It’s handy to have an annotated reference Bible, or several, for multiple viewpoints.

Sometime near the end of Matthew’s Gospel, heaven and earth pass away. Matthew is big on talking Jesus up as the end of prophecy, so when Jesus is crucified, Matthew writes in every calamity he can think of – not least of which is that the veil in the temple in Jerusalem is torn in two, so that the “holy” who handed an innocent man over to die aren’t separate any more.

Jesus goes around in the Gospels, even in Matthew’s, breaking the Law, because the real “law” is to love God and love your neighbor. Matthew in particular writes Jesus as throwing Hosea’s “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” back at the people who get all preachy at him, and also spends time on Jesus denouncing the hypocrisy of the religious leaders.

So, Matthew 5:18 is more about Jesus defining his own role in the grand scope of things than it is an injunction to modern-day Christians to keep Leviticus literally.

I’m a Christian. But you just need to look at all the people with quotes from Leviticus scrawled on their protest signs (who have no qualms about eating a cheeseburger) to see that there’s a lot of ill-informed hypocrisy going around.

VeggieTales, Davey and Goliath, and Sunday School, are what you might call introductory courses, though of course they don’t always do the best job of things. Massless strings, point masses, frictionless pulleys – these things don’t exist at all, but they feature in every introductory physics text. I forget where I read it, but isn’t it generally true that in intro courses you lie a little, you don’t present the whole picture, just because it’s a lot to take in at once.

So of course a children’s book of bible stories isn’t going to have the same amount of cross-referencing and commentary as a modern “study Bible”. The problem is that people who’ve taken the intro course, so to speak, think they have the whole story, so they just go along with whatever’s presented as “supported by Scripture”.