Jesus Without The Torah

Why we can't have Jesus without the Torah1 By Dr. Robbert A. Veen Huizen, the Netherlands @ all rights reserved 2008 Summary: In the light of our present day knowledge about 1st century Judaism it seems strange that the Church was so ready to abandon the Torah and the Jewishness of the Gospel. Within the NT there is still sufficient support for an understanding of the Torah and Jewish legal thought as a lasting element of Christian ethics. Especially if we take Matthews priority within the Canon and the statement Jesus made in Mat. 5:17 about the eternal validity of the Law seriously, one should accept that Torah and Church ethics cannot be separated. However, the question must be asked: what happened to the Torah in the Church and why did it happen if we want to make some progress in reassessing the value of the Torah as a source for Christian ethics.

more favorable view of the Torah and the Jewish way of deducing moral rules of behavior than had been acknowledged by the Reformation. His position might be summarized as follows: In the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Torah is normatively interpreted for the community of Jesus’ followers, who affirm His messianic position, and the nucleus of this interpretation is the love of God and neighbor. Affirmation of the Torah and its validity is precisely the cornerstone of any position that holds that Jesus came to interpret the Torah in a fresh manner and not abolish it. Which of course is exactly what Matthew 5:17 teaches us. Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill. From this thesis, we can deduce a number of implications, some of which I will try to explore in this and following articles.

In 1982 Mennonite theologian and pastor John Toews 2 presented his design for a theology of law in the New Testament that would be able to provide us with a biblical method of doing Christian ethics. In his view, the Torah should again have a role to play in ethics, precisely because all the evidence in the New Testament suggests that Jesus took a far

Questions, questions, and even more questions Other, more preliminary questions need to be asked too. If the above thesis is valid, how did it come about that the Christian Churches ignored this central position of the Torah? What happened? What doctrine took the place of the Torah in grounding Christian ethics if any? And how did we arrive

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at the almost insurmountable schism between the demands of the Kingdom and the exigencies of ordinary life in the modern state? The status of the Sermon on the Mount is something of an enigma, with widely diverging views as to the relationship between that Sermon and the teachings of the Torah or Jewish oral tradition. The issue of the relationship of Christian ethics and the Torah also has a significant bearing on many other topics, including the specific position of a Christian in his or her community. Is a Christian primarily a citizen with a specific religious attitude? That is at least what modern liberalism tells Christians based on the principle that religion is a form of inner persuasion. Quite different from the American predicament where 70% of all citizens are still Christians, in the Netherlands Christians are a small minority. But even then Christian political parties represent a sizable chunk of 34% of the electorate, give or take. What can it mean that some of us still hold that a Christian is a citizen of the Kingdom of heavens, who awaits the return of Christ while living in the remains of an old order, destined to fade away? Such a position of 'inner exile' is the reverse of the liberal position and it is in full harmony with it, both sides agreeing that there is no place for a Christian stand on ethics or politics in this life.

What can we do about it? Well, what should Christians do when they disagree? They should read the bible together. It seems to me to be necessary to look with a fresh mind at the New Testament evidence, the epistle of James and the gospels of Matthew and Mark in particular, to establish a biblical answer to these questions. Why these texts in particular? I'll come to that later, but for now I can say that Matthew seems to be the most Jewish gospel, Mark the most 'Roman' or pagan, and the letter of James has been in debate since the 1st century. These are the witnesses to the issue that may have been divided among themselves even from the start. More importantly, they all seem to agree that the Torah is being read and understood in the Church as a major source of Christian ethics, something which we in our time may find almost unintelligible. After all, in modern Christianity, there seems to be no place for the concept of a true obedience to the Torah as an integral part of Christian ethics. The New Testament seems to leave us with a pair of conflicting positions on this issue.

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Jesus or Jeshua? Who is the real Jesus? The Jesus who apparently abrogates the food laws in Mark 7 by “declaring all foods clean,” annuls the Sabbath, invalidates the Korban law and the laws of vowing in general, and rejects the institution of the Temple? Or is it the Je-

sus that we might refer to more adequately by his Jewish name Jeshua? That's the Jesus who in Matthew 5:17 declares that He “did not come to abolish the law and the prophets” and expects a higher righteousness of His disciples than that of the Pharisees, implying a greater obedience to the Torah? The controversy is even apparent within the body of apostolic correspondence, e.g. in Paul. Is it the Jesus who has become the “end of the law” in Romans 10? But how come Paul can say so many wonderful things about the Torah? Living through the Spirit actually fulfills the 'righteous demands' of the Torah. In what sense then can we argue that the New Testament as a whole teaches us that the messianic era starts with the abrogation of Mosaic Law? So again, we must ask: Who is the “real” Jesus? The Jesus of Mark or the Jesus of Matthew?

