having authority. They were a religious group however they had very strong political ties. Sadducees mainly focused on work directly in the Temple. They did not believe in resurrection of the body, angels or spirits and did not believe of the meting out of rewards and punishments after death. They believed all these things to be a corruption of the authentic faith of Israel.
The Pharisees were the religious lay leaders. They were more representative of the common man. They believed in the authority of the laws of Moses, what we now call the Old Testament and the tradition of the elders. They believed that worship in the Temple was one component of many Mosaic observances. The Pharisees and Jesus disagreed on the interpretation of the Jewish law and what interpretation of it represented the authentic tradition of Israel. It is the traditions of the Pharisees that influences the Jewish religions of