NOVENSON. The chapter opens with a thought experiment. Suppose we discovered anonymous Greek fragments of an ancient Jewish writer, and among the logia we made out: 'Do you not heed the law?' 'As many as sinned in the law, through the law they shall be judged.' 'Everyone who undergoes circumcision is obligated to do the whole law.' 'It is not hearers of the law who are right with God, but doers of the law shall be proved right.' 'In respect of the law, I am a Pharisee; in respect of righteousness in the law, blameless.' We would class this writer as a halakhic rigorist — or, to use the old-fashioned term, a legalist. Every one of those logia is Paul's. We cannot see it because we all learned from our mothers' knees that Paul is the arch-anti-legalist, and so we read him by what I call Richard Nixon's rule for legality: 'When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.' When the apostle Paul says it, that means that it is not legalistic — even though when someone else says the same thing it patently is. And the word itself deserves its history told: 'legalism' is seventeenth-century Puritan coinage, a term of intra-Christian contempt for two hundred years before anyone thought to accuse Jews of it — Bernard Jackson finds the 'Jewish legalism' stereotype no earlier than 1861. It has always been a term of abuse, not of analysis. To invoke it is to pick a fight. Of Gathercole's five senses of the word, Paul plainly fits two: the pettifogging regulation of practice — food, sex, veils, idol-meat, lawsuits — and the belief that God will repay each person according to his works, which Paul states without embarrassment: 'God will repay each person according to his works.' Romans 2:6, not Leviticus.
SANDERS. And now the chapter turns to me, and I will read my own indictment before Matthew can, since no one else at this table will spare me. I coined 'covenantal nomism' precisely because 'legalism' had spent four centuries as an insult — nomism and legalism are etymological twins, law-isms both, but only one triggered the fight response in the lizard brains of my readers. Matthew says that by ceding the word I missed the deeper criticism. Philip Alexander asked it in 1986: what exactly is so bad about legalism? Is it self-evident that a religion of grace is superior to a religion of law? If we fail to take a firm stand there, we make Rabbinic Judaism into a pale reflection of Protestant Christianity. And Neusner — the book quotes him, and I will finish the quotation myself: 'I do not thank him for apologizing for the rituals of my religion… With friends like Sanders, Judaism hardly needs any enemies.' There is blood on that page, and some of it is mine. My defense is only this: in 1977 the field called Judaism a religion of works-righteousness and meant it as a diagnosis. One fights the battle of one's own day with the weapons that exist. Matthew fights a later battle, in a field my book cleared — he can afford the word. I could not.
NOVENSON. Generously said, and the book says as much — Neusner, being Jewish, has a kind of knowledge of Judaism that Sanders, being a gentile Christian, simply cannot have; but neither of them is a first-century Pharisee, so both are foreigners to Roman Judea like the rest of us. Strip the abuse from the word and what remains is what Kugel called the genius of a religion of laws: in all the little encounters of daily life, the Torah set out the precise form of behavior God prescribed, so that a person could turn life into a constant act of reaching out to God. One is tempted to say: if that kind of legalism is wrong, I don't want to be right. Now the chapter's engine room. In a too-little-read section of his too-little-read book, Albert argued that for Paul there are precisely three deadly sins — Todsünden — which, ex opere operato, sever a baptized person's union with Christ: πορνεία, communion with demons, and proselyte circumcision. That theory has gone mostly ignored or dismissed in the secondary literature, but it is basically right, and it goes a long way toward explaining the legalism of Paul. These are exactly the three matters on which Paul issues lengthy, detailed halakhah; all three are body-modifications of the pneumatic body of Christ — penetration, ingestion, laceration — and the offender is severed, as Collman puts it, like a gangrenous limb. On circumcision, Gaventa is right against the whole adiaphora tradition: Paul does not say his gentiles need not be circumcised; he says they must not. And Thiessen supplies the halakhic rationale: Genesis 17, by the Greek text, stipulates circumcision on the eighth day or not at all — so proselyte circumcision is not merely unnecessary but forbidden, which finally makes sense of 'everyone who undergoes circumcision is obligated to do the whole law': the whole law of circumcision, which a proselyte, being past his eighth day, manifestly cannot keep. Paula told us years ago that the 'law-free gentile mission' is a gross misnomer, and the chapter agrees: Paul strictly forbids gentile cult, builds a wide high fence around adultery, and gives controversial halakhah about post-eighth-day circumcisions. Whatever all this is, the last thing it is is law-free. An interpreter not trained in Protestant theology might even call it legalistic.
LUTHER. A legalist! Professor, you have made the Apostle a monk, and I burned my cowl on better evidence than yours. Yes, he commands — I never denied the Law its third use among the justified; a father instructs his children without making them earn their sonship. The question was never whether Paul gives rules. It is what the rules are for. Read the fifth chapter of Galatians to its end, man, and read it in order! First the thunder: you are severed from Christ, you who would be justified in the law; you have fallen away from grace. Then — then! — the fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. First the tree is made good, and then the fruit grows; a good tree cannot help but bear, and no man ever made the tree good by hanging apples on it. You have counted the apples, Professor, and called the orchard a treadmill. Call him a legislator if you must. Call him a legalist and you have said that the ground of standing before God is performance — and that the Apostle never said, and against that I will fight you with my last pen, and when the pen is done, with the inkwell.
HART. But Martin, notice that you have just conceded the chapter. 'He commands; the commands are not the ground of standing' — that is precisely Matthew's position, minus the frightening word. And the frightening word is doing honest work: it forces the admission, which your tradition has resisted for five centuries, that judgment according to deeds is not a stray thread in Paul but a structural beam. I translated those verses without anesthesia and was accused of turning Paul semi-Pelagian. I had merely turned him back on.
WRIGHT. The way through is the one I have urged for decades: justification by faith in the present, judgment according to the whole life led in the Spirit at the end — two verdicts, one story, no contradiction, because the Spirit's work joins them. Matthew's provocation is useful exactly insofar as it makes the second verdict undeniable. It misleads exactly insofar as 'legalist' suggests Paul thought the doing generated the belonging. He did not. The doing displays it.
NOVENSON. 'Displays,' 'generates' — the table may notice that everyone now agrees Paul issues law and expects performance, and the remaining quarrel is over adverbs. That is what 'his big idea lay elsewhere' means. I rest the chapter.