The answer is quite clear: "Christ fulfilled the Mosaic Covenant and established the New Covenant. Anything else is ‘another gospel.’"
From LifeSiteNews
By S.D. Wright
Christ fulfilled the Mosaic Covenant and established the New Covenant. Anything else is ‘another gospel.’
In 1980, John Paul II claimed that the Mosaic Covenant was “never revoked.”[1]
Since then, this statement has been repeated by many churchmen. For example, frontrunner for the 2025 Conclave Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline repeats the statement, and much of his interreligious theology is built upon the extrapolation of this very idea to other non-Christian religions.[2]
In fact what was simply a passing statement in its original context has come to be seen as if it were an ex cathedra definition through which all doctrine must be understood; and alternatives are dubbed “supersessionism” or “replacement theology,” and treated as if they are condemned heresies.
A common way to defend this “dual covenant” theology is by reference to St. Paul’s words:
For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance. (Romans 11.29)
However, this is a misapplication of the text. St. Paul is not affirming the ongoing validity of the Mosaic Law or Covenant. Rather, in Romans 9–11, he explains how God remains faithful to his promises to the Jews—not by preserving the Old Covenant, but by offering them grace through the New Covenant in Christ.
The “calling” remains, but the means of salvation is not the Mosaic Covenant: it is Christ.
What was the Mosaic Covenant?
The Old Covenant, given to Moses at Mount Sinai, consisted of the Law—ceremonial, judicial, and moral—accompanied by promises and threats based on its observance.
According to the Old Testament itself, the Jewish people repeatedly broke this covenant and failed to keep the Law. On very many occasions, Holy Scripture notes that the Jewish people themselves made the Covenant “void.” While God permitted them to return to the Mosaic Covenant even after betraying him, he also promised a new covenant with them, which would replace “the covenant which they made void,” and which would not be subject to their voidability:
I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Juda: Not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt […] But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel. (Jer. 31:32).
The Epistle to the Hebrews makes this future transition explicit:
Now in saying a new, he hath made the former old. And that which decayeth and groweth old is near its end. (Hebrews 8.13)
As Cornelius a Lapide notes, even rabbinical sources acknowledged that the Messias would bring a new Law and Torah to replace the old. This is echoed in Midrash Rabbah, which distinguishes between the current Torah and “the Torah of the Messias,” without any indication that the former would continue unchanged.[3]
Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecies
Jesus Christ, coming at the expected time—recognized as such even by the Jews—fulfilled all that the Law and the Prophets foretold concerning the Messias. He established his Church upon St. Peter and the Apostles as the Messianic Kingdom of God on Earth.
He inaugurated a New Covenant in his blood, which both the Prophet Jeremias and Rabbinic sources expected of the Messias. This fulfilled and terminated the Mosaic Law, such that its continued observance was without salvific value (and in time also became an implicit denial of the New Covenant).
Such is the infallible teaching of the Council of Florence and of Catholic tradition, as we shall see.
Was the Church a Gentile affair?
From the beginning, the Christian proclamation was a Jewish affair—although “Jewish” in a different sense to how the term is used today. The Jewish Apostles began preaching the advent and redemption wrought by the Jewish Messias in Jerusalem itself,[4] where thousands of Jews were baptized.[5] Even many of the Jewish priests accepted that Jesus is the Christ.[6] From there, the preaching extended to the Gentiles, fulfilling the vocation of the Jewish people to be a “light to the Gentiles.”[7]
The fruit of this “light” was the fulfillment of various Messianic prophecies amongst the Gentiles, including:
- The banishment of idolatry[8]
- The worship of the God of Abraham[9])
- The recognition of the Jewish Messias as their King.[10]
St. Athanasius underscores the profound irony: the Jews, called to be the light to the Gentiles, deny that the world has been illuminated by the very light that proceeded from themselves. He compares them to a man…
… who sees the earth lit up by the sun, but denies the sun that lights it up! What more is there for their Expected One to do when he comes? To call the heathen? But they are called already. To put an end to prophet and king and vision? But this too has already happened. To expose the God-denyingness of idols? It is already exposed and condemned. Or to destroy death? It is already destroyed.
What then has not come to pass that the Christ must do? What is there left out or unfulfilled that the Jews should disbelieve so light-heartedly? The plain fact is, as I say, that there is no longer any king or prophet nor Jerusalem nor sacrifice nor vision among them; yet the whole earth is filled with the knowledge of God, and the Gentiles, forsaking atheism, are now taking refuge with the God of Abraham through the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ.[11]
Thus the Church was revealed as the prophesied means by which the Jews were to be the light to the nations, and of reconciling all men—Jew and Gentile alike—with one another and with God, as members of Christ’s Mystical Body.
This reconciliation, however, may be the source of some of the problems.
Perceived superiority over Gentiles
Pope Pius XII, citing Ephesians 2:14–16, taught:
[B]y His blood, [Christ] made the Jews and Gentiles one, ‘breaking down the middle wall of partition… in his flesh’ by which the two peoples were divided; and that He made the Old Law void ‘that He might make the two in Himself into one new man,’ that is, the Church, and might reconcile both to God in one Body by the Cross.[12]
This is what Pope Pius XI meant when he said: “Spiritually, we are all semites.” Christians are not replacements for Jews, but rather the body of men—made up of Jews and Gentiles together—who are the heirs to what the Old Covenant foreshadowed, and thus the true children of Abraham by faith.[13]
But this reconciliation—and the idea that the Mosaic Covenant has been fulfilled in a body uniting both Jews and Gentiles—is precisely what the opponents of so-called “replacement theology” refuse to accept.
The insistence on a “dual covenant” ultimately amounts to a demand for a continuing covenant with God apart from the Gentiles—a rejection of the unity established in Christ and realised in the Church, and recalling the recurring scriptural theme of a refusal to share such a status with others.
But no-one is proposing that Gentiles have replaced the Jewish people as God’s chosen people: the true picture is that those who do not accept their own Messias have refused to remain as God’s chosen people in the Covenant as it exists today: a Covenant between God and all men, in Christ.
Is Judaism the religion of the Old Testament?
What we have just described—the founding of the Church by Christ and the inauguration of the New Covenant—was not the establishment of a non-Jewish religion in opposition to the Jewish religion. It is rather the continuation and elevation of the religion of the patriarchs and prophets. It is the fulfilment of the promises made to Abraham, and the universalization of what was foreshadowed in type and figure, now brought to supernatural completion and made available for all men.
However, the implication is clear: if the Church is the true heir of the Old Testament religion, then post-Christian Judaism is not. This remains true regardless of any future conversion of the Jews, or any role that God may yet have for them.
This truth appears in two principal respects.
The Old Law was fulfilled and therefore finished
The Mosaic Covenant, the Law and its rites were instituted to prefigure Christ’s coming, his sacrifice and his Church—just as the Church’s rites signify those same fulfilled realities today. Once these promises had been fulfilled, the Covenant, Law and rites ceased—not through being destroyed, St. Thomas Aquinas writes, but “as being fulfilled through Christ’s Passion, being instituted by God as a figure of Christ.”[14]
This was also taught infallibly by the Council of Florence:
[The Holy Roman Church] firmly believes, professes, and teaches that the legal prescriptions of the Old Testament or the Mosaic law, which are divided into ceremonies, holy sacrifices, and sacraments, because they were instituted to signify something in the future, although they were adequate for the divine cult of that age, once our Lord Jesus Christ who was signified by them had come, came to an end and the sacraments of the New Testament had their beginning.[15]
St. Thomas explains further that all religious rites are professions of faith: but to continue observing the rites of the Old Law is to deny the truth of Christ and the Christian religion.[16] A religion that makes such denials is not a continuation of the formerly true religion; it is a false religion.
There is one Covenant, in Christ
The Old Covenant was provisional. It was not meant to endure after Christ established the new and eternal Covenant in his blood.
We have already seen that observing the Law and rites of the Mosaic Covenant constitutes a profession of faith which contradicts the Gospel. This is why the Council of Florence condemns, in even stronger terms, the idea that these rites and Laws could lead to salvation:
Whoever, after the passion, places his hope in the legal prescriptions and submits himself to them as necessary for salvation and as if faith in Christ without them could not save, sins mortally.
It does not deny that from Christ’s passion until the promulgation of the gospel they could have been retained, provided they were in no way believed to be necessary for salvation. But it asserts that after the promulgation of the gospel they cannot be observed without loss of eternal salvation.
Therefore it denounces all who after that time observe circumcision, the sabbath and other legal prescriptions as strangers to the faith of Christ and unable to share in eternal salvation, unless they recoil at some time from these errors.
Therefore it strictly orders all who glory in the name of Christian, not to practice circumcision either before or after baptism, since whether or not they place their hope in it, it cannot possibly be observed without loss of eternal salvation.[17]
This declaration leaves no room for so-called dual-covenant theology, nor for the continued observance of the Law and its rites without peril to the soul.
The Old Covenant was founded on the Mosaic Law as one of its essential conditions. Once that Law was fulfilled and brought to an end by Christ, the Covenant itself necessarily ceased. Any claim to the contrary contradicts Scripture, tradition, and solemn magisterial teaching. In addition to teaching that Christ’s Passion “made the Old Law void,” Pius XII also cited Pope St Leo the Great teaching the same:
[B]y the death of our Redeemer, the New Testament took the place of the Old Law which had been abolished; then the Law of Christ together with its mysteries, enactments, institutions, and sacred rites was ratified for the whole world in the blood of Jesus Christ.
For, while our Divine Savior was preaching in a restricted area—He was not sent but to the sheep that were lost of the House of Israel—the Law and the Gospel were together in force; but on the gibbet of His death Jesus made void the Law with its decrees fastened the handwriting of the Old Testament to the Cross, establishing the New Testament in His blood shed for the whole human race.
‘To such an extent, then,’ says St. Leo the Great, speaking of the Cross of our Lord, ‘was there effected a transfer from the Law to the Gospel, from the Synagogue to the Church, from the many sacrifices to one Victim, that, as Our Lord expired, that mystical veil which shut off the innermost part of the temple and its sacred secret was rent violently from top to bottom.’
On the Cross then the Old Law died, soon to be buried and to be a bearer of death, in order to give way to the New Testament of which Christ had chosen the Apostles as qualified ministers.[18]
This is also the consistent witness of Sacred Scripture. Our Lord declares: “No man cometh to the Father but by me” (John 14:6), and “Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5).
St. Peter, speaking to the Jews, proclaims: “There is no other name under heaven given to men whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
St. Paul insists that “by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified” (Rom. 3:20), and that “the law was our pedagogue in Christ […] but now that faith is come, we are no longer under a pedagogue” (Gal. 3:24–25).
The Church Fathers affirm the same. St. Justin Martyr writes:
A covenant which comes after […] has put an end to the previous one […]. An eternal and final law—namely, Christ—has been given to us.[19]
God is not the one who broke his promises
What we have seen so far is not evidence that God reneged on his promises in the Mosaic Covenant. Rather, it shows that he gloriously fulfilled them, bringing the Old Covenant to completion in the New in Christ.
Further, the Old Covenant did not merely foreshadow the coming of Christ—it commanded its subjects to receive him:
The Lord thy God will raise up to thee a PROPHET of thy nation and of thy brethren like unto me: him thou shalt hear. […]
I will raise them up a prophet out of the midst of their brethren like to thee: and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I shall command him.
And he that will not hear his words, which he shall speak in my name, I will be the revenger. (Deut. 18.15, 18-19)
Moreover, the purpose of the Law was to teach mankind—as the pedagogue mentioned by St. Paul—both the depth of our misery (through our inability to fulfil the Law itself) and our need for a Redeemer. The Mosaic Covenant did not justify by the Law alone, but by preparing souls—through sacrifice and obedience—to receive grace through anticipatory faith in the promised Redeemer. Without that grace, the Law was powerless to save.
However, since the coming of the Messias and the promulgation of the Gospel, such anticipatory faith is no longer possible: the figure has given way to the reality, and justifying faith must now be directed to Christ as he has been revealed. The Mosaic Covenant has been fulfilled, and therefore brought to an end. Anyone who still seeks justification through it is rejecting the anticipated redeemer, and placing himself under a covenant that can no longer save without him. Further, he is taking on a yoke he cannot bear:
I testify again to every man circumcising himself that he is a debtor to do the whole law. (Gal. 5.3)
[W]hosoever shall keep the whole law, but offend in one point, is become guilty of all. (James 2.10)
In short, this is to embrace a Law that accuses and condemns: without faith and grace, it cannot be observed, and instead serves as a testimony against those who reject the Redeemer it once foreshadowed.
