The strongest Christian case
The argument deserves to be stated in its strongest form. In Matthew 5:17-18 Jesus says:
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished."
Traditional Christian interpreters have often read this as a decisive answer to the charge that Christianity cancels the earlier revelation. Jesus does not present himself as an enemy of Moses or the prophets. He stands inside Israel's Scriptures and claims to bring them to their intended goal. The Greek verbs matter. "Abolish" translates kataluo, a verb that can mean to tear down, demolish, or annul. "Fulfill" translates pleroo, to fill up, complete, bring to fullness, or bring to realization. On this reading, Jesus is not revoking God's word; he is completing its purpose.
This is not a weak argument. It is deeply rooted in the New Testament's own way of reading the Old Testament. Matthew repeatedly uses fulfillment language: Jesus' birth, ministry, suffering, and mission are said to fulfill the Scriptures. Luke 24:44 has the risen Jesus say that "everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled." Paul can say that Christ is the "end" or "goal" of the law in Romans 10:4, depending on how one reads telos. Hebrews presents the sacrificial system not as meaningless or mistaken, but as a "shadow" of heavenly realities and of the good things to come.
Many serious Christian theologians therefore argue that the movement from old covenant to new covenant is not cancellation but consummation. Augustine's famous formula, often paraphrased, captures the thought: the New Testament is hidden in the Old, and the Old is unveiled in the New. In Reformed covenant theology, the moral will of God remains continuous, while ceremonial and civil aspects of the Mosaic covenant reach their fulfillment in Christ. Lutheran theology similarly distinguishes law and gospel, while still treating the Old Testament as God's word. Dispensational interpreters often place greater stress on distinct economies in God's plan, but even many of them deny that this implies divine inconsistency. Scholars such as D.A. Carson, R.T. France, N.T. Wright, Douglas Moo, and Thomas Schreiner, though differing in important ways, all recognize that the New Testament claims continuity with Israel's Scriptures rather than simple rejection of them.
The Christian steelman, then, is this: God did not issue one command, discover a problem, and then replace it with a contradictory command. Rather, the law functioned as covenant, pedagogy, prophecy, type, and shadow. In Christ, its goal arrives. Sacrifices cease because the true sacrifice has come. The temple loses its centrality because God's presence is now focused in Christ and, by extension, his people. Circumcision is no longer required of Gentile believers because the covenant family is now marked by faith and the Spirit. The earlier revelation is not false; it is preparatory. It is not thrown away; it is fulfilled.
Why this reading has real biblical strength
Several New Testament passages strongly support this Christian reading. Matthew 5 itself does not sound like a manifesto of abolition. Jesus warns against relaxing the commandments and teaches a righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and Pharisees. His antitheses - "You have heard that it was said... but I say to you" - are not always straightforward reversals. Often they deepen the command: murder is traced to anger, adultery to lust, retaliation to enemy-love. In these cases, Jesus intensifies the law's moral demand rather than cancels it.
Paul also insists that faith does not overthrow the law. Romans 3:31 says, "Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law." Romans 7 calls the law "holy," and the commandment "holy and righteous and good." Hebrews, too, does not mock the sacrificial system. It treats it as divinely ordained but incomplete. The problem is not that God gave Israel a bad law, but that the law could not bring final perfection.
So the traditional claim establishes something important: the New Testament writers do not think they are rejecting Israel's God, Israel's Scriptures, or the divine origin of the Mosaic covenant. Christianity, at its best, is not Marcionism. It does not say the Old Testament is the product of a lesser deity, nor that the law was simply evil. The canonical Christian position is that the same God speaks through Moses, the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles.
The internal difficulty
The difficulty is that the stronger form of the argument often says more than the New Testament itself permits. If the claim is merely that the Old Testament is fulfilled rather than rendered false, the New Testament supports it. But if the claim is that no divine command is ever superseded by a later divine command, the New Testament contains too much contrary evidence.
The clearest example is circumcision. Genesis 17 does not treat circumcision as a minor custom: God says that the covenant is to be marked "throughout your generations," that it is "an everlasting covenant" in Abraham's flesh, and that the uncircumcised male has broken the covenant. Yet Acts 15 decides that Gentile believers in Christ are not to be compelled to receive circumcision. Paul goes further in Galatians 5:2-4 when circumcision is embraced as an obligation for covenant standing or justification: "if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you." Whatever theological explanation is given, the covenantal obligation has changed for Gentile members of the people of God. A sign once commanded as central to Abraham's covenant is not imposed on Gentile Christians and, in Paul's polemical context, becomes spiritually dangerous if treated as necessary for belonging to God's justified people.
Food laws provide another strong case, though it should be handled carefully. Leviticus 11 distinguishes clean and unclean animals. Mark 7:19 is often rendered, "Thus he declared all foods clean," based on the participial phrase katharizon panta ta bromata ("cleansing all foods"). Many scholars take this as Mark's editorial inference from Jesus' teaching about what defiles a person; others note that the immediate dispute concerns handwashing and that bromata can mean "foods" in the ordinary Jewish sense, not necessarily every animal forbidden in Leviticus. Even with that caution, the broader New Testament trajectory is hard to deny: Acts 10-11 uses the clean/unclean animal vision to authorize Gentile inclusion, Romans 14 treats dietary scruples as matters of conscience rather than covenant membership, and 1 Corinthians 8-10 addresses food offered to idols in terms of loyalty to God and concern for others rather than Levitical purity categories. The old food distinctions no longer govern the people of God in the same covenantal way.
The temple and priesthood are even more explicit. Hebrews 7:12 says, "For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well." That sentence is difficult to reconcile with the claim that the Bible contains no abrogation in any meaningful sense. Hebrews 8:13, reflecting on the new covenant promise in Jeremiah 31, says, "In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away." The word "obsolete" is not an outsider's accusation; it is the argument of a New Testament homily addressed to Christians.
Ephesians 2:15 is also significant. It says that Christ has made peace between Jew and Gentile by "abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances." The verb here is not Matthew's kataluo but katargeo, meaning to render inoperative, nullify, or set aside. Christian interpreters rightly debate the scope of "the law of commandments" here. It need not mean that every moral command is abolished. But the verse plainly speaks of some aspect of the law being rendered inoperative through Christ.
Fulfillment can include supersession
The key question is what "fulfillment" means. In ordinary theological use, fulfillment often includes the ending of a prior form because its purpose has been reached. A promise is fulfilled when the promised event arrives. A shadow is fulfilled when the reality appears. A tutor's role ends when the child comes of age. These are not acts of contempt, but they are real changes.
Paul uses precisely this logic in Galatians 3. The law was a guardian or custodian "until Christ came." But "now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian." That is fulfillment language, but it is also supersession of a previous covenantal administration. The believer's relation to the Mosaic law is not what it was before Christ.
This is why Christian scholarship often distinguishes between moral continuity and covenantal discontinuity. The command not to murder remains, but animal sacrifice does not. Love of God and neighbor remains, but circumcision is not required of Gentiles. Sexual holiness remains, but purity regulations concerning foods, fabrics, and corpse impurity are not applied in the same way. Such distinctions may be theologically coherent, but they are still distinctions introduced by later revelation within the Christian canon.
Therefore, the claim "Christ fulfilled rather than abolished the Law" does not by itself prove "no earlier divine command is ever set aside." It proves that, for the New Testament writers, the setting aside happens by completion rather than by repudiation. That is an important difference, but it is not the same as denying all abrogation in the sense of changed covenantal obligation.
Matthew 5 in context
Matthew 5:17 is sometimes made to carry more weight than it can bear. Jesus says that he did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. But the phrase "the Law and the Prophets" often means the whole scriptural witness, not merely a list of commandments. To fulfill the Law and the Prophets is to bring Scripture's story, promises, types, and demands to their appointed goal.
