According to the Gospels, Jesus kept of the law of Moses, but he considered the expansionist teachings of the “traditions of the elders” accepted by many of the Jewish leaders and teachers of his day to be overly pedantic, burdensome, and sometimes not even in accord with what the law itself intended. This gave rise to the controversies between him and many of the Jewish teachers in his day, as testified to in the Gospels, and the ongoing debates over Jesus’s view of the law from the beginning of the church up to the present day. Jesus saw himself as a prophetic teacher of the law in line with the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, which is the reason he often emphasized his absolute commitment to the truth and ongoing application of “the law and the prophets” in the kingdom of heaven.