14 Law as a Problematic Aspect of Religion Paul’s Skepticism in a Broader Jewish Context Serge Ruzer
I INTRODUCTION
In his pioneering studies, E. P. Sanders described late Second Temple Judaism as “covenantal nomism” in the sense that while the demands of the law as derived from the Torah constitute a core element of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel, the covenant is not exhausted by its law-centered aspect. It includes additional foundational components like election, God’s faithfulness, his mercy, and mechanisms of atonement and reconciliation. As the title of his book where the term was first introduced indicates,1 it is in conversation with views found in the epistles of Paul, penned mostly during the 50s of the first century CE, that the scholar was able to portray this more nuanced picture of the contemporaneous Judaism. No wonder – Paul, a member of the nascent Jesus movement, a messianic offshoot of broader Judaism, provides many examples of coping with the law-centered tenets of religion juxtaposed to those of God’s mercy revealed in messianic redemption. This chapter attempts to further clarify certain aspects of Sanders’ important intuition. Paul uses extensively the term nomos (law) with a variety of meanings: sometimes this may refer to a universal law, archetypal law of the cosmos, which, as already the Hellenistic Jewish second-century BCE Letter of Aristeas argued, essentially overlaps with the law revealed in the Torah.2 I, however, focus here on the cases where the particular Jewish meaning of nomos as related to Torah is clearly indicated by the context. This focus will allow to revisit the issue of Paul’s grasp of the interactions between various parts of the Torah-centered law and their standing vis-à-vis other aspects of the covenant. Contextualizing Paul’s strategies against the backdrop of the 1
2
Ed P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977). See also Ed P. Sanders, “‘A Covenant to the People, a Light to the Nations’: Universalism, Exceptionalism, and the Problem of Chosenness in Jewish Thought,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 16.1 (2009): 23–55. The equation that would be later propagated by Philo, see discussion in Christine Hayes, What Is Divine about Divine Law? (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), 122–24. That the outlines of universal law were available to the Gentiles without the Torah and thus they are responsible for fulfilling it, seems to be indicated in Rom 2:12: “All those who sinned without the law/Torah will also perish without the law/Torah.”
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