NOTES for Joh 7:12-22
Jesus' preaching astonished many learned rabbis and teachers of the Torah. In Gospel times, Judaism already had many schools, sometimes called theological schools, but primarily schools of commentators on the Torah.
Each such school usually had its own tradition. There were many schools, and knowledge of this whole variety of traditions was an indispensable part of Jewish learning at the time. Yet in His preaching Jesus offers His own interpretation, at once wholly original and very profound. The learned rabbis and teachers of the Torah who heard Him had a reasonable question: who is this new teacher, where did he study, and which school does he represent?
Jesus says directly that He studied in no school: He merely bears witness to the One who sent Him and interprets the Torah as the One who sent Him revealed it to Him. At that time, the concept of the living Torah was widespread in Judaism. This was usually the name given to a person who had followed the path of the inward Torah to the end—a path associated above all with understanding the commandments as an inward, God-given spiritual and moral imperative that must be followed unswervingly.
Someone who lived guided solely by the inward Torah and by nothing else was called a living Torah. The text of the Torah was revealed to such a person from within, in direct experience, so there was no longer any need for instruction from teachers or traditional methods of studying it. It must be noted, however, that the history of Judaism knows virtually no examples of a living Torah: to speak seriously of such fullness of spiritual life would require complete freedom from sin, and such freedom was considered impossible, at least in this world, in the realm of the present age.
Jesus, however, bears witness precisely that He knows and understands the text as a person who has become a living Torah should know and understand it. There is nothing surprising in such testimony about Himself: elsewhere, too, the Savior speaks of Himself in terms that allow us to think of Him precisely as a living Torah. This is also how the first two generations of Christians perceived Him, reflecting their understanding in the New Testament books.