The Hebrew Roots Movement rests on a foundational claim that is rarely examined and almost never argued for - it is simply assumed, stated, and repeated until it feels self-evident. The claim is this: the Torah is the perfect, eternal, universal expression of God's will. It is not merely Israel's covenant charter for a specific period of redemptive history. It is God's definitive moral standard for all humanity in all ages - and therefore the standard that Gentile believers in Jesus are obligated to observe today.

This assumption is the load-bearing wall of the entire structure. If Torah is eternal and universal, then keeping Torah follows naturally. If it is covenantal and historical - given to Israel at Sinai, serving a specific purpose in redemptive history, reaching its intended terminus in Christ - then the entire edifice collapses.

The movement defends this assumption with appeals to God's immutability, with selected proof texts, and with the observation that Jesus himself kept Torah. But there is a body of evidence they consistently avoid - the words of Jesus himself, recorded in John's Gospel, in which he refers to Torah not as his own eternal standard but as your law and their law. Three times. In three distinct contexts. Using the possessive pronoun to place Torah at a deliberate distance from himself.

If Torah is God's perfect eternal standard - Jesus's own definitive self-expression - these three statements are inexplicable. If Torah is Israel's covenant charter that Jesus came to fulfil and transcend, they make perfect sense.

The Three Statements - Examined in Order

All three appear in John's Gospel. This is significant. John is the most deliberately theological of the four gospels. Matthew wrote for a Jewish audience navigating the relationship between Jesus and Torah. Luke wrote as a historian for Theophilus. But John writes with a specific theological architecture - he opens with the Logos, identifies Jesus as the one through whom grace and truth came in contrast to the law given through Moses (John 1:17), and builds a sustained case for Jesus's identity as the one who stands above every category Israel had available. John does not use language carelessly. When Jesus says something three times in John's Gospel, John recorded it because it carries theological weight.

John 8:17 - Your Law

The context is a confrontation with the Pharisees over the testimony Jesus bears to himself. Jesus appeals to the principle of two witnesses: "In your Law it is written that the testimony of two people is true. I am the one who bears witness about myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness about me."

The Pharisees are Torah experts. Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy 19:15 - a passage from their own scriptures, from the covenant given to their ancestors at Sinai. And he says: your Law. Not our Law. Not the Law. Not God's Law. Your Law.

He is citing Torah as their framework - the covenantal inheritance of the Jewish people - while positioning himself as the one who stands outside that framework as its witness and its fulfilment. The two witnesses he identifies are himself and the Father. He is not appealing to Torah as the ground of his own authority. He is appealing to Torah as a framework his interlocutors accept in order to demonstrate something about himself that transcends it.

John 10:34 - Your Law Again

The confrontation has escalated. The Jewish leaders are about to stone Jesus for claiming to be God. Jesus responds: "Is it not written in your Law: 'I said, you are gods'? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came - and Scripture cannot be broken - do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God'?"

He quotes Psalm 82:6 - which in Jewish tradition was part of the broader Torah, the Law as the entire scriptural inheritance. Again: your Law. The possessive is deliberate. Jesus is doing something subtle and powerful here - he is arguing from within their framework to a conclusion that transcends it. He uses what is written in their Law to establish something about himself that their Law could never fully contain.

A man who understood himself to be Torah's eternal author and universal standard would not say your Law when quoting it. You do not say your book about something you wrote. The pronoun places Jesus outside Torah as its external referent - the one to whom it points - not inside Torah as its subject.

John 15:25 - Their Law

This is the sharpest instance. Jesus is speaking to his own disciples - not to hostile Pharisees or a crowd seeking to stone him. He is explaining why the world hates both him and them: "But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: 'They hated me without a cause.'"

Their Law. Speaking to his own Jewish disciples about their shared scriptures, Jesus uses the third person possessive. He is quoting Psalm 35:19 and 69:4 and calling it their Law - the Law of those who hate him, the covenant framework of those who reject him.

