Scholars know that many Jewish teachers at the time of Jesus—teachers like Hillel and Shammai, Jesus’ contemporaries—engaged in moral interpretation of the law. One famous story tells how Hillel answered a student who asked him to teach the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel replied, “Whatever you do not want others to do to you, do not do to them. That is the whole of the Torah.” Yet even a liberal like Hillel would have opposed a movement that claimed to reinterpret the Torah morally but put aside the ritual precepts that define Jewish identity. Many Jews of the first
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