That, at any rate, is how the foreword to the book of Jesus Sirach formulates it. That book, originally written in Hebrew, was composed around 190 BCE. The prologue is later and is by the Greek translator of the book, a grandson of the author. It begins: “Many great teachings have been given to us through the Law and the Prophets and the other [books of the ancestors] that followed them, and for these we should praise Israel for instruction and wisdom.”
“Written on Your Heart”
So we really should ask: what was Jesus’ relationship to the Torah, the prophets, and the writings? Or, more simply: how did he live with “Scripture”? What significance did it have for him? How did he deal with it? The answer, before anything else we have to say, must be: probably, on the basis of Deuteronomy 6:6-7, he knew central texts of Sacred Scripture by heart. Deuteronomy demands, “These words that I am commanding you today must be written on your heart. You shall cause your children to repeat them.”2 “They must be written on your heart” in the first place means nothing but “you must learn them by heart.” This a fixed formula. And when the text continues, “You shall cause your children to repeat them,” it means, “you must recite the Torah [the book of Deuteronomy] over and over again to your children” (“sons” in the original is understood to include daughters) “until they know the text by heart.” And concretely that probably meant that the children heard, day after day, how their parents prayed and meditated on Scripture out loud, and so they also learned the texts, almost automatically, until they were fixed in their memory. So this is not about a way of dealing with Scripture that only Jesus practiced but about the practice of many families in Israel.
Thus we can take it as given that Jesus would have known crucial passages from the Torah and the prophets by heart, and probably all the psalms and some parts of the Wisdom literature as well. Most frequently quoted in the New Testament canon are3 the Torah (35 percent of all direct quotations), the Psalms (24 percent), Isaiah (22.5 percent), and the Book of the Twelve [Prophets] (10 percent). Quotations from other biblical writings make up 8.5 percent. It is true that these numbers already reflect a specifically Christian perspective, but at the same time they reveal the relative values of the different parts of the canon of Scripture in the Judaism of the time. The Torah is, of course, in the foreground; then come the psalms for daily prayer and then the prophets, Isaiah above all.
How was it possible for a Jew of that time to know so many texts by heart? We can by no means judge this phenomenon in terms of the quantity of text we ourselves can recite from memory today. At that time people not only had a universally practiced mnemonic technique at their disposal. The texts themselves were shaped in such a way that they could be more easily remembered. But above all, people’s heads were not crammed with our media garbage.
When Jesus withdrew and prayed for many hours alone (cf. Mark 1:35), he would have recited the Psalms and through them have entered into a deep, wordless conversation with his Father. And when the Torah was recited in the synagogue worship service, followed by sections of the prophetic books as commentary, he heard in public what he had already learned by heart as a child.
The Major Biblical Materials
And what did Jesus learn when he heard Scripture recited or spoke its verses for himself? He learned what Israel had experienced of its God over the centuries, what his great teachers and preachers had understood, formulated, and collected, what they had thought through, corrected, expanded, deepened, arranged, written down, and continued to write, namely, that there was but one God who made heaven and earth. That he had created the world with its multiplicity and its wealth but was not himself the world. That he gave existence to all things, sustained all things, contained all things, gave meaning to all things. That the gods humans created for themselves were idols, nothing but deception and nullity.
He learned that this one God had chosen little Israel out of the many nations because he wanted to have a people in the world that belonged entirely to him with its whole heart and soul and existence. That he had rescued the Israelites from the nation of Egypt, where they were oppressed and violated, in order to bring them together as a people that lived differently from the other nations, in justice and peace with one another and in holiness before its God.
He then learned that God had led Israel through the desert, fed the people, and, at Sinai, gave them a way of life that was both a just order of society and instruction for hallowing all of life. That this Torah was meant to help Israel to give witness before the eyes of the nations to its God: to God’s glory, justice, and concern for the world. That God had made a covenant with Israel, to be their God and to make this people his very own.
And he learned that Israel began to grumble, even as it was being rescued from Egypt, and that the grumbling kept breaking out again and again. That Israel took a dim view of the land God wanted to give them and even slandered it. That it was frightened by the nearness of God, that it broke its covenant with God, that it wanted to be like the other nations. That God nevertheless sustained his people, with great endurance and unwearying patience, that he forgave them again and again, that he created the temple for them in Jerusalem as a place of atonement so that the horrible consequences of sin were broken asunder and the people could always begin anew.
He learned that God had given Israel festivals that divided the year, so that one could live from feast to feast. That at these festivals Israel gathered to remember its history and join in a holy community to praise God. That God raised up prophets for his people to snatch them out of their hard-heartedness and blindness. That Israel did not listen to its prophets, did not live according to its social order, sought out the gods of the nations, and so became like the Gentiles. That God therefore had to scatter it among the nations in order to bring it to repentance and reflection.
And he learned that, even in this most profound crisis of Israel’s history, God never forgot his people. That he promised to gather them again, renew the fertility of the land of Israel for them, and one day to raise up a king for them who, after all the many kings who had so miserably failed them, would be the true Anointed, the true Ruler, the true God-fearer.
And finally, he learned that God had begun a history with his people that was crucial for the whole world because it brought it to the moment of decision. That this God who had resisted every name and certainly every image was the absolute Lord of history. That he would bring all history to its goal without damaging human freedom: as its Creator, its Judge, but also its Lover. Then God would be all in all and the world would breathe a sigh in God, and God himself would take away the shroud of sorrow that still covers the nations.
All that and much more the young Jesus heard, recited it daily like every faithful Jew, and took it into his heart.4 It is impossible to measure the depth to which it penetrated, because that was a secret between him and his heavenly Father. The reader of the gospels can only dimly perceive it, for example, when the evangelist Luke tells his interpretive story of how the twelve-year-old Jesus, during his first pilgrimage to Jerusalem, remained in the temple and explained to his parents, who had sought him with great anxiety, that he had to be in what belonged to his Father (Luke 2:41-52).
Jesus, a Scribe?
All that had to be said at the outset if we are going to talk about Jesus and the Old Testament. But we have not yet come to the real topic of this chapter. We are interested not in how Jesus, as a pious Jew, lived his life on the basis of Scripture but in what role Scripture played in his preaching and his public activity. How did he deal with it as a teacher, a preacher, a prophet, and someone who was more than any prophet?