One of the more ambitious HRM arguments about Matthew 5:17 does not focus primarily on the word "fulfil." It focuses on the phrase "the Law and the Prophets" - and it tries to turn that phrase into a comprehensive, permanently binding canonical obligation. The argument runs like this: Jesus did not say he came to fulfil "the law." He said he came to fulfil "the Law and the Prophets" - the entire Hebrew scriptures as a unified body of God's instruction. Not one jot or tittle shall pass from any of it until heaven and earth pass away. Therefore every commandment God ever gave - across the Torah, across the prophets, across the entire Old Testament canon - remains permanently binding on all believers. The scope is not just the 613 commandments of the Mosaic law. It is everything God said through Moses and the prophets combined.

This is a broader and more sophisticated version of the standard Matthew 5:17 argument. It deserves a direct, thorough response - because Jesus himself, in the same Gospel, in the same mouth, using the same phrase, has already given one.

How Jesus Uses "The Law and the Prophets" in Matthew

The phrase "the Law and the Prophets" appears five times across Matthew and Luke. In every single use, it functions not as a list of commandments to obey but as a body of scripture that points forward, anticipates something, or has a direction and a destination. Examining all five uses is the most efficient way to establish what Jesus means when he uses this phrase - from his own mouth, across multiple contexts.

Matthew 5:17 - the verse in question: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them." The HRM reads this as: I have come to confirm the ongoing binding authority of every commandment across the entire Hebrew canon. We will return to why this reading cannot survive the context.

Matthew 7:12 - "So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets." Jesus says the entire Law and the Prophets is summarised in the Golden Rule. Notice what he does not say. He does not say: therefore observe every commandment of the Law and the Prophets. He says: the entire Law and the Prophets is captured in this one principle of love. He is not pointing people toward comprehensive commandment observance. He is pointing them toward the heart principle that the entire canon was always expressing. The Law and the Prophets is the material Jesus distils, not the programme he prescribes.

Matthew 22:37–40 - "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." Everything in the Law and the Prophets hangs on love. The entire canonical complex - Law and Prophets together - is suspended from two love commandments. Jesus is not saying: therefore keep all 613 plus everything the prophets ever said. He is saying: the entire edifice points to and is anchored in love. The Law and the Prophets is the structure that love supports and expresses. The destination, the governing principle, the summary is love - not the comprehensive observance of every item within the structure.

Luke 16:16 - "The Law and the Prophets were until John. Since then the good news of the kingdom of God is proclaimed, and everyone forces his way into it." This is the verse the HRM argument cannot survive. Jesus uses the exact phrase "the Law and the Prophets" and explicitly assigns it a terminal point: until John. The era of the Law and the Prophets ran until John the Baptist. Something new begins with John - the proclamation of the kingdom of God. The phrase "the Law and the Prophets" here denotes a historical period with a beginning and an end, not a permanent binding obligation with no expiration.

Luke 24:44 - "Everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled." The Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms - the entire Hebrew canon - is here described as things written about Jesus that must be fulfilled. The risen Christ, explaining the scriptures to his disciples after the resurrection, describes the entire Old Testament as a body of material written about him - prophecies, types, patterns, anticipations - that his life, death, and resurrection brought to completion. The canon is not a list of requirements for believers. It is a witness to Christ.

Five uses of "the Law and the Prophets" from Jesus's own mouth. Not one of them functions as a comprehensive binding obligation list. All five describe the Hebrew scriptures as a unified body of anticipatory revelation pointing toward a destination - love, Christ, the kingdom, fulfilment. The HRM's reading of Matthew 5:17 requires Jesus to mean something by this phrase that he demonstrably never means anywhere else he uses it.

Luke 16:16 - The Verse That Ends the Argument

Luke 16:16 deserves extended treatment because the HRM almost never engages it directly, and the reason is obvious: it is the most direct statement Jesus ever made about the era of the Law and the Prophets, and it assigns that era a definite end point.

"The Law and the Prophets were until John."

