Is it OK to add to the law of Moses?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

This entry sets the Torah's explicit canon-protection clause against Matthew's portrait of Jesus issuing what reads, on its surface, as expanded legislation. It is one of the cleaner cases of the covenant-expansion problem because Deuteronomy's prohibition is verbally precise and Matthew's antithesis formula is verbally aggressive.

Deuteronomy 4:2 reads *lōʾ tōsipû ʿal-haddābār ʾăšer ʾānōkî mĕṣawweh ʾetkem wĕlōʾ tigrĕʿû mimmennû* — 'you shall not add to the word which I command you, nor subtract from it.' The pairing of addition (*ysp*) and subtraction (*grʿ*) is a fixed legal idiom; Deuteronomy 13:1 (Heb; 12:32 Eng) repeats it almost verbatim, and the same 'canon formula' appears across the ancient Near East (Weinfeld notes its parallels in Mesopotamian and Hittite treaty-curse traditions, where it protects the inviolability of a sworn document). Tigay underscores that in its Deuteronomic context the clause guards the completeness and sufficiency of the covenant stipulations as delivered.

Matthew 5:21-22 has Jesus cite the sixth commandment (*ou phoneuseis*, LXX Exod 20:13 / Deut 5:17) and extend liability to the angry man, the one who says *rhaka*, and the one who says *mōre*. The governing formula — *ēkousate hoti errethē tois archaiois ... egō de legō hymin* — is structurally contrastive. Whether the *de* is adversative ('but I say') or merely additive ('and I say') is debated, and the answer affects the charge: an additive reading supports 'deepening,' an adversative reading supports 'overriding.' Either way, content not present in the Mosaic text is being supplied on Jesus's own authority.

The strongest apologetic case — Carson, Blomberg, France, with Wright supplying the theological frame — distinguishes adding to Torah from interpreting or intensifying it. Jesus, they argue, exposes the commandment's deeper intent: anger is the root from which murder grows, so prohibiting anger is exegesis, not legislation. For the murder/anger antithesis this is genuinely plausible, since rabbinic tradition itself drew ethical inferences from the Decalogue, and Deuteronomy 4:2 was never read in Judaism as forbidding interpretive expansion (the entire halakhic enterprise presupposes it does not).

The defense weakens across the wider antithesis block. In 5:31-32 Jesus restricts what Deuteronomy 24:1-4 plainly permits — that is functionally *subtraction* (*grʿ*), which Deut 4:2 forbids in the same breath as addition. In 5:33-37 his *mē omosai holōs* — 'do not swear at all' — overrides the oath-regulating provisions of Numbers 30 and Deuteronomy 23:22-24, which assume and govern vow-making. 'Interpretation, not addition' cannot easily absorb a command that cancels standing Torah permissions and obligations.

The critical reading (Davies-Allison, Luz, and especially Allison's *The New Moses*) is that Matthew deliberately stages Jesus as a new Moses: the ascent of the mountain in 5:1, the five great discourses echoing the Pentateuch, and the antitheses as a new lawgiving. On this view Matthew's Christology requires Jesus to occupy the position Deut 4:2 reserves to God alone — the one whose word may neither be added to nor diminished. The antitheses are thus less a violation Matthew overlooked than a claim Matthew intended: Jesus speaks with the authority of the lawgiver, not merely an interpreter of the law. Read that way, the tension with Deut 4:2 is real and theological, not accidental.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine tension. The 'interpretation not addition' defense plausibly covers the murder/anger antithesis but breaks on the divorce and oath antitheses, where Jesus narrows or annuls explicit Mosaic legislation — precisely what Deuteronomy 4:2 prohibits.