Matthew himself also keeps fulfillment from meaning mere preservation of the status quo. Jesus' Sabbath controversies are not simple Sabbath abolition; in Matthew 12 he argues from David, the priests, Hosea's "mercy and not sacrifice," and the lawfulness of doing good on the Sabbath. Still, the point is that Jesus claims authority to interpret the law around his own messianic mission, even saying that "something greater than the temple" is present (Matthew 12:6). At the Last Supper he speaks of "my blood of the covenant" (Matthew 26:28), echoing Exodus 24. The best-attested text of Matthew does not include the word "new" here, unlike Luke 22:20 and 1 Corinthians 11:25, but the saying belongs to the wider New Testament claim that Jesus' death inaugurates the promised new covenant. Matthew does not portray Jesus as lawless, but neither does he portray the Mosaic covenant as continuing unchanged after Jesus' death and resurrection.
Even Matthew 5:18 includes the phrase "until all is accomplished." Interpreters differ over exactly what this means: the end of the age, the completion of Jesus' mission, or the accomplishment of everything Scripture anticipates. But the verse itself contains a teleological frame. The law remains until its intended accomplishment. The debate is not whether fulfillment matters, but what happens once fulfillment arrives.
What the argument does and does not establish
The argument establishes that Christianity has a serious internal account of continuity. The New Testament does not present God as correcting a mistake. It does not teach that the Old Testament was false revelation. It does not deny that the Mosaic law was divinely given. It presents Christ as the one in whom law, prophecy, priesthood, sacrifice, temple, kingship, and covenant reach their intended climax.
But the argument does not establish that the Bible contains no supersession of earlier commands by later revelation. The New Testament itself says that believers are not under the law in the same way, that circumcision is not required, that food distinctions no longer define holiness, that the priesthood has changed, that the first covenant is obsolete, and that certain commandments in ordinances have been rendered inoperative. These are not marginal texts. They are central to Acts, Paul, and Hebrews.
Nor does the fulfillment argument, by itself, establish the deity of Jesus. It certainly gives Jesus an extraordinary role. He speaks with authority, interprets Torah, embodies Israel's destiny, inaugurates the covenant, and stands at the center of God's redemptive plan. In broader Christian theology, these claims are connected with texts that are genuinely much stronger evidence for traditional high Christology, especially John 20:28 ("My Lord and my God"), Titus 2:13 ("our great God and Savior Jesus Christ," on the common Granville Sharp reading), Hebrews 1:8 (where the Son is addressed in the language of Psalm 45, "Your throne, O God"), Romans 9:5 (depending on punctuation, plausibly calling Christ "God over all"), and John 1:1. Those passages deserve serious engagement on their own terms. But Matthew 5:17 alone shows Jesus as the fulfiller of Scripture, not as an explicit ontological statement that he is God. A high messianic claim is not automatically the same as a Nicene metaphysical claim.
A balanced conclusion
The best Christian version of the argument is not that nothing changes from Moses to Christ. Something plainly changes. The best version is that the change is not arbitrary cancellation but purposeful fulfillment. That distinction is meaningful and should be acknowledged.
Still, if "abrogation" means that a later divine act or revelation changes the binding force of an earlier command, then the New Testament does contain such a principle. The old covenant is fulfilled, but it is also surpassed. Sacrifice is fulfilled and therefore no longer practiced. Circumcision is fulfilled and therefore not required of Gentiles. The Levitical priesthood is fulfilled and therefore replaced by Christ's priesthood. Food laws are fulfilled and therefore no longer function as covenant boundary markers.
So the statement "Christ fulfilled rather than abolished the Law" is biblically grounded, but it must be carefully defined. It protects the coherence of Scripture against the charge of crude contradiction. It does not prove that every earlier command remains binding, nor that the Bible lacks covenantal supersession. The New Testament's own position is more nuanced: God's word does not fail, but some of its covenantal forms reach their appointed end in Christ.