sealchan
Well-Known Member
How do you think God feels about such traditions?
When Jesus walked the earth, he slammed the Pharisees for following the oral traditions more than adhering the word of God.
At Matthew 15:3 Jesus asked them.... "Why do you overstep the commandment of God because of your tradition? "
After giving them an example of that, he said to them...."You hypocrites, Isaiah aptly prophesied about you when he said: 8 ‘This people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far removed from me. 9 It is in vain that they keep worshipping me, for they teach commands of men as doctrines.’”
Apparently God did not want a fence around the Torah.....The Law he gave Moses was sufficient for his will to be carried out correctly. The legalistic nit-picking just made the Law a colossal burden, enslaving the Jewish people to strict rituals that God never gave them because God's commands were never meant to be burdensome. (Matthew 23:4; 1 John 5:3)
The Bible account clearly shows that Moses was never commanded to transmit an oral law. Exodus 24:3-4 says.....
"So Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the ordinances, and all the people answered in unison and said, "All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do."
4 And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord, and he arose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and twelve monuments for the twelve tribes of Israel.”
And, at Exodus 34:27, it says.....“The Lord said to Moses: "Inscribe these words for yourself, for according to these words I have formed a covenant with you and with Israel."
An unwritten oral law had no place in the covenant that God made with Israel. So are those traditions of men agreeable with God?
Neither Jesus nor his disciples ever quoted oral Jewish tradition to support their teachings but, rather, appealed to the written Word of God. (Matthew 4:4-10; Romans 15:4; 2 Timothy 3:15-17)
Christendom too has adopted many traditions that have no place in the lives of Christians....they too fell into the trap of thinking that God's word was not enough.
This brings up the whole cultural impact of oral versus literate culture...stories that make up the Bible often had oral origins. When it is claimed that the commandments were written by God that is an interesting shift right there from an oral attitude where truth is more of an internal feeling to a literate attitude which is that truth is in the wording of what is said.
I think it unlikely that Jesus would have a problem with oral tradition because it strayed from a written source unless the author of Matthew didn't realize the significance of truth in an oral culture or the origins of much of what that scripture was.