Further, the Mosaic Covenant itself warns of terrible punishments for disobedience (Lev. 26)—warnings which, after 70 AD, appear to have been fulfilled to the letter.[20] Those who wish to say that the Mosaic Covenant and its promises were never revoked do not seem to recall these promises.
In sum: Both Old and New Testaments affirm, failure to observe the whole Law brings condemnation. Now that the Messias has come, seeking justification through the Mosaic Law or Covenant is both futile, and a dangerous rejection of grace. The Old Covenant was fulfilled in Christ and brought to an end.
Like a caterpillar that gives way to a butterfly, it has no independent existence once it has fulfilled its purpose. There is no separate path of salvation for the Jews, nor for anyone apart from Christ and the Church. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism—and one New and Eternal Covenant in Christ and his Church.
Conclusion
However, the rupture is even deeper than it may appear.
Some assume a continuity between Judaism today and the religion of the Old Testament, by those who have “simply” failed to recognise Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ.
However, this overlooks the reality that what we call “Judaism” today is not simply the continuation of the pre-Christian Jewish religion, which was centred on animal sacrifice, the Levitical priesthood, and the Temple. That religion ceased to exist in AD 70, when the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. Without priesthood and sacrifice, the cultic heart of the Mosaic Covenant was gone.
This is why Christ, on two occasions in the Book of the Apocalypse, refers to those “who say they are Jews and are not.”[21] (Apoc. 2.9, 3.9)
Thus, what we call “Judaism” today is a new religion: it is a version of the pre-Christian religion, reimagined for a world without the Temple or sacrifice, and based not on the rites and sacrifices of Moses, but on the teaching of the Rabbis and the “Sages”—and continuing in their opposition to Jesus of Nazareth and the emerging Christian Church.
In the next part we will examine this religion, its origins and what “providential purpose” it has in the world today.
References
| ↑1 | https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/it/speeches/1980/november/documents/hf_jp_ii_spe_19801117_ebrei-magonza.html |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | See the upcoming Part IV of the Cardinal Aveline study for further details. |
| ↑3 | Source |
| ↑4 | [T]he law shall go forth out of Sion, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem. Micheas 4.2 |
| ↑5 | They therefore that received his word were baptized: and there were added in that day about three thousand souls. (Acts 2.41) |
| ↑6 | And the word of the Lord increased: and the number of the disciples was multiplied in Jerusalem exceedingly. A great multitude also of the priests obeyed the faith. Acts 6.7 |
| ↑7 | And now saith the Lord, that formed me from the womb to be his servant, that I may bring back Jacob unto him, and Israel will not be gathered together: and I am glorified in the eyes of the Lord, and my God is made my strength. And he said: It is a small thing that thou shouldst be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to convert the dregs of Israel. Behold, I have given thee to be the light of the Gentiles, that thou mayst be my salvation even to the farthest part of the earth. (Isaias 49.5-6) Behold my servant, I will uphold him: my elect, my soul delighteth in him: I have given my spirit upon him, he shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not cry, nor have respect to person, neither shall his voice be heard abroad. The bruised reed he shall not break, and smoking flax he shall not quench, he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. He shall not be sad, nor troublesome, till he set judgment in the earth, and the islands shall wait for his law. Thus saith the Lord God that created the heavens, and stretched them out: that established the earth, and the things that spring out of it: that giveth breath to the people upon it, and spirit to them that tread thereon. I the Lord have called thee in justice, and taken thee by the hand, and preserved thee. And I have given thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles: That thou mightestopen the eyes of the blind, and bring forth the prisoner out of prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house. I the Lord, this is my name: I will not give my glory to another, nor my praise to graven things. (Isaias 42.1-8) |
| ↑8 | “And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord of hosts, that I will destroy the names of idols out of the earth, and they shall be remembered no more.” (Zacaharias 13.2) |
| ↑9 | “… the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the covering waters of the sea.” (Isaias 11.9) “And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be prepared in the top of the mountains, and high above the hills: and people shall flow to it. “And many nations shall come in haste, and say: Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob: and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth out of Sion, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem.” (Micheas 4.1-2 |
