Deuteronomy 13:5 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Ver. 5. Because he hath spoken to turn you away— Margin, spoken revolt against the Lord; in which words we read the reason of the law. The crime of the false prophet was a crime of lese majeste and high treason: in preaching apostacy, he preached revolt; and that which makes his crime most odious is, that, to favour idolatry, he calls himself the messenger of God; and, under the sanction of this title, solicits the Israelites to renounce their obedience to the Lord. Nothing could be more culpable than such an imposture. One could scarcely believe that the later Jews had justified their rejection of our Saviour by this passage in the law; the fact, however, is true. "Our law," they say, "permitted us not to receive Jesus for a true prophet, whatever were his miracles, because he proposed the destruction of our religion." Now, not to say that the proposition is false, and that Jesus Christ, so far from forming any design to abolish the religion of Moses, declared on the contrary, in the plainest manner, that he came not to destroy, but to accomplish it; not to insist upon this, there are two things which evidently distinguish our Saviour from the false prophet here pointed out: first, it was not one sign or one miracle only which Jesus wrought to prove the divinity of his mission; his miracles were both more in number and more excellent than those which were performed by Moses: but what probability is there that God should have given him such permission and power, if he had not been, as he declared himself, the CHRIST? Secondly, in the words of Moses, a prophet is spoken of who would seduce the people to idolatry; but the man must have lost all shame who imputes this crime to the legislator of the Christians. See Bishop Kidder's Demonstr. of the Messiah, part 2 Chronicles 1 p. 4 fol.