False Prophet?

In Deuteronomy 13 we read about God’s warnings to his people regarding false prophets. “If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a miraculous sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder of which he has spoken takes place, and he says, ‘Let us follow other gods’ (gods you have not known) ‘and let us worship them,’ you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. It is the LORD your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him.” (Deu. 13:1-4)

Even if the prophet performs miraculous signs, he could be a false prophet. The main test given in this passage is whether the prophet tries to lead people to follow other gods. But it seems also to emphasize obeying God and keeping his commandments. The implication is that any prophet who tries to lead away from keeping God’s commandments is a false prophet and should be rejected.

Unfortunately, the way Jesus is presented by most Christians, he appears to Jews to fit the characteristics of a false prophet in this passage. He and his followers are portrayed as leading people away from God’s commandments, claiming that the Torah has been done away. Jews who reject Jesus on this basis are doing it out of faithfulness to God and to scripture. They should be commended for this.

However, this is clearly not the way Jesus is portrayed in the New Testament. The Jesus of the New Testament held Torah in extremely high regard. He taught that not a letter, or even a piece of a letter would pass away from Torah until heaven and earth pass away, until all things happen (Matt. 5:18). I can’t imagine affirming Torah any more strongly than that.

He quoted the Torah often in his teaching. It was his go-to scripture. He cited Deuteronomy more than any other book. When he was confronted by the devil in the wilderness, he quoted Deuteronomy three times. (Matt. 4; Luke 4) His famous statement about the greatest commandment and the second greatest, summarizing the entire law, are from Deuteronomy and Leviticus (Deu. 6:5; Lev. 19:18) When he healed a man with leprosy, he ordered him to go and show himself to the priest and offer the sacrifices commanded in the Torah (Mark 1:44).

There are those who seem to think that Jesus disregarded the Sabbath laws. He certainly faced disagreement from some of the teachers about how they should be interpreted. A close examination of the texts reveals that Jesus never claims that the Sabbath laws have been abolished. He always defends his understanding as the original intent of the laws, sometimes quoting scripture to back it up.

There is one passage where some poor translations have led people into a misunderstanding about Jesus’ attitude toward the food laws. In Mark 7 Jesus has just accused some of the Pharisees of ignoring God’s law in favor of their traditions (7:8-13). Afterward he goes on to explain to the crowd and his disciples that what they eat has nothing to do with being clean or unclean. It’s a totally separate issue. He explains to his disciples that food that they eat doesn’t go into the heart, but into the stomach, and then out of the body into the sewage, purging all foods (from the body). Some translators with an agenda have translated the phrase “purging all foods”, which in the context is part of Jesus’ statement, to say something like, “In saying this Jesus declared all foods clean”. This is a real stretch grammatically, as you’d have to go back two or three verses to find an antecedent for the participle. Besides this, he had just finished standing up for the authority of God’s law; he wasn’t about to cancel it in the next few verses. And even if he had intended such a statement, the things that he and the Jews considered to be “food” would not include the things that were prohibited by God to his people and called “detestable” (Deu. 14:3ff).

Jesus clearly revered God’s law and did not try to change any of it. But most Christians after the second century have embraced “another Jesus” who they think changed the laws. This has been a stumbling block for Jews, preventing them from acknowledging the Torah-observant Jesus who identified himself as their promised Messiah, and will return to set up God’s promised kingdom where God’s law will be internalized into people’s hearts (Jer. 31:33) and will be the universal standard of behavior (Isaiah 2:3).