| ↑10 | Cf. Isaias 54.2-3, 66.19-20, as well as all the texts of the Old Testament that speak of the kings of the nations submitting to and serving the Messias. Rabbi Nissan Dovid Dubov writes, from the Jewish perspective: “All the nations of the world will recognize Moshiach to be a world leader, and will accept his dominion.” ‘What Is the Jewish Belief About Moshiach (Messiah)?’ Chabad.org. |
| ↑11 | St Athanasius, On the Incarnation, Chapter VI, n. 40. Available here. This section does not appear in some versions of the text, but appears in Latin and Greek in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca Vol. 25, available here. |
| ↑12 | Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, n. 32. |
| ↑13 | The full text is as follows:
Is this anecdotal text genuine? It was published in newspapers France and Belgium in 1938, although it does not appear on the Vatican website, or in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis. It was not reported by Osservatore Romano or the Vatican Radio, according to John Connelly, who adds:
John Connelly, ‘Nazi Racism & the Church: How converts showed the way to resist,’ Commonweal, 12 February 2012. |
| ↑14 | St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia IIae, Q. 103, A. 4, Ad. 1 |
| ↑15 | Council of Florence, ‘Bull of union with the Copts,’ Session XI, 4 February 1442. |
| ↑16 | “All ceremonies are professions of faith, in which the interior worship of God consists. Now man can make profession of his inward faith, by deeds as well as by words: and in either profession, if he make a false declaration, he sins mortally. Now, though our faith in Christ is the same as that of the fathers of old; yet, since they came before Christ, whereas we come after Him, the same faith is expressed in different words, by us and by them. For by them was it said: ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,’ where the verbs are in the future tense: whereas we express the same by means of verbs in the past tense, and say that she ‘conceived and bore.’ In like manner the ceremonies of the Old Law betokened Christ as having yet to be born and to suffer: whereas our sacraments signify Him as already born and having suffered. Consequently, just as it would be a mortal sin now for anyone, in making a profession of faith, to say that Christ is yet to be born, which the fathers of old said devoutly and truthfully; so too it would be a mortal sin now to observe those ceremonies which the fathers of old fulfilled with devotion and fidelity. Such is the teaching Augustine (Contra Faust. xix, 16), who says: ‘It is no longer promised that He shall be born, shall suffer and rise again, truths of which their sacraments were a kind of image: but it is declared that He is already born, has suffered and risen again; of which our sacraments, in which Christiansshare, are the actual representation.’ St Thomas, ibid. |
| ↑17 | Council of Florence, ibid. |
| ↑18 | Pope Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, nn. 29-30 |
| ↑19 | St Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, Ch. 11 |
| ↑20 | Consider the truly terrifying “promises” of Leviticus 26:
This does not mean that the Old Covenant itself remains in force, as a superficial reading of the chapter might suggest: on the contrary, having served its purpose, the Covenant was fulfilled, and the promises made to the Jewish people now subsist—more fully and definitively—in the New and Eternal Covenant of Christ, available both for them and for all men. |
| ↑21 | Such is the interpretation of George Haydock in his Bible, and Cornelius a Lapide in his commentary Vol. XXI, Ch. II: “Thou art blasphemed,” that is, thou art assailed with insult and reproach, and reckoned and described by the Jews not as faithful and devout, but as impious and execrable—as an enemy, as it were, of the Law and of Judaism—because thou art a follower of Christ. But these are not true Jews, that is, not true confessors and worshippers of God, as Judas was (from whom the name “Jew” is derived), and as their fathers were, for they persecute Christ. For, as the Apostle says (Rom. II, 28): “For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, but he is a Jew who is one inwardly.” This is the true Jew—God’s worshipper and confessor—“whose praise is not from men, but from God.” « Blasphemaris, » id est injuria lacesseris, et non fidelis et pias, sed quasi legis et Judaismi hostis, utpote Christi assecla, impius et execrandus existimaris ae diceris a Judais, qui so veros esse religionis Deique cultores mentiuntur. Hi enim non sunt veriJudaei, id est Deum confitentes et colentes, uti fuerunt Judas, a quo dieti sunt Judaei, aliique patres eorum, quia hi Christum persequuntur. Nam, ut ait Apostolus, Rom. II, 28: « Non qui in manifesto, Judaeus est; sed qui in abscondito, Judaeus est. » Hie scilicet verus Judaeus, Deique cultor et confessor est, «cujus laus non ex hominibus, sed ex Deo est. » |
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