NOVENSON. The final chapter opens in Ottoman Izmir, with Rabbi Eliyahu Kohen Ittamari, kabbalist, who asked why Torah scrolls must be written without vowels, and answered: because the Torah as God beholds it is a heap of unarranged letters. Because of Adam's sin, God combined them into words describing death and the things of death — levirate marriage, impurity, inheritance. At the Messiah's coming, when death is engulfed forever, God will recombine the same letters into other words, telling a different story: a new Torah, which is the old Torah, read at last as it was always written. Eliyahu Kohen saw the logical problem clearly: the Torah manifestly legislates for mortals — people who are born, eat, marry, generate impurity, and die — and if the raised righteous die no more, there can be no levirate marriage; yet the Torah abides forever. How? That is not Räisänen's pseudo-problem — 'if something is truly divine, it is hardly capable of being abrogated,' a theological axiom, not an argument — it is the age-old puzzle of divine law and human mortality, and Paul was one of the premodern thinkers who wrestled it. Not the retired Torah-in-the-messianic-age hypothesis — Schäfer laid that to rest, Ed rejected it in 1977, and I have no wish to revive it; it was built on a slapdash reading of one Bavli passage. The subtler comparison is what I call eschatological anthropology: how exactly one imagines the conditions of human life in the age to come. The rabbis disagreed richly — Samuel's messianic age differs from ours only politically; Ecclesiastes Rabbah's abolishes death itself; and everyone agreed the Torah was not given to ministering angels, because angels neither eat, nor discharge, nor die — Song of Songs Rabbah even calls angelic bodies disabled in respect of the commandments, like a boy with stumped fingers apprenticed to an embroiderer. So: if at the resurrection humans become like the angels — and 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and the martyrs' acts all say they do — what happens to their capacity to do the Torah?
NOVENSON. Enter, of all people, Origen the Paulinist — who, like the rabbis and unlike nearly every modern interpreter, kept mortality at the front of his mind when thinking about the law. Commenting on Romans 10, Origen argued that Paul's two righteousnesses correspond to two kinds of life: Leviticus 18:5 — 'the person who does these things shall live in them' — promises quotidian life, the mortal life of the present age, exactly as Sifra and Deuteronomy Rabbah read the same verse; while the righteousness from trust pertains to life everlasting, newly available at the resurrection of Jesus. Two kinds of righteousness, two kinds of life. On this point Origen gets Paul right where most modern interpreters get it wrong: the verse is not a zero-sum duel of soteriologies, works versus faith, Moses versus Christ. And so the knot unties: the law is not abolished — 'Do we then nullify the law through trust? No! Rather, we establish the law'; the law is holy, righteous, good, and even pneumatic; its δικαίωμα abides forever, and the one commandment Paul expressly cites as abiding is Leviticus 19:18, love your neighbor — love never passes away. But the law was given to mortals, and people-in-Christ have, ritually but really, already died — 'the law has jurisdiction over a person only for such time as he is alive'; 'as soon as a man dies, he is free from the commandments,' says Rabbi Yohanan, glossing the same psalm. 'Having died, we are now unemployed from the law.' One can neither commit adultery nor remain monogamous if there is no such thing as marriage. The secondary literature repeats that Paul's distinctive is his anthropological pessimism; it is exactly the wrong way around. It is his anthropological optimism that distinguishes him: Paul does not think humans are worms who cannot muster the will for the smallest commandment. He thinks that humans, once they have God's pneuma, are demigods who can fulfil the δικαίωμα of the law perfectly, effortlessly, and forever. Christ is the end of the law precisely because he is the last man, the last human being made of dust — and, by his resurrection, the first of the newborn sons of God. Christ is the end of the law just to the extent that Christ is the end of human mortality.
SCHWEITZER. And here the ledger of my vindication shows its one debit, which I will read aloud myself. The Torah-in-the-messianic-age hypothesis — mine, with Silver and Baeck and Davies and Schoeps — is retired in this chapter with full honors and a firm hand: laid to rest by Schäfer, rejected by Ed, not to be revived. Very well; the exegesis was ours and it was thin. But observe what the book does next: it revives the hypothesis's soul under a new name — eschatological anthropology — and the soul was always the true argument: the law belongs to the world of death, and those who have passed into the resurrection mode of existence pass beyond it. My son has corrected my grammar and kept my house. But the son inherits the family debt: if the law ended because the resurrection began, and the completion did not come, then the letters remain what I said they were — dispatches from an interval that history outgrew. The book's title says the end of history. Nineteen centuries of history have read it. The knot in chapter nine is tied, Professor, around my old wound.
