Many Judaizing groups will assert that before Moses, the ceremonial divisions of food and the Mosaic Sabbath was kept. This is far from the truth, even Jesus asserts that the Jews of His time “19Did Moses not give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law?” (John 7:19-24 DRA).
I highlight some Patristic evidence for this interpretation, thus further showing the truth that no one kept the Law of Moses before Moses.
6. If any one should assert that all those who have enjoyed the testimony of righteousness, from Abraham himself back to the first man, were Christians in fact if not in name, he would not go beyond the truth.
7. For that which the name indicates, that the Christian man, through the knowledge and the teaching of Christ, is distinguished for temperance and righteousness, for patience in life and manly virtue, and for a profession of piety toward the one and only God over all — all that was zealously practiced by them not less than by us.
8. They did not care about circumcision of the body, neither do we. They did not care about observing Sabbaths, nor do we. They did not avoid certain kinds of food, neither did they regard the other distinctions which Moses first delivered to their posterity to be observed as symbols; nor do Christians of the present day do such things. But they also clearly knew the very Christ of God; for it has already been shown that he appeared unto Abraham, that he imparted revelations to Isaac, that he talked with Jacob, that he held converse with Moses and with the prophets that came after.
9. Hence you will find those divinely favored men honored with the name of Christ, according to the passage which says of them,
Touch not my Christs, and do my prophets no harm.
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