gled that apparently had been adopted by the apostolic council under the joint authority of James, Peter, and Paul and the Church in Jerusalem (Acts 17). For the same reason, if Pauline doctrine can be considered part of the answer and if it is in strict continuity with Jesus’ teaching, then Jesus must have been abolishing the law, since established exegesis has it that Paul surely did. Even Peter is portrayed as being the recipient of a divine vision in which impurity barriers between Jews and gentiles were lifted (Acts 10). Church practices then and now, and various texts in the New Testament, speak urgently in favor of the image of Jesus of Nazareth as the one who abolished the law.

Mark or Matthew? If Church practice early and late can be considered at least part of the answer, the “real” Jesus obviously is that of Mark. You might work backward, starting from what we actually hold to be true in practice and then reviewing the NT in that light. Well, then it's obvious the Church has overcome its inherent or initial jewishness. The Christian Churches do not hold to laws of ritual purity nor do they abide by the various food laws, including those Noachide laws dealing with blood and the stran-

A New Perspective? Just for argument sake, can we put all of this into some other perspective? Suppose we take into account in what context these gospels were written, without forgetting even for a moment that they are canonical witnesses and therefore cannot be simply excluded in our theology. Matthew might have been speaking from within a part of the Christian Church to whom the recognition of an ongoing validity of the law was still important. To Jewish Christians a continuing role of the law must have been quite self-evident. And they would therefore be inclined to retain vivid memories of Jesus' sayings and acts that were in discontinuity with that presupposition, because they would

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take notice of the divergence sooner than the obvious similarity. In the same manner it would appear to the audience of Mark, that anything that Jesus had said to support the Torah and Judaism would be of great importance because it would be natural for them to assume that He would take a diverging position on nearly everything - as they presumably did themselves when compared to their Jewish neighbors in Rome. At least with respect to dietary laws and matters of sanctity in the daily life, Jesus' teachings and life must give a foundation for current Church practices. The question is how to develop these differences between the gospels into a consistent theology? How else can we explain these divergences? The difference of the images of Christ in Matthew and Mark might be explained by arguing for two separate patterns of early Christianity, which we then can identify according to ethnic boundaries as Jewish and gentile Christianity. That has consequences for exegesis. Matthew's statement are less likely to be taken as the corner stone of our understanding of any issue, we would be inclined to start elsewhere. Read historically, Matthew’s position on the law might then have been a redactional input by its author to support viewpoints taken by the congregations that he wrote for. A fine example is the way we treat the statement

about divorce in Mark and Matthew. This is Mark's statement: Whoever should put away his wife and marry another commits adultery against her. And if a wife should put away her husband and be married to another, she commits adultery. (Mark 10:11, 12) And this is Matthew, I have put the divergent clause in bold letters. But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife, except for a matter of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorcee commits adultery. (Mat. 5:32) The exception is treated most often as an enhancement and Marks statement as the original one or as the principle. In Jewish thinking the amplification of the Law would be treated on a par with the ultimately valid position or halakha - which the Church also does if you look at its practice of allowing divorce, at least in most protestant churches. A Jewish approach would tend to accept an underlying structural relationship between the two statements. Marks statement would still be considered of importance because it showed the intent of the lawmaker to make divorce a difficult thing to do. The statement of the principle and the ultimate ruling on a point of 'law' would be in harmony. By the way, the terminology might lead us astray here. We are talking about 'halakha', which is a Jewish word for a way of life rather than about 'law' in any modern sense.

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Historically speaking, Mathew and Mark would have done very much the same thing, both obscuring the “real” Jesus behind their own theological needs. Theologically speaking we have to choose between two strategies: reading it as 1st century believers, that are familiar with Jewish legal thought, or as modern folk, that consider legalities to be the province of the lawyers. Our modern distinction between the realm of the legal and the moral would make us believe that we find the whole truth in Mark and a particular addition to that in Matthew which should be considered secondary. It would mean a crushing blow to our instincts, and I'll be ready to deliver it later on - that the addition to the law that Jesus made according to Matthew would be considered only the beginning. After all, the interpretation of law and ethics according to Matthew 18 is left in the hands of the congregation as a whole. But we will climb that particular mountain when we come to it later in this series. The equilibrium of our historical observation can theologically be ignored by a harmonizing strategy that starts from the gospel statements that are concurrent with modern practices. We could either start from Mark or from Matthew. In a way, we are doing the same theologically that they did according to our presumptions, when they wrote the gospels. Jesus must have said something in support of what we are doing and know to be

right, how can it be otherwise? The differences are then not really recognized but they are actually ignored because the gospel of Mark - mostly of course the theological views of Paul - can be used to explain Matthews position as belonging to a separate social group with specific theological issues to contend with. We take the historically contingent statement of Mark to be eternal, and the addition of Matthew we see as deviating. The popular idea that Mark is the oldest and therefore the most authentic gospel can be cited for support in this case, even by those who do not wish to practice historical-critical method.