WRIGHT. Or around your old mistake, Albert — for the chapter's own mechanism refutes the despair. If the law's δικαίωμα abides and is fulfilled in those who walk by the pneuma, then the new age is genuinely present where the Messiah's people are — which is inaugurated eschatology by another route, and I claim the chapter for my side of the quarrel Albert and I began at chapter one, 'bad history' notwithstanding. And I note with satisfaction that Matthew's Paul establishes the law rather than nullifying it, keeps 'love your neighbor' in force, and speaks of one law of God for two conditions of humankind — τέλος as arrival, the road reaching the sea. Räisänen's Paul, the confused abolitionist, dies in this chapter, and I will send flowers.
HART. And I claim the chapter's patron saint, since I have been Origen's advocate at this table all day. Origen the Paulinist — vindicated on the two righteousnesses, vindicated on the pneumatic body against every 'zombie resurrection,' as he put it against Celsus; the righteous rising with the kind of bodies stars have; even the spherical saints make their appearance, with Knox's immortal joke that the erect posture lost its point once man ceased to contemplate heaven from below. This is the company the book has chosen, and it is the right company. And mark where the logic runs: 'people who neither sin nor die are no longer people in many of the relevant senses' — the last man is not the last of a lineage but the first of everyone; where death is destroyed, jurisprudence follows; and when the last enemy is destroyed, God is all in all. The chapter stops one sentence short of universalism, which in a Cambridge monograph is what courage looks like. Origen would have written the sentence.
FREDRIKSEN. And I claim its ground floor, before David floats away with it: the argument works because it is ethnic all the way down. The promises were to the patriarchs; the resurrection life pays them; the gentiles are folded into Israel's hope, not into a universal humanity with the serial numbers filed off. The book's own conclusion counts nine findings and the eighth is metamorphosis for both — Israel and the nations, each as themselves. Even at the end of history, the choir has parts. And the ninth finding ends with the only sentence in the book that no one at this table can improve: the difficulty lies not in anything Paul says, but in the empirical fact that we are — or at least the author is, at the time of writing — still dust, and to dust we shall return. A scholar who ends a monograph with his own mortality has earned his conclusions the hard way.
MODERATOR. Paul — the book is before you. Last word.
PAUL. Then hear the subject on his biographer. Matthew: you have read me almost as carefully as I wrote, and no man at this table has said that to me before. You kept my words in their places — Ἰουδαϊσμός a deed, Israel a people, the law holy, the quarrel ours and not Moses'. You saw that everything in me hangs from one hinge: that God raised the Messiah from the dead, and that in raising him he began the raising of all. There is the sentence under all my sentences. But now hear the three corrections of the subject. First: you say the end of history was present to me. Brother, it was — but as birth-pangs are present, not as an arrival; I lived in the contraction, not the delivery, and the difference is where my groaning lives, and Albert will not let you forget it, nor should he. And when you write that the world's not arriving is no problem for my theology, only for the theologies built upon my letters — elegantly said, brother, and too kind to me by half. I wrote my own reckoning: if for this life only we have hoped in the Messiah, we are of all people most to be pitied. Let the theologians have their reckoning; do not spare me mine. Second: your chapters five and six — you were right about my rules and my order, and half the table has conceded it; but 'legalist' and 'chauvinist' are words with knives in them, and you knew it when you chose them. A scholar may pick a lock with a knife; let him not leave it in the door for the next man, who may not be a scholar. Third: you found my big idea, and then, being a historian, you declined to say whether it is true. I was not a historian. I said it is true — I saw him — and every word you have so patiently catalogued was written because of that seeing — in haste, by lamplight, between beatings, for people I loved. Phoebe carried Romans to the capital in her luggage; do your editions remember her? For people I loved, I say. I am saying it twice because once was not enough, and because your guild's word for them is 'audience.' Catalogue that too. And your last sentence — that the difficulty lies not in anything I say but in the fact that you are, at the time of writing, still dust — brother, that is the most honest sentence in your book, and I will answer it with the most honest sentence in my letters: the one who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal body also, through his pneuma dwelling in you. I wrote it to Rome; I write it now to Princeton. Dust is not an objection. Dust is the raw material — ask Adam. For the rest: grace to you, and peace. You have done no violence to my letters, which is more than I can say for most of the men who loved me louder. Now to him who is able to strengthen you — to the only wise God be glory forever. Amen.
Novenson closes the blue volume. Schweitzer, from the window, is heard to murmur that the royalties, at least, are eschatology realized.
MODERATOR. We adjourn. The book is commended to the table's students — with the table's arguments attached.