(1) The Synoptic teaching starts throughout from the ordinary post-exilic Jewish feeling and teaching, which indeed recognizes the ceremonial obligations and the more tangible amongst the ethical demands as standing under the categorical imperative of the Legal “Thou Shalt,” but places the large territory of the finer moral precepts outside of the Law. So with the “Zedakah,” the “Justice” of almsdeeds, and with the “Gemiluth Chasadim,” the “works of mercy,” such as visiting the sick, burying the dead, and rejoicing with the joyful and sorrowing with the sorrowful. Thus Rabbi Simon the Just tells us: “The world rests on three things: on the Law (_Thorah_), on Worship (_Abodah_), and on Works of Mercy (_Gemiluth Chasadim_)”; and Rabbi Eleazar declared the “Gemiluth Chasadim” to be above the “Zedakah.”[140] And it is especially in view of these works of supererogation that rewards, and indeed a strict scale of rewards, are conceived. Thus already in the Book of Tobit, (written somewhere between 175 and 25 B.C.), we have Tobit instructing his son Tobias that “Prayer is good with Fasting and Alms, more than to buy up treasures of gold. For Alms delivereth from death … they that practise Mercy and Justice shall live long.”[141] And one of the sayings of the Jewish Fathers declares: “So much trouble, so much reward.”[142] Now this whole scheme and its spirit seems, at first to be taken over quite unchanged by Our Lord. The very Beatitudes end with: “Rejoice … because your reward is great in heaven.” And, in the following Sermon, his hearers are bidden to beware of doing their “Zedakah,”--the “Justice” of Prayer, Fasting, Almsdeeds in order to be seen by men; since, in that case, “ye shall not have reward from your Father Who is in heaven.” And this is driven home in detail: these three kinds of Justice are to be done “in secret,” and “thy Father will repay thee.” Even Prayer itself thus appears as a meritorious good work, one of the means to “treasure up treasures in heaven.” Similarly, the rich man is bid “Go sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor; and thou shalt have a treasure in heaven.” Even “he that shall give you a cup of cold water in My name, shall not lose his reward.” Indeed we have the general principle, “the labourer is worthy of his hire.”[143]