The verb is imperfect: ēsan - they were. Past tense. Until John. The Law and the Prophets governed the era of anticipation - the long period of covenant history from Moses through the closing of the prophetic canon. That era ran until John the Baptist. With John, something changes. The kingdom of God is proclaimed. The era of fulfilment begins.

This does not mean the Hebrew scriptures are discarded or irrelevant. Luke 24:44 shows they are the very scriptures Jesus appeals to in order to explain his own person and work. But their function changes. They were the anticipatory period - the era of promise and shadow and pointing-forward. That era ended with John. Now the one they were pointing toward has arrived, has proclaimed the kingdom, has died and risen, and has sent the Spirit.

The HRM argument from Matthew 5:17 requires "the Law and the Prophets" to be permanently binding on all believers in all ages. Luke 16:16, from the same speaker, assigns the era of the Law and the Prophets a terminal point within history. You cannot simultaneously hold that the Law and the Prophets are permanently binding without expiration and that the Law and the Prophets were until John. These are contradictory claims about the same phrase from the same person. One of them has to give way - and it is not the one where Jesus is explicitly addressing the question of the era's duration.

The standard HRM response to Luke 16:16 is that "until John" refers to the law being valid from the beginning until John, not that the law ended with John. John marks the beginning of a new phase but the law continues through and beyond him. But this reading requires "until" (mechri) to mean something it does not naturally mean. In ordinary Greek usage, "X was until Y" means X's operative period ran up to the point of Y and a change occurred at Y. The sentence "the Law and the Prophets were until John; since then the kingdom of God is proclaimed" draws an explicit contrast between two eras: the era of the Law and the Prophets, and the era of kingdom proclamation that begins with John. The contrast requires a transition, not a continuity.

The "Jot and Tittle" Clause - Both Untils

Matthew 5:18 is the verse the HRM camps in: "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."

The HRM quotes the first half - until heaven and earth pass away - and stops. But the sentence contains two until clauses, not one, and the second is the interpretive key to the whole.

Until all is accomplished. The Greek is heōs an panta genētai - until all things come to pass, are accomplished, happen. The HRM reads "all things" as the full eschatological programme - second coming, millennium, new creation. Nothing has passed from the law because those events are still future.

But "all is accomplished" cannot be referring to events still thousands of years away in Jesus's future, for a simple reason: the statement is meant to answer an immediate concern. Jesus says "do not think I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets" - he is pre-empting the charge that his ministry represents a break with the Hebrew scriptures. He answers the concern with a present and near-term guarantee: not one iota will pass until all is accomplished. The guarantee addresses the concern. If "all is accomplished" means the eschaton, the guarantee does not address the concern at all - it simply defers it by two thousand years.

Romans 10:4 says: "Christ is the telos of the law." Telos means end, goal, completion, destination. Christ is what the law was always heading toward. He is its accomplished end. When John 19:30 records Jesus's final word from the cross - tetelestai, "it is finished, accomplished" - the word shares the same root as telos. The accomplished thing is the redemptive work of Christ. That is what "until all is accomplished" points toward - the completion of the work the Law and the Prophets were anticipating.

The two until clauses are not redundant. The first - until heaven and earth pass away - establishes the cosmic permanence of the scriptures as testimony. The second - until all is accomplished - establishes the temporal horizon of the law's binding administration: until the event the law was always pointing toward arrives. Both clauses together say: the scriptures are permanent witnesses, and their administration runs until their fulfilment arrives. The fulfilment has arrived. The witness remains. The administration of anticipation has ended.

The Phrase Functions as a Canonical Whole - But Not in the Way the HRM Needs

The HRM is actually right about one thing: "the Law and the Prophets" in Jewish usage designated the entire Hebrew canon as a unified body - not just the Pentateuch but the complete scriptures of Israel. This is correct.