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The canon expresses priorities To modern Christians, this historical issue is not without importance, but it does not confront us with an obstacle that needs to be solved completely in order to make progress. We must first accept that the “real” Jesus cannot be reconstructed as if we can go back behind the texts that we have, and we must accept fully that we are left to do our work with the canonized text. The "real" Jesus is the Jesus of all the canonical gospels and letters. We have to find our way through a maze of conflicting pieces of evidence and travel among incongruent images of Christ, both between and within the given text, to reach our goal. But we should not deny the internal evidence. Is there a way to ease this burden? We should at

least accept the canon as such as our starting point, as the given material to work with, defining our task as finding the unity or the center of the whole of the text that the Church considered Sacred Writings. From that unity we can achieve some grasp of the consistency of the various texts, not as a simple uniform statement, but as something with the consistency and the variety of a chorus piece, where different voices are necessary to express a single melody and harmony results from hearing them all. The canon is not a practical list or a divine revelation in itself, but it reflects the historical perspective and a way of reading Scripture that was current in the early Church. Matthew was put first in the order of gospels for a reason. It was supposed to be the basic and grounding view of Christ. Mark could not set it aside and its historical priority did not affect its theological position after Matthew. After all the gospel of Jesus Christ started to spread around the world from Jerusalem. Matthews placement as the opening gospel also meant, that even Paul could not contradict the basic position of the gospels with impunity. The gospels had particular authority because they represented the living voice of Christ who was the Lord of the Church and the consensus of local Churches or Church groups. And finally, because of the specific contents of Matthew, it made clear from the outset, how the relationship between the Old Testament history and the life of Jesus was to be understood.

The canon preserves diversity However, we should be aware that the New Testament is in many ways a product of conflicting positions. James was in conflict with Paul on the issue of justification; Peter and Paul had their quarrel about the status of gentile Christians in the Church; the gospels of Matthew and John seem to depict quite a different Jesus. All of this is reflected in the texts. Should we harmonize them into one consistent picture? I say we should not, nor should we exaggerate the differences. Side by side with the historical decision to adopt our four gospels instead of the shortened version of Luke that Marcion and Arius had proposed in the 2nd and 4th century, there was the effort to harmonize the gospels into a synoptic vision of events. The conflicts between the gospels were duly noted and increasingly, as the Church moved further into Roman territory, seen as problematic. That accounts for the drive toward conformity and consistency that permeated theology from the third century on. In stead of creatively building upon the example of the NT, and its Jewish mind cast, there was a drive toward a unifying view, a synoptic completeness without tensions, that allowed for easy decisions about right and wrong and stirred the dogmatic imagination. The differences between the New Testament writings had to be smoothed out by a meta-narrative that did not allow them to

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be understood as formal contradictions. And finally dogmaticism arose as the systematic attempt to produce a single consistent series of statements. Dogmatic statements tried to define the Person that all these storied were told about in such a way, that harmony between the texts became possible. Harmonization, the smoothing out of differences, became the dominant hermeneutic strategy. E.g., if Luke said something that is not in John, both events must have happened at different times. The differences between Paul and James should be attributed to different emphases in the same overall gospelstory. If John mentions a date different from the other gospel writers, then he purposely deviated from the historical truth to make a point. In a modern approach, we would read differently. We would surmise that the differences are part of different theological appreciations of the apostolic traditions that the gospel writers were working with, or reflect the different contexts in which their congregations had to deal with those traditions. In such a case, when the contradiction cannot be explained away, theological intent supersedes descriptive accuracy. Whereas the canon preserved the differences between apostolic witnesses and yet hinted at their inner harmony, the drive for dogmatic unity destroyed it in favor of a uniform position. Already within the New Testament, this urge was present in

the baptism formulae that gave succinct answers to the question what do Christians believe. But these statements tried to preserve basic truths as the foundation for different perspectives. They did not try to integrate everything into one logical system.

