The old puzzle
The final chapter opens in Ottoman Izmir with Rabbi Eliyahu Kohen Ittamari, who asked why Torah scrolls must be written without vowels and answered that 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 swallowed up, God will recombine the same letters into other words, telling a different story. The new Torah is the old Torah, read at last as it was always written.
Eliyahu Kohen had seen the difficulty clearly. The Torah legislates for mortals, people who are born, eat, marry, contract impurity and die; if the raised righteous die no more there can be no levirate marriage; yet the Torah abides forever. This is not Räisänen's pseudo-problem, which rests on the theological axiom that anything truly divine is incapable of abrogation. It is the old question of divine law and human mortality, and Paul was one of the premodern thinkers who worked on it.
Eschatological anthropology
Novenson is explicit that he is not reviving the hypothesis of a retired Torah in the messianic age. Schäfer laid that to rest, Sanders rejected it in 1977, and it rested on a hasty reading of a single passage in the Bavli.
The productive comparison is what he calls eschatological anthropology: how a writer imagines the conditions of human life in the age to come. The rabbis disagreed richly. Samuel's messianic age differs from the present only politically; Ecclesiastes Rabbah's abolishes death. All agreed that the Torah was not given to ministering angels, since angels neither eat nor discharge nor die, and Song of Songs Rabbah goes so far as to describe angelic bodies as disabled with respect to the commandments, like a boy with stumped fingers apprenticed to an embroiderer. The question follows directly: if at the resurrection humans become like the angels, as 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch and the martyrs' acts all say they do, what happens to their capacity to keep the Torah?
Origen's two righteousnesses
Origen, alone among ancient Paulinists and unlike nearly every modern interpreter, kept mortality at the front of his mind when thinking about the law. Commenting on Romans 10, he 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, which is how Sifra and Deuteronomy Rabbah read the same verse; the righteousness from trust pertains to life everlasting, newly available at the resurrection of Jesus.
That reading unties the knot. The verse is not a duel of soteriologies, works against faith or Moses against Christ. The law is not abolished: Paul asks whether trust nullifies the law and answers that it establishes it. The law is holy, righteous, good and even pneumatic; its δικαίωμα abides; and the one commandment Paul expressly names as abiding is love of neighbour.
But the law was given to mortals, and people-in-Christ have, ritually and really, already died. The law has jurisdiction over a person only while he lives, which is also Rabbi Yohanan's gloss on the same psalm: as soon as a man dies he is free from the commandments. Having died, the book says, we are now unemployed from the law. One can neither commit adultery nor remain monogamous where there is no marriage.
The consequence reverses a commonplace. The secondary literature holds that Paul's distinctive is his anthropological pessimism; Novenson argues that it is his anthropological optimism. Paul does not think humans are worms incapable of the smallest commandment. He thinks that humans who 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 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.
The objections
Schweitzer would find in this chapter both his vindication and its one debit. The Torah-in-the-messianic-age hypothesis, which was his with Silver, Baeck, Davies and Schoeps, is retired with honours and a firm hand. He would concede that the exegesis was thin and observe what the book does next, which is to revive the hypothesis's substance under another name. The substance was always the real argument: the law belongs to the world of death, and those who have entered the resurrection mode of existence pass beyond it. He would also enter the inherited debt. If the law ended because the resurrection began, and the completion did not come, the letters remain dispatches from an interval that history outgrew.
Wright would answer that the chapter's own mechanism refutes the despair. If the law's δικαίωμα abides and is fulfilled in those who walk by the pneuma, the new age is genuinely present where the Messiah's people are, which is inaugurated eschatology arrived at by another route. He would note with satisfaction that Novenson's Paul establishes the law rather than nullifying it, keeps love of neighbour in force, and speaks of one law of God for two conditions of humankind, τέλος read as arrival rather than termination. Räisänen's confused abolitionist does not survive the chapter.
Hart would claim Origen, whose advocate he has been throughout: vindicated on the two righteousnesses and on the pneumatic body against every crude physical resurrection, the righteous rising with the kind of bodies stars have. He would press the same objection he has pressed all along, and it is sharpest here. People who neither sin nor die are no longer people in many of the relevant senses; 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.
Fredriksen would claim the ground floor. The argument works because it is ethnic throughout: the promises were to the patriarchs, the resurrection life pays them, and the gentiles are folded into Israel's hope rather than into a universal humanity with the particulars removed. 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.
Paul's own account
The letters supply the mechanism the chapter reconstructs, and supply it in pieces that are usually read apart. Paul writes that Christ is the τέλος of the law for righteousness to everyone who trusts; that trust does not nullify the law but establishes it; that the law is holy and the commandment holy and righteous and good; that the law has jurisdiction over a person only while he lives; and that those baptised have died. Held together, those five statements are the argument, and none of them requires the law to have been abolished.
He also names the hinge on which the whole corpus turns, and names it as a fact he claims to have witnessed rather than as a doctrine he holds: God raised the Messiah from the dead, and in raising him began the raising of all. Christ is the firstfruits; the last Adam became a life-giving pneuma.
And he supplies his own reckoning with the difficulty Schweitzer raises, in terms harsher than any of his interpreters use about him: if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. Paul does not treat the non-arrival as survivable for his position. He treats it as fatal, and proceeds on the conviction that it has not occurred.
The remaining disagreement
The book closes with a sentence its author has earned, that the difficulty lies not in anything Paul says but in the fact that we are, at the time of writing, still dust, and to dust we shall return.
That sentence is where the disagreements finally rest. Schweitzer reads it as the admission that the letters describe an interval that closed without delivering. Wright reads it as compatible with a genuine inauguration awaiting completion. Hart reads it as one sentence short of the conclusion the argument requires. Fredriksen reads it as a scholar ending a monograph with his own mortality, which is how the subject ought to be ended.
Novenson does not choose between them, and the refusal is the book's method rather than an evasion of it. He set out to describe what Paul thought, and whether it is true is a question he declines. Paul did not decline it. That asymmetry between the historian and his subject is the condition of the whole enquiry, and neither party can resolve it for the other.
The same chapter as a dialogue sets these positions in the participants' own voices, which is how this was first written.