“Do not think that I have come to put an end to the Law,” Jesus said. Then he added I have come “to fulfill” it (Matt 5:17).

This week the Sabbath reading includes the ten words (aka commandments) from Moses’ Law book, “Names,” (aka Exodus).

Every year, year after year, Jesus’ friends and neighbors gathered Sabbath day to Sabbath day to read the Law of Moses. Plus the priests read the Law at the Temple feasts.

In Jesus’ experience, whenever he spoke about the Law, his listeners only had to think of their previous Sabbath synagogue reading to consider his meaning.

Reading Jesus’ story today, the familiarity with the Law as well as the shock of Jesus’ words is often lost.

So consider this. It would be like someone telling Americans that the federal courts have misapplied the U. S. Constitution.

And of course, to make the illustration completely parallel, Americans would need to read and re-read excerpts from the Constitution every Saturday.

“I have not come to put an end to the Constitution but to fulfill it!” Whoa. What does that mean?

During the first-century on Sabbath the devout of Israel gathered to read the Law of Moses. In Jesus’ experience, the Law of Moses was authoritative. It came from God.

Jesus’ later follower Paul and his brother James confirmed the practice (Acts 13:27; 15:21). For example, James said, “For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath” (Acts 15:21).

First-century Jewish writers Philo and Josephus also comment on the practice of gathering for Sabbath instruction (Philo’s Special Laws 2.15 §62 and Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, 16.2.3 §43; 2.17 §175).

Though the practice of reading is without question, the schedule of readings in the first-century is debated. There is an annual cycle of Torah readings as well as a three-year cycle that could have guided the Sabbath practice.

The SpendaYearwithJesus storyline follows an annual cycle, giving a flavor of what it could have been like to hear the Old Testament and the teachings of Jesus in the same timeline.

One of Jesus’ followers wrote that Jesus faced all of the same trials and challenges as any person on earth; and more, that Jesus lived with human frailty. Yet Jesus faced the challenges without frustrating himself or exploiting others (Heb 4:15).

That sounds nice, “Jesus faced the same things we do.” As we read the stories, however, do we assume that Jesus could tap his inner supernatural whenever he wanted control?

If that assumption is true, then he wasn’t challenged like I am challenged.

If Jesus controlled the natural rhythms of this earth-bound experience for his own advantage, then he cannot relate to my human experience.

I don’t float six inches off the ground, and if Jesus’ follower is right, neither did Jesus.

By writing SpendaYearwithJesus, I see the phrase “live like Jesus lived” in a new light.

I do not immediately think of moral or charitable activities. I think of a pace of life, an expectation of life, an engagement of life … Jesus’ experience.

For more on this topic, see No Shortcuts and No Shortcuts Revisited.

Sign-up for SpendaYearwithJesus.

Jesus’ tradition prescribed affirming “God is one” (Deut. 6:5). In Jesus’ experience, he and his disciples would have repeated this affirmation in their morning and evening prayers.

It’s not a question of whether the Jesus and the disciples thought this way. It’s not a question of whether or not they believed God is one. The devout believed.

For the people of Israel in the first-century, God was in heaven. God’s chosen one, the Messiah, was a human who would come and rule on earth. Their expectation was ironclad.

How do you change an ironclad expectation?

Change the currents of experience. The currents of experience that seemed to flow so neatly were about to flow in a seemingly new direction.

Could Jesus say enough, could Jesus do enough in one lifetime to change the expectation? I think, No.

Because he was human, Jesus could only begin a culture shift that would take generations to unfold. Frankly, compared to others from the Greco-Roman world, he had a limited impact in his lifetime.

Gospel Scholar Vincent Taylor once wrote, “It goes without saying that in any recreation of the past much has to be supplied by the imagination; but there is all the difference in the world between idle fancy and the historical imagination controlled by facts which have been patiently investigated.”++

The SpendaYearwithJesus story is the result of a decade of patient investigation.

If the details of the Gospel accounts are to be accounted for on first-century terms (and in light of pre-Pentecost realities), then economic, geographical, and relational implications may be played out in narrative form. SpendaYearwithJesus is exactly this sort of play–one which emerges out of the broader historical realities implied by the available details.

++ Vincent Tayler, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (London: MacMillan, 1933), 168.

Jesus walked and walked and walked. Traveling was a major part of Jesus’ experience.

First, there was feast travel. At an early age, Jesus traveled to Jerusalem with his father Joseph (Lk 2:41). And since Jesus kept the Mosaic Law, he made three trips a year (Ex. 23:17) to Jerusalem for more than a decade before he started preaching. The trip to Jerusalem was a common travel scenario for the people Jesus lived among.

Teaching tours. The Gospel of Luke describes how Jesus went from village to village in Galilee preaching about the kingdom of God. Luke also mentions that the 12 disciples as well as some women went with Jesus (8:1-3). The region of Galilee must have accommodated co-ed travelers, meaning that necessities such as safe roads and separate quarters were available.

