NOVENSON. I begin with Voltaire, who observed that no people on earth ever took for themselves the name of idolater — 'idolatry' exists only in the mouths of its accusers. Some of our biggest ideas are like that: an idea in search of a proponent. My chapter asks whether 'justification from works of the law' is another. So — who actually says it? Dr. Luther had strongly held opinions and was happy to name names: 'as many as are in the world that hold not this doctrine are either Turks, Jews, papists, or heretics.' Modern critics narrowed the list to Jews — Dunn: 'it was his fellow Jews in particular who needed to hear that no one is justified by works of the law.' And the radical Paul-within-Judaism school, deliciously, agrees with them all that ancient Jews held it. Now search the sources. The three terms — righteousness, works, law — never once cluster in the Jewish scriptures; not in Philo, not Josephus, not ben Zakkai, not Aqiba, not Mishnah, Tosefta, either Talmud, or any midrash. Rather embarrassingly for Paul's modern interpreters, the first person in antiquity expressly to attest the motif turns out to be… Paul himself. He even shows us the mint: he adds 'from works of the law' to a psalm that never mentioned works or law, and — Watson is surely right — he coined the phrase as the negative image of Habakkuk's 'the righteous from trust shall live.' If, as Ed taught us, Paul reasons from solution to plight, he also reasons from solution to counter-solution. The phrase is Paul's own polemical invention. The only people who think it are those who Paul says think it.
NOVENSON. And before the table objects: yes, 4QMMT. When the halakhic letter was finally published in 1994 — miqsat ma'aseh ha-Torah, 'some works of the law,' with Genesis 15:6 attached — interpreters were elated. Here at last was the smoking gun. Professor Wright, I must read the deposition: 'What MMT adds to the discussion… is the fact that justification by works of Torah… was not just a Pharisaic doctrine, nor simply something that the Galatian agitators were urging. It characterized sectarian Judaisms of various sorts, and perhaps mainstream Judaism as well.' Upon inspection the evidence does not bear this out. In 4QMMT the 'works of the law' are particular halakhot recommended over against competing halakhot — a 364-day calendar against a 365 — and 'reckoned to you for righteousness' means that those who adopt them will be proved right in the end. Vindication in right opinion. Whereas Paul means by justification the obliteration of all sin and the transfer into undying life — his own technical term, not an already-current general-purpose word for good religion. 4QMMT and Paul share vocabulary the way a memo and a resurrection share ink. In the quest for ancient Jews who thought they would be justified from works of the law in the sense Paul means, 4QMMT turns out to be a red herring — and so, I argue at equal length, does Philo, whose 'ethical circumcision' is the nearest conceptual cousin and still a bridge too far.
WRIGHT. Guilty as read, and I will not squirm while quoted. I wrote that in the first flush of the publication, when the parallel glittered; Jimmy Dunn wrote stronger. Very well: I withdraw 'perhaps mainstream Judaism' — the generalization outran the fragment. But note what I do not withdraw: somebody at Antioch demanded, and somebody in Galatia preached, and the fight over the boundary of the covenant was real whoever coined its slogan. Relocating the mint does not shrink the war.
LUTHER. Twice subpoenaed in one session. Good; I have answered harder summonses than yours, Professor, and at Worms they wanted more than a retraction. Turks, Jews, papists, and heretics — I said it, I preached it, and I will tell you what I knew that your archive does not. No ancient Jew wrote the doctrine in a book; granted. I never met it in a book either. I met it in my own chest, where it needs no publisher — the opinio legis, the inborn opinion that doing makes righteous. A fish leaves no treatise on water. But now answer what your own chapter raises and then smothers: you say Paul aims the phrase twice at Jews — at himself before his call, and at his kinsmen who keep Torah and refuse the crucified Messiah. Then the coin circulated further than your mint, and my sermon was not about nothing.
SANDERS. The chapter answers you, Dr. Luther, and with a distinction I wish I had drawn myself. Paul thinks no one is justified from works of the law — and thinks Jews know this, because they know the law and the prophets, while gentiles do not know it, which is why they keep circumcising themselves, mistakenly thinking it will effect their justification. Galatians 2:15–16 read straight: 'We who are Jews by nature know that a person is not justified from works of the law.' That is why Antioch is a charge of hypocrisy, not ignorance — Cephas knew better and played otherwise. Paul does not portray justification-by-works as a characteristically Jewish error; quite the opposite. And Matthew has minted a sentence for it that I would have given a chapter of my own to have written: 'Silly gentiles, circumcision is for Jewish mortals.'
SCHWEITZER. And now the minute I have waited ninety years to enter into the record. Page 70: 'Here, as on so many points of interpretation, Albert Schweitzer had it very nearly right almost a century ago' — with my sentence following: this righteousness is 'a condition of the Messianic era, like the resurrection state of existence,' attained in advance as a consequence of the being-in-Christ. The subsidiary crater has been resurveyed, and the main crater found where I left it. I thank the author. I note only, for the record, that the interval between the two verdicts was ninety years, and that I spent them elsewhere.
FREDRIKSEN. Since we are collecting our notices: the chapter judges my own proposal — righteousness as the Second Table, justice toward the neighbor — 'basically right,' before enlarging it: Paul's δικαιοσύνη subsumes all the duties, performed maximally, effortlessly, and forever — what Christine Hayes calls robo-righteousness. 'Basically right' is the tombstone every scholar dreams of; I accept, with the amendment that I was right about the direction and Matthew about the voltage. What we now agree on matters more: Paul's righteousness-talk is impracticably utopian and eschatological — it does not match what any quotidian lived religion, Judaism or Christianity, actually offers. Both traditions have been claiming to have in hand what Paul said only resurrection delivers.
PAUL. The mint is confessed. I struck the phrase as a die strikes silver — from the Psalm, which gave me 'no flesh shall be justified,' and from Habakkuk, who gave me 'the righteous from trust shall live'; I set the one against the other and the coinage was mine. Matthew, you have watched my hands more closely than any reader since Tertius took my dictation. And you saw where I spent it: not against Israel — against foreskins being counted as credit in Galatia, men rebuffing the announcement of the risen one for a more conventional devotion. A strategy, you say, for not buying what I was selling. Brother, I have been called worse by men who understood me less. But Martin — your midnight keeps its rights. I did write of myself, 'my own righteousness, from the law,' and counted it dung; and of my kinsmen, that pursuing righteousness they did not attain it. The coin found purses I never aimed at, because the presumption you name is older than my mint. Only remember, both of you, what the coin buys and what it does not: everyday righteousness in the law is real — I was blameless in it — and it is mortal. What I meant by justification was life that does not die. On that exchange rate, Professor, your chapter is exact.