What is our Lord Jesus’ attitude towards Jewish tradition?

The answer

Our Lord Jesus Christ, who came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them (Matt. 5:17), did not belittle the value of Jewish tradition. When He asked, “Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your traditions?” (Matt. 15:3; Mark 7:13; Col. 2:8), He was not rejecting tradition itself, but rather rejecting their approach to tradition. He rejected those traditions that stood in opposition to the word of God, and their literal attitudes towards the application of the law or the tradition. He gave them an example of a tradition that contradicts the word of God, whereby a man might avoid the duty of caring for his parents financially by offering that money to the Temple instead as qorban (offering).²⁵⁹

In another example, we find that our Lord Jesus does not forbid His disciples when, walking in the fields on the sabbath, they plucked some heads of grain and extracted the grains from them with their hands. The Pharisees accused the disciples of violating the law, since “gathering the grain and pressing it” are two of the thirty-nine categories of work identified by the Mishnah as work prohibited on the sabbath.²⁶⁰

Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty