Flickr-User: upturnedface

In my article Is the Quran Based on the Bible?, I wrote that Jewish sages long ago moderated the harshness of Old Testament Law regarding capital punishment. In response, a reader disagreed with me saying that it was due to Jesus, who offered forgiveness and mercy in place of the old barbaric laws.

There are no historical writings of Jesus coetaneous with his life, so for the sake of this argument we will assume the existence of Jesus:

Yes, in the time of Jesus there was a movement to make Jewish Law more civilized. Before that time, Jewish written law was contained in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. An oral Jewish tradition existed as well. That movement started with one of the great Jewish Sages, Hillel the Elder, who died a decade after Jesus' presumed birth. Hillel helped begin the development of the Talmud and Mishnah to replace both the written and oral Jewish traditions. Just so you know, the Talmud is today the basis for all codes of Jewish law. It is in these books that the rabbis declared that the death penalty as prescribed in the Torah was meant only for historical study and not to be followed.

Hillel and the Jewish Golden Rule

It is Hillel who gave us the Jewish Golden Rule: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn." Thus, the whole of Jewish Law can be boiled down to "Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do to you."

The Christian version, inspired by Hillel, goes like this: "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

The difference between the two versions is that the former proscribes the doing of evil against one's fellow man while the latter prescribes the doing of good toward one's fellow man.

The abrogation of capital punishment by Jewish sages two millennia ago was the result of abiding by Hillel's urging Jews to do no evil toward potentially innocent men and certainly nothing to do with wanting to be merciful toward murderers.