Teaching with Authority (Matthew 7:28-29)
Matthew tells us that the crowds were astonished because Jesus taught with authority, not like their scribes (Matt 7:29).
I’ve sometimes heard people condemn the scribes for this lack of authority, as if there was some problem with the way they taught. “All they did,” people say, “was quote one rabbi after another. But Jesus didn’t quote people” — and the implication sometimes seems to be that preachers today should somehow be more like Jesus than like those scribes, drawing on other people’s commentaries.
Well, that’s not really what Matthew means. Jeffrey Gibbs (if I may draw from another person’s commentary) puts it well:
None of their scribes taught with such conviction. Nor should they have. Any authority that a scribe might possess in his teaching would be completely derived from the authority of the Scriptures. Any other teacher in Israel would need to substantiate what he proclaimed by citing from God’s Word. Jesus, however, teaches God’s Word from out of himself, with unfettered power and divine authority, and the crowds were astonished at this (400).