I beg to disagree. Jesus accepts the Torah(Written Law) as binding. Remember He said that He came to fulfill the Law. What Jesus was against was the myriad of rules and regulations that the Pharisees and Sadducees imposed ON TOP of the Torah (Oral Law or the Talmud)
Jesus accepted both as binding. Here's a simple example:
At Matthew 12:11, Jesus says, "What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it shall fall into a pit on the sabbath, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?"
That was a direct allusion to a principle of rabbinical interpretation that was later codified as pikuach nefesh --Literally "Uncovering life" If an occupied building collapses on the Sabbath, what do you do? Do you work to rescue the survivors (Uncovering life) or do you let them die? Which is more important: the implicit requirement to preserve life or the explicit requirement to keep the Sabbath?
The answer to that question is not in the Torah, it's in the Oral Law. And Jesus accepted it as binding.
As a general observation, I think when people speak of the "myriad of rules and regulations" of the Pharisees (..and Sadducees????) they're failing to grasp one of the biggest distinctions between historical Christianity and Judaism.
The Law was not just a code of moral conduct, it was a civil, criminal and penal code covering both high and low justice because Israel was a sovereign nation for fairly long periods of its existence. Christianity on the other hand, was born at the height of the brutal Pax Romana and was molded around the constraints imposed by that State.
For example, both Christianity and Judaism condemn the crime of murder. But what is murder? How do you know when a murder has occurred? What do you do when a murder has occurred? What do you do with the murderer once you've caught him?
Stop and think about how complicated things get when there is a death penalty involved or how complicated a crime murder can be inasmuch as there are many diferent degrees and levels of culpability. Look at the criminal code in your country covering the crime of murder. I would be willing to be that it's not light reading.
Christianity leaves all of those messy details to the State. Judaism did not. So it is really unfair to condemn the level of detail in the Oral Law. Desecration of the Sabbath carried a very real, very severe penalty for a pretty big chunk of Jewish history. When a physical penalty is involved, people have both the need and the right to have every single detail spelled out, especially when that penalty is death. The Law had to be interpreted over and over as the centuries passed and new situations arose and those interpretations established a body of precedent. Like a snowball with the Torah as its core, the Oral Law was born.
To pretend that the Law can be interpreted by a simple, mechanical reading without human judges and a corpus of prior precident to refer to is really a logical fallacy called dicto simpliciter.
What any particular law says is not always what the law actually means. That idea might sound like doublethink at first, but it's a basic principle of every legal system and there are several very valid reasons for this.
First: A simple, mechanical reading of law can run counter to what the law was actually intended to accomplish. Here's a simple example to illustrate this:
There are certain plants in the American southwest that are protected by law. These plants may not be moved or transported without a permit. Let's assume you're walking your dog around a construction site after hours one evening and you see a young saguaro cactus that has been toppled by a bulldozer and then rolled into a trash heap. The saguaro is one of these protected plants. Let's further assume that you're outraged by this and you put this doomed saguaro in your truck and take it miles and miles out into the desert and replant it. Have you broken the law? Based on the facial evidence, a police officer might think so, but if you can clearly document what you did, (Pictures would be a good idea) it's doubtful if a judge would ever agree with him. The purpose of the law is to protect that plant and in this hypothetical situation that is exactly what you did. A police officer knows what the law says. A police officer does not necessarily know what the law means.
Second: A law may be applied to a situation beyond its intended limits. Let's take another example:
Suppose that a backpacker is stranded in a remote area by an unexpected blizzard. He breaks into an unoccupied cabin and waits for two days until the storm abates and he may safely leave. During this time, he consumes his unknown benefactor’s food, burns his wood to keep warm, and even sleeps in his bed. While we would recognize that this individual would be obligated to monetarily compensate the owner of the cabin, he would not automatically be adjudged as a thief. American law, through such rulings as Vincent v. Lake Erie Transportation Co. and Ploof v. Putnam has long recognized that laws whose purpose is to protect property are not intended to do so at the expense of life.
To be fair and accurate to believers, there was a controversy in Jesus' day between two factions of the Phraisees. There was a hard-line faction who interpreted the Law harshly and a liberal faction who interpreted the Law more along the lines of Jesus' approach
In rabbinic literature, these were known as Bet Hillel and Bet Shammai: The story goes like this:
A Gentile came to Shammai with the strange request that he be taught the entire Torah, but that it be done during the time he could stand on one foot. Shammai, a surveyor by trade, chased him away, swinging a cubit stick. When this Gentile approached Hillel with the same request, instead of being scolded for such an impudent demand, he was told, "What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowman. This is the entire Torah. All the rest is commentary — now go and study."
The parallels with Hillel’s statement are readily recognized in Jesus’ statement in Matthew 7:12 and Paul’s "summary" in Galatians 5:14. Hillel's negative formulation of Jesus' Golden Rule is sometimes referred to as the "Silver Rule". It, in turn, is derived from even earlier Jewish tradition: "Do to no one what you would not want done to you." (Tobit 4:15)
I think it's easy to read the NT and assume that 'Pharisees' meant all pharisees and overlook the fact that many agreed with Jesus as evidenced by the number of early converts to Christianity who were pharisees.
