When the documentary producer Ken Burns put together his nine-part series on baseball several years ago, he included a comic segment in which Billy Crystal played three different kids from three different boroughs of New York back in the 1950s, arguing about whose team had the best centerfielder.

            Think about it. How do you choose between Duke Snyder of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Willie Mays from the New York Giants, and Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees? At the time, New York must have seemed like the center of the baseball universe.

            In some ways, arguing about it is more fun than figuring out who was best. The same is true for figuring out the greatest in a lot of categories. What’s the greatest novel of all time? Greatest poem? Greatest president? Greatest movie? The list can go on and on.

            For centuries, the ancient rabbis, the great biblical scholars whose words were recorded in the Talmud, engaged in similarly fascinating discussions about the many laws contained in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. They discussed the meaning of each law, its application and exceptions, but the question they returned to — which law is the greatest? — was exciting!

            So perhaps it was natural that someone, eventually, would ask Jesus that question. And as it turns out, Jesus had something to say.

The preceding incidents

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