in the law, Luke calls him, or as we would say, an Old Testament scholar. He raises a query which on the surface sounds guileless enough. Indeed, the man seems to hold Jesus in considerable esteem. He stands to put his question and addresses him respectfully as Teacher'. What's more, the enquiry itself appears, superficially at any rate, to be rather promising. 'Teacher,' he says, 'what must I do to inherit eternal life?' But in order that we should not be misled, Luke tells us that his inner motive was rather more disappointing. He stood up, he tells us, to put Jesus to the test.
So this man was not a genuine seeker after spiritual illumination. He was one more of those hostile inquisitors from the Jewish Establishment who were looking for an opportunity to examine Jesus' theological credentials and, if possible, to expose his theological incompetence. No doubt he hoped that Jesus would make some wild messianic claim or utter some heretical statement which could be taken down and used later as evidence against him.
But if so, he was frustrated. For instead of volunteering some theological novelty for him to seize upon, Jesus invited the man to answer his own question from the Old Testament which he knew so well. 'What's written in the Law?' he asked. 'How do you read it?'
And the man was, not surprisingly, only too willing to exhibit the fruits of his biblical research. 'Love the Lord your God,' he said, 'and your neighbour as yourself.'
'You've answered correctly,' Jesus replied.
You may be a little surprised to find this man summarizing the Old Testament law in those terms. For Jesus himself, when asked on another occasion to identify the most important commandment in the Bible, could do no better than to cite precisely the same two texts which this scribe quotes here, namely Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, 'Love God. Love your neighbour. The entire moral teaching of the Bible,' he said, 'hinges on
