. 21-48) look at first much like a doing away of the old. Jesus
did not so conceive them. He rather thought of them as fresh statements of
the idea which underlay the old; they fulfilled the old by realizing more
fully that which it had set before an earlier generation. He was the most
radical teacher the men of his day could conceive, but his work was
clearing rubbish away from the roots of venerable truth that it might bear
fruit, rather than rooting up the old to put something else in its place.

233. The Old Testament was for Jesus a holy book. His mind was filled with
its stories and its language. In the teachings which have been preserved
for us he has made use of writings from all parts of the Jewish
scriptures--Law, Prophets, and Psalms. The Old Testament furnished him the
weapons for his own soul's struggle with temptation (Matt. iv. 4, 7, 10),
it gave him arguments for use against his opponents (Mark xii. 24-27; ii.
25-27), and it was for him an inexhaustible storehouse of illustration in
his teaching. When inquirers sought the way of life he pointed them to the
scriptures (Mark x. 19; see also John v. 39), and declared that the rising
of one from the dead would not avail for the warning of those who were
unmoved by Moses and the prophets (Luke xvi. 31). When Jesus' personal
attitude to the Old Testament is considered it is noticeable that while
his quotations and allusions cover a wide range, and show very general
familiarity with the whole book, there appears a decided predominance of
Deuteronomy, the last part of Isaiah, and the Psalms. It is not difficult
to see that these books are closer in spirit to his own thought than much
else in the old writings; his use of the scripture shows that some parts
appealed to him more than others.

234. Jesus as a teacher was popular and practical rather than systematic
and theoretical. The freshness of his ideas is proof that he was not
lacking in thorough and orderly thinking, for his complete departure from
current conceptions of the kingdom of God indicates perfect mastery of
ethical and theological truth. It is all the more remarkable, therefore,
that so much of his profoundest teaching seems to have been almost
accidental. The most formal discourse preserved to us is the sermon on the
mount, in which human conduct is regulated by the thought of God as Father
and Searcher of hearts. For the rest the great ideas of Jesus have
utterance in response to specific conditio