Was
Second-Temple Judaism a legalistic religion?
This is the first instalment of the Paul &
The Law series.
There is
now a huge scholarly consensus that although certain elements of legalism
remained in Second Temple Judaism, it simply was NOT a religion oriented towards
(or expecting from its followers) 100% legalistic perfection.
1. The Jews didn’t believe that
perfection in law-keeping was needed in order to be counted as part of the
people of God. The ‘Sanders Revolution’ has all but made this
a fixed point in subsequent discussions on Paul and the Law.
Thielman,
on Sanders:
“Covenantal nomism (was)... the view that one’s
place in God’s plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the
covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to its
commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression.
“Judaism from Ben Sira (about 200
B.C.) to the Mishna (about A.D. 200), therefore, was, despite all its
diversity, a religion of grace that kept works on the ‘staying in’ side of
the religious pattern and did not allow them to intrude on questions of
‘getting in’.” (Paul & the Law: A Contextual Approach, Frank
Thielman 1994 p.30-31)
Wright,
explaining Sanders’ position:
“(Sanders’)
major point…can be quite simply stated:
Judaism in Paul’s day was not, as has regularly been supposed, a
religion of legalistic works-righteousness…Most Protestant exegetes had read
Paul and Judaism as if Judaism was a form of the old heresy Pelagianism,
according to which humans must pull themselves up by their moral bootstraps and
thereby earn justification, righteousness and salvation. No, said Sanders.
“Keeping the law within Judaism
always functioned within a covenantal scheme.
God took the initiative, when He made a covenant with Judaism; God’s
grace thus precedes everything that people (specifically, Jews) do in
response. The Jew keeps the law out
of gratitude, as the proper response to grace – not, in other words, in order
to get into the covenant people, but to stay in…Keeping the Jewish law was
the human response to God’s covenant initiative.” (What Saint Paul Really
Said, N.T. Wright 1997, p.18-19 italics in the original)
Dunn,
summarizing this (very rare) consensus:
“…Membership of the covenant
people is a presupposition (Deuteronomy is addressed to those who are
already the people of Israel).
Consequently the function of the law (again as archetypically expressed
in Deuteronomy) is not to enable ‘getting in’ to the covenant people nor to
make it possible to earn God’s acceptance…Obedience to the Torah is a
requirement for continuing membership of the covenant, for life within the
people, and for gaining a portion in the life of the world to come.” (Paul
& the Mosaic Law, (ed. James Dunn) 1996 p.312)
2.
The purpose of Judaism’s key symbol, the Temple(!), exists precisely to
grant forgiveness in the context of grace.
Howard
reminds us that:
“…The Levitical system of sacrifices
provided a means whereby man, when he sinned, could obtain forgiveness. In fact, observance of the law to a large
degree involved the offering of sacrifices for the atonement of sins. To keep the law was, among other things,
to find cultic forgiveness for breaking the law…For Paul to have argued
that the law demanded absolute obedience and that one legal infraction brought
with it unpardonable doom, would have been for him to deny what all the world
knew, namely that the Jerusalem temple stood as a monument to the belief
that YHWH was a forgiving God who pardoned His people when they sinned.” (Paul:
Crisis in Galatia, George Howard 1979, p.53)
And Dunn:
“Nor
did God require a sinless perfection from His people or require that His
forgiveness had to be earned. The
whole sacrificial system, including the sin-offering and the Day of Atonement,
was provided by God as a means of conveying forgiveness to the penitent.” (The
Justice of God: A Fresh Look at the Old Doctrine of Justification by Faith,
Dunn & Suggate 1993, p.15)
Finally, Wright:
“No
Jew who failed to keep Torah, and knew that he or she was failing to keep
Torah, needed to languish for long under the awful threat of either exclusion
from the covenant people or…eternal damnation.
Remedies were close at hand, prescribed by God’s grace within the Torah
itself.” (The Climax of the Covenant, N.T. Wright 1991, p.145)
Paul’s negative comments on the ‘works of the
law’ (which we’ll look at later), then, was most probably not an attack on
legalistic self-sufficiency. After
Sanders, it will not be easy to juxtapose Pelagianism and what the ‘unbelieving
Jews’ of Paul’s time believed.
AL
Next:
What did Paul mean by ‘works of the law’, ‘justification’, ‘faith’,
‘justification by faith’, etc.? (but
this might take a while, *smile*)