All of Scripture is inspired. The question for you then becomes do you follow the dietary laws that were given to the Jews? Do you keep the all the Sabbath laws? Do you bring a lamb to the priest to make an offering for your sins? Were those things written TO YOU?
The distinction between the Old and New Covenant is clear. Some laws (ceremonial) were fulfilled by Christ. Some (the Mosaic civil code) applied only to the Theocratic government of Israel. In other words
the Bible explains itself. You have introduced a paradigm which is
not self-evident in scripture which is arrived at indirectly by inferencing and eisegesis one which, moreover sets part of the New Testament against the other. If you MAD proponents really believed non-Pauline writings are inspired you would not be so dismissive of them when people bring them up to prove a point.
This OT/NT dichotomy appears to categorize Jesus teaching as belonging more to the OT. I do not think that is accurate at all. For one thing, while Jesus followed the Law this was not part of the gospel He taught to the disciples. The Bible says "the Law and prophets were
until John." John introduced something new - Jesus and His proclamation of good news which had been prophesied about. This was was not the Law. It was good news which was a message both of
truth and grace (
John 1:17).
Now Jesus dealt with people who were still following the law but that was not part of His good news nor is it what He personally taught His disciples to practice. He said His message could not any more fit into the old forms than new wine can be put into old wine skins without bursting them. In His ministry we see a lot of Rabbinical wine skins rupturing.
For one,
Jesus did not teach Mosaic Sabbath-keeping. He proclaimed Himself Lord of the Sabbath and said "Man was not made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath was made for man" and was liberal in allowing commonsense violations that would not have been acceptable in Moses day. If He was Lord of the Sabbath then He was on par with the Creator who established that day as holy in the first place (
Mark 2:23-27).
Jesus is the first person in the NT to teach that
violating the dietary law does not defile a person. "it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person” (
Matthew 15:11)
With regard to the
moral law Jesus summed it up as "Love God with all our heart...and our fellow humans as ourselves" (
Matthew 22:40) This was held to be a Divine imperative also by James (
James 2:8) and Paul (
Galatians 5:13-14)
Jesus apparently participated in festivals. His habit was to go to Jerusalem on the Passover; but was not part of the corpus of the teachings He delivered to the disciples. When He ate His last Passover with the disciples He showed them how it symbolized the redemptive purpose of His death
for this is my
blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the
forgiveness of sins. (
Matthew 26:28)
In the Great Commission Jesus says this:
19 "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20
teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the
end of the age" (
Matthew 28:20)
They were not to teach all
Moses had said. That was Old Covenant. Only those things that He specifically had taught them were to be included in the message they would pass on to the nations.
The word "nations" is "
ethnos" The Hebrew equivalent is "
goyim" which means
all people not merely Jewish people. Had he wished to refer just to the Jews scattered throughout the nations He could have conveyed that by using the term "diaspora" as Peter did in
1 Peter 1:1.
Now when was this age
of spreading Jesus gospel supposed to end - in 70 AD? Jesus answers this question:
…13"But the one who
endures to the end, he will be
saved. 14"This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the
whole world as a testimony to
all the nations, and
then the end will come.
I am going to assume for the moment that "the end" coincides with the coming of the Messianic Kingdom and subduing the world. From Jesus' remark about "enduring to the end" I understand that there is going to be tribulation before "the end." Paul's remarks on the subject reveal that he and the Early Church interpreted Jesus' remarks that way too (
Acts 14:22) It does not look like they expected to escape tribulation by being raptured out.
The end would not come until
THIS gospel had been preached to
all the nations in the world. Jesus apparently expected evangelization to continue until
all nations had been reached. That certainly not happen during the lives of the disciples or for thousands of years afterward. Evangelization was to continue right up until He returned. Since He has not returned I am going to assume that His orders are still en force.
This scenario is, of course, inconsistent with the belief that Peter's mission was merely to evangelize the Jews with a special "Jewish Gospel" or with the belief that his mission subsequently failed and become obsolete in 30-50 years.
