Can somone explain to me

[Igel]

18. Because Jesus' quotes are often from those writings.

Many of his words allude to those writings, either the ideas, the laws, the stories and history, the events, or the people.

When he speaks in the setting attributed to him, those writings are what people would have had in mind. He would have known this. What he says and what they do are consistent with this.

When he said "justice" he wasn't speaking to those who went to Berkeley in the 1960s and 1970s, and talking about economic, environmental, or social justice. We forget that not everybody is local to us, not everybody speaks to us, personally, not everything is properly understood from our narrow POV. (And we do this even as we accuse others of committing the sin. We impose a burden on others we're often not willing to bear ourselves.)

He was speaking to those for whom "justice" was doing as the OT said to do to others: You treated people impartially when enforcing the law, which was defined as good. When he said "mercy' his listeners would have understood a certain thing, and he would have known that's what his words would have meant: Not being rigorous in seeking that the law be applied on a personal level, understanding their situations, being generous. "Righteousness" would have been acting in accord with God's will.

From the POV of a standard Jew in 25 AD, the same God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah was the one who said "love God with all your heart" and "love your neighbor as yourself." The same one who said not to look with pity on the poor nor with favor on the rich when judging a case of theft also said to help those who were poor and decried the arrogance of the rich. The OT God defended the poor as did Jesus. He decried the arrogance of the rich as did Jesus. And yet he was impartial--when the poor were disobedient, they also merited punishment. (This is rather new--a God that showed favor at the national and not the personal level.)

Jesus pointed out that God was merciful and that many of the iron-clad restrictions of the Pharisees were unmerited impositions. Steal God's showbread to survive, help a beast by pulling it out of the ditch on the Sabbath--they're not only okay, they're good. God forgave these offenses, obviously offenses against God, because life trumps property or such trespasses. Nobody made the mistake of thinking Jesus said it was okay for the poor to steal another person's bread, though; mercy required isn't voluntary or "being merciful", and so it would be up to the owner of the bread to decide what to do.


In short, the OT is around because without the OT Jesus has no background. People have already decontextualized the texts, deconstructed them to find their own truths and immediately reconstructed them around those newly-found truths, and that's with the OT stuck onto the NT. Either they have the background they appear to have or the people who already show blatant contempt for the texts should just be honest and say, "We should do this because I think it's right."