But this makes the argument worse for the HRM, not better. Because if "the Law and the Prophets" is the entire canonical scriptures as a unified whole, then everything Jesus says about that phrase applies to the entire canonical scriptures as a unified whole - including Luke 16:16 (the Law and the Prophets were until John) and Luke 24:44 (everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets must be fulfilled) and Matthew 22:40 (all the Law and the Prophets hang on love).

The HRM wants to claim the entire canon as a binding obligation. But Jesus describes the entire canon as a witness to himself, as a period that ran until John, and as a structure that hangs on love. If the entire canon is in view - as the HRM correctly argues - then the entire canon points to Christ, ended its operative era with John, and is summarised in love. The HRM's own broader reading of the phrase produces conclusions they do not want.

Furthermore, the prophets contain material that no HRM community observes. The prophets include commands to specific kings, judgments on specific nations, agricultural and civic instructions for the theocratic state of Israel, warnings about specific historical situations that no longer exist. If "the Law and the Prophets" as a binding canonical unit means every commandment across the entire Hebrew canon remains operative, the HRM's selective application - observing Sabbath and feasts but not the judgments against Edom or the instructions for Israelite siege warfare - is already a departure from their stated hermeneutic.

What Matthew 5:17 Actually Argues - In Its Own Context

Having established what "the Law and the Prophets" means from Jesus's other uses of the phrase, Matthew 5:17 reads clearly.

Jesus is pre-empting the accusation that his ministry represents a break with Israel's scriptures. His healings on the Sabbath, his association with sinners, his claim to forgive sins - all of this looks, to the religious establishment, like someone dismantling the covenant heritage. Do not think that is what I am doing. I have not come to tear down the scriptures of Israel - to treat Moses as irrelevant, to discard the prophets, to start a rival religion with no continuity with Israel's God and Israel's story. I have come to fulfil them - to be the one they were always pointing toward, to bring them to their appointed destination, to be the substance the shadows anticipated.

The six antitheses that immediately follow are the demonstration. Jesus says six times: "you have heard that it was said... but I say to you." He speaks with first-person authority contrasted directly with Torah - not correcting misinterpretations, but placing his own word in explicit contrast with what Moses said. No rabbi in first-century Judaism spoke this way. This is the language of the lawgiver, not the law-keeper. He is not a Torah teacher confirming the tradition. He is the author of the Law and the Prophets, arrived to complete what he always intended them to say.

Verse 20 - which the HRM almost never quotes immediately after verse 17 - makes the agenda explicit: "For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." The scribes and Pharisees were the most meticulous Torah-keepers in Israel. If comprehensive Torah observance were what made someone great in the kingdom, they would be the standard to meet. Jesus says their standard must be exceeded. The kingdom's righteousness goes deeper than Mosaic Torah compliance can reach - because it is the righteousness of the heart that the Spirit produces, not the external compliance that a legal code demands.

Conclusion

The HRM argument that "the Law and the Prophets" in Matthew 5:17 constitutes a permanently binding canonical obligation for all believers collapses when you follow the phrase through all five of Jesus's uses of it.

Matthew 7:12 reduces the entire Law and the Prophets to one principle: the Golden Rule. Matthew 22:40 suspends everything in the Law and the Prophets from two love commandments. Luke 24:44 describes the entire canon as things written about Jesus that must be fulfilled. Luke 16:16 assigns the era of the Law and the Prophets a definite terminal point - until John.

The same phrase, from the same speaker, never functions as a comprehensive binding commandment list. It always functions as a unified body of anticipatory revelation pointing toward love, toward Christ, toward fulfilment, toward the kingdom. The era it governed ran until John. Its content points to Christ. Its summary is love. Its destiny is fulfilment.

That is what Jesus said about the Law and the Prophets. In five separate statements. In his own words. The verse the HRM cites most is surrounded, on every side, by Jesus's own explanation of what "the Law and the Prophets" means - and that explanation consistently points not toward Sinai but toward the one who stood before them saying I have not come to abolish but to fulfil.

The Law and the Prophets were until John. Since then the good news of the kingdom of God is proclaimed. - Luke 16:16