No historian denies that Judaism in the time of our Lord possessed definite rites and an authoritative priesthood which performed and safeguarded those rites. Heiler is correct in asserting that the Jewish society in which Jesus lived and worked exhibited on its religious side “a striking similarity to Catholic ecclesiasticism.”[3] What was our Lord’s attitude toward this Jewish Church?

On one point there is surely agreement, namely, that Jesus should not be regarded—in the manner of many romances of the past and present—as an aggressive reformer, who raised the standard of spiritual religion and the love of God and attacked all external ordinances. On this point the evidence of the Gospels is too plain. So we are left to ask—and the question is in fact so formulated—whether Jesus did not by the novelty of His teaching, that is to say indirectly, undermine and uproot these external ordinances, and so annul and abolish them.

The attitude of Jesus towards the authoritative teaching of Judaism, as laid down in the Torah, is decisively indicated in His emphatic declaration (Mt. v, 17-18): “Do not think that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For amen I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled.” We have in this passage a genuine utterance of our Lord’s, for St. Luke also, who has in his whole attitude some of St. Paul’s independence towards the Law, gives this important saying, and puts it in the distinctive form: “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fall” (xvi, 17).