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You’re right about the false dilemma. But it’s not in what Jesus said concerning those whose hearts were far from God.

Rather, the false dilemma is between Abraham’s faith and his obedience. You see, faith is obedient.

Those God rebuked through Isaiah, and whom Jesus rebuked in the passage in the OP, claimed to have faith, honoring God with their lips. But their hearts were so far from Him that their worship was mere man-made commandments.

Abraham wasn’t like that. His heart drew nigh unto God; he obeyed God; he trusted and believed God. When God told him to leave Ur of the Chaldees, he did it. When God gave him a promise, he believed it. When God told him to sacrifice Isaac, he did it. When God commanded, he obeyed.

Some people today want to say, “I have faith, but I don’t want to obey.” Was Abraham like that? No. Jesus called such people hypocrites, merely honoring God with their lips.

I'm not following this. Perhaps we have misunderstood each other. Of course faith is obedient. I have always said so. Please check any post I have written on the subject and see that this is so. The false dilemma which troubles me is the one so often presented by those arguing for a specific form of worship, that unless one agrees with their understanding, one is being disobedient to God. Jesus was well positioned to say that. Being God, and the Son of God, He knew who was disobedient and who was merely uninformed.

I think for example of the Samaritan woman. She knew the argument that the Temple was the right place to worship, despite the Samaritans having wandered off to do their own thing. But Jesus doesn't camp on that error. Instead, He directs her to the heart of the matter, that worship is something that happens in spirit and in truth. That's what matters to God.

And honestly, it matters far more than the technicalities of what day of the week Jesus rose from the dead, or how that fits into the most convoluted calendral arguments known to mankind. If someone wants to worship on one or another day of the week, fine, do that. I prefer worshipping every day of the week. I rejoice in His resurrection every time I think about it.

BTW, Diego, I appreciate your energy, but your linguistic arguments are faulty. Linguists recognize a function called "notional agreement" that makes it so that sometimes the formal number of a part of speech disagrees with the semantic, idiomatic value of that term. You can't rely on Sabbatwn really being plural Sabbaths. That's just imposing your non-idiomatic filter on the language of Scripture. Usually that will lead to a fail of some sort.

Yes, the so-called "literal" translations run roughshod over all that, and some folks think that's good. I think it's horrible. It takes people who have had a lot of exposure to both the original and the receptor language to get the idiomatic layer right. A literal translation can lead straight into profound error.

I am reminded of the translators who encountered a language that had no word for love. They had to invent some construction that used a cultural example of love and substitute that in the text where we would have used "love." Was that wrong? Not at all. It is what real translators are supposed to do. Get the message across, idioms and all. It's their job.

As for "notional agreement," check this out. If I say, "That is a lot of cookies," or I say, "Those are a lot of cookies," which is grammatically correct? Hmmmm. Interesting problem, isn't it?

As for the LXX, that was a different time, different place, and you can't draw the inference that there couldn't have been a difference in idiom. Obviously there was, because as far as I can find, the LXX term for "week" ("ebdomadas") isn't used anywhere in the NT corpus. It's just not how they did it there. Think of it as a difference in dialect, like Midwestern rural-speak versus east-coast news-speak. It happens.

And there are other problems as well. In Greek there is a principle called "concord," the idea that word order can be shuffled and the meaning retained because the relationship between the words is established by their inflectional form, not by their position. This is important to our discussion because the case, gender and number of a noun's modifier must agree with the noun it is supposed to be modifying. If it doesn't agree, the modifier is modifying something else. And if you can't find the "something else," odds are it's implied as a substantive, i.e., an unstated word implied by the context.

So in the case of, for example, Matthew 28:1, mian sabbatwn, "mian" ("one") is feminine, accusative, and singular, whereas "sabbatwn" is neuter, genitive, and plural. Concord fails. "One" does not modify "sabbatwn." What does it modify? By idiomatic usage, it modifies "day," implied by the context. So "On [day] one of [the] week ...," which we can do, because word order doesn't change the functional relationships. What word order can do, thus liberated, is become a great tool to add emphasis, such that words at the beginning of a phrase can have more pizazz than words that follow along at the end, yet without losing the basic sense of the sentence. Which I happen to think is a pretty cool feature of the language. :)

Anyway, with so much weighing in favor of idomatic usage, it is easier to see how sabbatwn could appeal to a well-seasoned translator as an NT way of referring to what we now call "week." Especially when you've got the same stem being deployed in Luke 18:12, "I fast twice in the week," where "dis" ("twice") is an adverb and so bypasses the concord problem, and sabbatou is singular but the same stem as sabbatwn, just inflected for a context where a day of the week is not being referenced.

But again, all of this is a distraction. The essence of the law is love for God and love for one another. We may all become experts at lesser things, but if we fail at love, we are but sound and fury, signifying nothing. Not a happy ending, that.

Peace,

SR