Otros artigos deste número | Versión en inglés | Versión en francés

Jesus and Paul - Two Aspects of Law in Christian Beginnings
Clemens Thoma - Franz Mussner

Although this issue is concerned with the halakhic/ethical aspects of Torah/Law, it has not been possible to beat this vast subject in all its ramifications. Mention at least needs to be made of one of the problems that has bedevilled the relations of the two Jaiths for centuries — that of Paul's altitude to Law. While this could well be the subject of a future issue of the SIDTC Review, we should like to reproduce here a few sentences from two contemporary theologians who, among others whose number is growing, are presenting such topics candidly, removed from the damaging polemics of the past. Modern theological research, far from attempting to suppress such delicate discussion, would aim at going to the heart of the matter as objectively as possible, demonstrating that true dialogue consists in an honest exposition by both partners of one's belief to the other, respecting the difference of the other while going forward together, each in the uniqueness o/ his/her own faith experience.

Jesus and the Law
In discussing Jewish law from a Christian theological point of view, care must be taken to consider the vibration of undertones and accessory terms. Whenever the word "nomocracy", government by law, is leveled at Judaism, or when the alleged Jewish-Christian dichotomy law / grate and law / freedom is applied in favor of Christianity, we must suspect that "the Law" is used merely as a polemic formula. I t is part of ecumenical fairness that outsiders not harp on actual or alleged misuse of Jewish piety and practice of the Law. Such an approach could only go contrary to one's own Christian interests; the Law of the Hebrew Scriptures is, after all, a part of Christian revelation, Christian opinion of the Law must be based on the fact that, wherever the Law is properly understood and practised, law/grace and law/freedom are not opposites but belong together. One can verify this easily from the Old Testament (for example, Ps 119).

There is good reason to understand Matt 5:17 as follows: "Do not imagine that I have come to sever the Law or the Prophets from their context, but, on the contrary, I have come to place them within their context." According to the teaching of the Matthean Christ, his disciples are forbidden to be antinomians. Christians do not do away with, or express contempt far, the Law, but they place it into a favoured context by linking it to Christ who fulfilled all God's laws. Paul held a similar conviction when he said: "Do we therefore through faith destroy the Law? By no means. Rather we establish the Law (Rom 3:31). Since the disciples of Christ then, are to accept and fulfil what the Law means at its deepest level, we must take a look at the meaning and rank it has in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Clemens Thoma: A Christian Theology of Judaism, Stimulus Books, New York 1980, pp. 97f.

Paul and the Law
For the following reflections I shall proceed from the sentence of Paul: "For freedom Christ has set us free" (Gal 5:1). According to Pauline theology, the "freedom program" of Christ is one that is comprehensive and multiple, related to past, present and future. (1) The freedom to which Christ has freed us implies, according to Paul, the liberation from Law as a way of salvation. In this tractate on the Jews the fact that the "Law" is a fundamental given of Jewish existence to this very day cannot be overlooked. The Jew takes joy in the Torah; it is for him the instruction for life. (2) According to Pauline teaching, the Law, however, became a factor of death: "The very commandment which promised life prove to be death to me" (Rom 7:10; cf. Gal 3:12). The Law became the "Law of sin and of death," from which the "Law of the spirit of life in Jesus Christ... has freed us." By the "Law of sin and death" doubtless the Torah Is meant, which indeed, according to Rom 7:12, is "holy and just and good," but which in reality became a factor of death because without the Law the human being would not have known the power of sin; this takes the Law as the starting point (aphormé) of its death-bringing attack upon humanity and calls forth from it every kind of covetousness. Thus according Paul, ft was only through the arrival of the Law that the power of sin rose up and brought humanity into death (Rom 7:7-10); sin "deceived and killed" humanity "through the Law" (7:11). The Law thus became kind of "power of sin" (1 Cor. 1556).

Two things in the statement of the apostle about the Law are "un-Jewish": One is the strange judgment of the Law as being a death-bringing agent; the other is the view of human beings who have to do with the Law. For the Jews the Torah is the instruction for life, and the human being, according to Jewish conviction, is capable of carrying out the instructions of the Torah. For Paul it is other: For him the human being who finds himself confronted with the Law is "flesh," and because of the weakness of the flesh he so very often is unable to fulfil the demands of the 1,aw (cf. Rom 7:18-20). The human being is a sinner: For the apostle this is confirmed from experience and from Scripture (cf. Rom 1-3:21). The human being cannot free himself from this situation, and it is not necessary for him to do so; for another has freed him: God, specifically in that the crucified Christ "has openly offered himself up as a reconciling sacrifice" (Rom 3:25) and allowed himself to become "a curse for us" (Gal. 3:13). The moment Paul recognized and witnessed in faith along with the primitive Church that Christ "has died our sins" (cf. I Cor. 15:3), in that moment he saw a totally un-Jewish alternative placed before him, concerning which I have already spoken:(3) eschatological salvation either through the Torah or through the crucified and risen Christ. On the basis of the Damascus experience, Paul decided in favor of the second, and it Is with this decision that his so un-Jewish sounding sentences concerning the Torah and (bound up with that) the "justification" of human beings are connected. On the basis of this decision Paul comes to an opposition which is difficult for a Jew to understand. salvation "from faith" (in Christ) and not "from works of the Law". "Even we have believed in Christ Jesus. in order to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no one be justified" (Gal. 2:163). "For if justification were through the law, then Christ died to no purpose" (Gal. 2:21b).

Paul could not avoid these alternatives or seek a harmonization synthesis, as apparently his opponents with whom he battled in the "apostles' council" and later in the Epistle to the Galatians, tried to do. Being placed before these alternatives, Paul decided for the way of faith fn Jesus Christ. However, with this he was forced to develop a new and different "Law theology" than Judaism had and has. h was not because he misunderstood the essence of the Law, as for example H.-J. Schoeps among others believes, that Paul carne to the new judgment concerning the Law as it is presents in the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians, but rather simply and only on the basis of his Christological and soteriological faith convictions'
The primitive Church took over the decision of Paul — even if it was against a strenuous resistance especially [mm the Jewish Christians — and the Church professes it to the present day. The basis for this decision lies in Christology and its soteriological implications and nowhere else. With this decision, however, there has come into existence something which forever divided the Church and Judaism.
Franz Mussner: Tractiwe on the Jews: The Signilicance o/ Judaism jor Christian Fall& Foriress Press, Philadelphia 1984, pp. 237ff.