Withdrawals. During the summer of Jesus’ last year, he went to Tyre and Sidon and then to the Decapolis both outside Galilee. After the Feast of Dedication in the winter, Jesus went to the remote place where John had baptized years before (John 10:40). Later that last winter, Jesus and his disciples withdrew to a wilderness border town called Ephraim (John 11:54) where no one found him until he re-emerged traveling to Jerusalem for the Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread.

In all of this travel, Jesus used that most humble and human form of transportation, his own two feet.

Jesus’ experience included a series of withdrawals his last year. During the summer months, he traveled in and out of Galilee. During the winter, he visited Jerusalem and withdrew multiple times.

This pattern of engagement and withdrawal points to the mounting tension between Jesus and the religious authorities.

The perception of Jesus as a dynamic, likable teacher-leader is true enough. But often in our focus on Jesus, we ignore the feelings of all of the other dynamic leaders around him who were competing for public interest, let alone those who were attempting to preserve the power they had already attained.

The leaders in Nazareth and Capernaum and other towns in Galilee turned against Jesus. Not long afterwards in Jerusalem at the Feast of Huts, the religious leaders sent the temple guards to arrest him. And a few months later, on Jesus’ next feast-visit to Jerusalem, some of his listeners/competitors intended once again to seize him.

Jesus lived in this mounting tension of rejection and hostility for months. Yet he never lost his nerve or his focus.

If we tell the story overlooking this tension, we do it not because the circumstances demand it, but because we are so overawed by Jesus’ calm in the face of unrelenting opposition.

During the winter of Jesus’ last year after his withdrawal from Jerusalem, Jesus went to the place where John had baptized (John 10:40). John had been imprisoned and executed, but apparently even after his departure places were known by his baptizing activity.

In fact, twenty years after John’s life the impression left by his baptism still influenced the preaching of a man named Apollos (Acts 18:18). Priscilla and Aquila, friends of Paul, tutored Apollos, but that is another story.

Around fifty years after the John’s baptizing activity, his influential reputation remained. Josephus recalled John’s execution by Herod as well as John’s message of virtue (Ant. 18.5.2 § 116-119).

All of the Gospels mention John. Mark describes him briefly as an unconventional man who prepared the way for the Lord. Mark also comments that John drew crowds from rural Judea and Jerusalem (1:2-8) and recalls John’s execution by Herod (6:14-29).

Matthew follows Mark’s basic outline (Matthew 3:1-12; 14:1-12), and Luke adds additional dialogue to Mark and Matthew (Luke 3:1-20). Meanwhile, the Gospel of John offers a more personal glimpse of the eccentric holy man (John 1:19-39; 3:22-30) ending with John’s acknowledgement that Jesus must increase, and he [John] must decrease (3:30).

John worked in places around the Jordan that were away from the main roads, i.e. remote places (called “wilderness” in many English translations of Mark and Matthew).

During this last winter after a clash with religious folks at the temple, Jesus took the opportunity to withdraw to one of John’s old baptizing sites probably as tensions naturally settled in the city.

Timing is everything.

It was the Feast of Dedication. As the people engaged Jesus in a heated argument over his identity, Jesus quoted a song. Today, we read about the exchange in John 10:22-42, but we hardly know the song.

What Jesus said was, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’?” (10:34). The people revolted against Jesus’ title “Son of God,” so Jesus invoked the authority of the Hebrew Scripture and Psalm 82 to validate the designation.

The problem is the next few lines in the song (which to most readers today are unfamiliar) — “But you will die like men and fall like one of the rulers” (Ps 82:7). The Psalm itself is about God judging injustice! Was Jesus trying to enrage his listeners?

But it gets even more interesting because there is a reference in the Mishnah to the songs that the Levites sang in the temple corresponding to the days of the week (m. Tamid 7.4).** On the third day of the week (Tuesday), guess what they sang? Psalm 82!

This song, Psalm 82, was well-known in Jesus’ experience. His words cut like a knife. And the attendees of the Feast of Dedication, the people in the temple court, mobbed to grab him.

** Jacob Neusner, The Mishnah : A New Translation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 873.

The “good shepherd” is an important leadership image from Jesus’ experience. Jesus referred to the metaphor during the Feast of Dedication when the nation celebrated political independence.

The national significance of the shepherd image originates from the Hebrew Scripture in the writings of the prophet Ezekiel, among others.

Ezekiel described how bad shepherds feed themselves and ignore the needs of the sheep. They fleece their followers for wool, and kill them for meat. Strays are abandoned (Ezek 34:1-6).

At the Feast of Dedication, Jesus suggested that he stood (right there in the temple courts) as the antithesis of Ezekiel’s scathing metaphor. Jesus was the “good shepherd” (John 10:14).

One can imagine the reaction of the religious authorities. They wanted to finish what they had started at the Feast of Huts, but once again, Jesus retreats.

In the previous posts, we looked at Jerusalem’s resilient leaders and the preservation they achieved for their nation. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were part of that tradition.

So was Jesus trying to pick a fight with people in power?