This is not rhetorical carelessness. This is Jesus, in his Farewell Discourse - the most intimate and theologically dense teaching he gives before the cross - deliberately framing Torah as the possession of others. He is not disowning Scripture. He is saying that Torah itself, rightly understood, testifies against those who hate him and vindicates him. But it is their Law that does so - not his own self-definition.

John 7:19 - An Additional Witness

A fourth passage, less often noticed, confirms the pattern. Jesus is addressing the Jewish leaders who are seeking to kill him: "Has not Moses given you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law."

Moses gave you the law. The law is Moses's gift to Israel - the covenant charter given through the mediator at Sinai. Jesus frames it precisely: it belongs to them through Moses. The giving, the reception, the obligation - all of these are indexed to Israel's covenantal relationship with God mediated through Moses. Jesus is not presenting Torah as the universal eternal standard binding on all humanity. He is presenting it as what it is in redemptive history - God's specific covenantal instruction to a specific people through a specific mediator for a specific purpose.

The Significance of John as a Theological Writer

John's Gospel is not a transcript. It is a theologically shaped account of Jesus's life and ministry, written by an eyewitness who had decades to reflect on what he saw and heard. The opening of the gospel establishes its interpretive framework immediately: the Word was with God, the Word was God, the Word became flesh. And then in verse 17 - "The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ."

This is John's controlling statement about the relationship between Torah and Jesus. They are not the same. They are sequential. Torah came through Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus. The contrast is deliberate - not that Torah was ungracious or false, but that Jesus brings something Torah could not bring, something Torah was always pointing toward but could not itself deliver.

Within this theological framework, Jesus's repeated use of your law and their law is not accidental. John recorded these statements because they express something true about Jesus's relationship to Torah - he stands above it as its fulfilment, its destination, its living content. He can reference Torah as belonging to others precisely because he is the one to whom it belongs in a different and deeper sense - not as its subject but as its subject matter.

The Galatians 4:4 Confirmation

Paul's statement in Galatians 4:4 provides the theological framework that explains Jesus's distancing language: "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law."

Born under the law. Jesus entered the jurisdiction of Torah as a participant in the Mosaic covenant - fully, truly, without remainder. He kept Torah because he was born into the covenant community for whom Torah was the defining covenant charter. His Torah observance was not evidence that Torah is the eternal universal standard for all believers. It was the precondition for his redemptive work - he had to live under the law in order to redeem those under the law.

The one who redeems prisoners from a legal system is not identical with that legal system. He enters it, operates within it, and then liberates others from its jurisdiction. Jesus's relationship to Torah is redemptive, not definitional. He was born under it to redeem from it - and having accomplished that redemption, those he redeemed are no longer under it. They are under him.

What the HRM Cannot Explain

The Hebrew Roots Movement insists that Torah is the eternal perfect universal expression of God's will - Jesus's own commandments, the standard he came to confirm and extend to all nations. If this is true, the three possessive pronouns in John's Gospel are impossible to explain.

Why would Jesus say your Law when citing the eternal universal standard that belongs equally to him and to all humanity? You do not say your book about something written for everyone. You do not say your standard about something you yourself authored as your eternal self-expression. The possessive creates distance. It assigns ownership. It places the speaker outside the thing being referenced.

Jesus is placing himself outside Torah - not as one who dismisses it, but as one who stands above it as its living fulfilment. He can say your law because Torah is Israel's covenantal inheritance, given through Moses, serving a specific purpose in redemptive history - and he is the one to whom that history was always heading.

When he issues his own commandments, he does not say: "keep the Torah." He says: "A new commandment I give to you." He uses the first person possessive - my commandments - and fills that possessive with entirely new content. Love as I have loved you. Believe in my name. Love one another.

Torah was your law. His commandments are his. And he was careful, in John's Gospel, to make sure we understood the difference.

"In your Law it is written that the testimony of two people is true." - Jesus, John 8:17

This article is the first of two examining the HRM's confusion between Torah and the commandments of Jesus. The second article - Commandments or Torah? What Jesus Actually Meant by 'Keep My Commandments' - examines the Greek distinction between nomos and entolē, and what the apostles understood Jesus's commandments to actually be.