The same fundamental emphasis on spiritual religion dominates His attitude towards the Jewish authorities. It is true that He is kindled to a holy indignation by the hypocrites and blind guides among the Scribes and Pharisees, who tithed mint and cummin, but neglected what was more important in the Law: justice and mercy and faith (Mt. xxiii, 23). Yet the very preface to this vehement attack makes it plain that His protest is directed, not against the chair of Moses itself, but against the blind guides who sit in it. Here Jesus distinguishes expressly between the teaching and the teacher, or, as we should say, between the office and the person. “All things therefore, whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do; but according to their works do ye not” (Mt. xxiii, 3). Therefore Jesus intends to preserve the principle of a teaching authority as such, and attacks only the perverse manner in which the Scribes and Pharisees realized this principle. To be sure, so far as this perversity was rooted in the nature of pharisaism, His attack on the blind guides becomes an attack on the institution itself, but it is not an attack on the principle of a teaching authority as such. On the contrary He expressly adopts and commends this principle in the same context: “Let one only be your Master, Christ” (Mt. xxiii, 10). And in so far as the disciples have to spread the teaching of Jesus, they, and St. Peter especially, are the appointed teachers of the kingdom of heaven.

The more we examine the matter the clearer it becomes that our Lord’s attitude towards the Old Law is neither abrupt rejection, nor unwilling tolerance, nor entire acceptance. It is rather the attitude of one who wishes to complete and fulfill this Law, that is to say, a conditional acceptance. Because in the Judaism of the Pharisees the Law, the worship of the temple, and the official teaching had become externalized and divorced from spiritual and moral values, therefore Jesus could oppose only a decisive “No” to this rabbinical perversion of the Mosaic Church. “No man puts a new piece to an old garment, no man puts new wine into old bottles.” To that extent Jesus is a conscious reformer. But in so far as the Judaism of His time rested on ordinances which were sanctified by the authority of Moses and aimed at the moral improvement of men, He acknowledges their inner value unequivocally. “These things you ought to have done, and not to have left the other undone” (Mt. xxiii, 23). That is the formula in which He Himself describes His fundamental attitude towards the Law of Moses.