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Paul and the gospels Since the Reformation placed so much emphasis on the interpretation of the gospel by Paul, a new problem arose: that of harmonizing Jesus’ statements in the gospels with the letters of Paul. Matthew e.g. could be harmonized with Paul by using a double strategy: (1) Matthew was either writing about a preliminary position that Jesus took because at that time the gospel was still meant to reach Israel or (2) Matthew’s text, with its emphasis on “doing the Law” had to mean something else, i.e. it had to be spiritualized. One of the ways of doing that, was to speak about the demands of the law as a prerequisite of accepting the gospel. Jesus was actually showing us to what degree we had merited punishment in order to guide us to divine grace. That strategy resulted in a near dismissal of Matthew’s own intent. Affirming the Law in a gentile Church That is particularly apparent in the case of the great stumbling block that we find in Matthew 5:17, the massive affirmation of the law and the prophets that is contained there.

It is generally accepted that the passage deals with the meaning of Christ’s death in the light of His resurrection, which was the real fulfillment of law and prophets. To be able to fulfill the law meant that Jesus was the One that the law and the prophets had predicted, and the higher righteousness demanded of Jesus’ followers could be equated with the righteousness imputed to sinners. The passage is quite equivocal in this way of reading, involving a double-entendre at the moment it was uttered. It simply doesn't say that without recourse to the 'meta-narrative' or dogmatic framework that is set up in advance. From our present understanding of the Jewish context of early Christianity we can ask a different question. We now know what the expression 'to fulfill the Law' really means: it means that Jesus had no intent whatsoever of abrogating the Torah but in stead came to uphold its standard or even bring the Torah to its real goal. So, perhaps already in the era of the formation of the canon, the Church had forgotten what it actually meant to “fulfill the law” and not to abolish it? Maybe the early Church already employed a reading strategy that made it possible to circumvent the massive affirmation of the Torah’s validity? To fulfill might have come to mean to supersede, by the end of the 2nd century. Paul’s post-resurrection theology, after having reached the status of primary framework, could then become the foundation of all

Christian theology. Jesus’ affirmation of the law was read from hindsight as a stage in a progressive revelation. His effort to build a new Israel had failed and was first present in a new shape in the apostolic preaching of Peter and James, and then given up halfway through the book of Acts to be focused finally on Paul’s mission to the gentiles. It is this meta-narrative of the replacement of Israel by the Church that allowed for the harmonization strategy to work, in essence dividing pre- from postresurrection theology (whereas in fact all of the New Testament in its redacted state is post-resurrection reflection). It is then set in the framework of Jesus’ preaching of the gospel of God’s kingdom to Israel first, and only after they rejected His message could the complete gospel of freedom from the law be explained to gentiles and Jews alike. However, that is not the reading strategy that the canonical structure seems to hint at. The placement of Matthew with its massive law-affirmation as the first of the canonical gospels is the decisive act on which we need to base our understanding of its practical status. The canonical stature of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, including the massive affirmation of the continuing validity of the law in Matthew 5, is a barrier to any contemporary attempt to formulate a law-free gospel, even if based on the gospel of Paul or his followers. It is necessary to leave a formidable

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tradition of reading the gospel behind us. Bias against the Jewishness of the gospel Even in modern readings of the gospel however, this ancient bias against the Jewish character of the gospel is present. Rudolf Bultmann can state, e.g., that Jesus’ teachings are ”a major protest against Jewish legality (Gesetzlichkeit), i.e., against a piety that sees the will of God expressed in the written law and the tradition that explains it.”3 Such a piety would try to achieve God’s acceptance through a painstaking effort to comply with the law’s demands. Religion, law, and ethics were not separated in Pharisaic doctrine, so that civil law became a divine institution and divine law was handled as civil law. That position in his view must lead to casuistry, where legal institutions that have lost their force because of changing circumstances need to be kept alive because they are considered of divine origin and must be adapted to the new circumstances by an artificial process of interpretation. “The consequence of all of this is that the real motivation for the moral act has become perverted.”4 Obedience is in that case seen as something formal and the question of why a moral act is commanded cannot be asked; the principle of retribution (Vergeltung) is the primary motivational force. In such a legal discourse, religious ethics cannot achieve a radical, real obedience from the heart.

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Jesus’ intent was, according to Bultmann, to bypass the codified law and the cultic requirements and present the case of a radical, moral obedience beyond legalism. God demands what is morally good in every situation anew. The moral relationship becomes the pure divine requirement, beyond legal, ritual and cultic law, to respond authentically to Gods presence. The antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount would in fact portray such a moral requirement versus the religious and legal dictates of the rabbis. The behavior of man cannot be determined by legal rules; it would leave a person a sphere of freedom outside of Gods imperative that the law could not deal with. Bultmann equates the halakhic system of the Pharisees (a way of understanding obedience as a “way of life”) with this legalist distortion of Torahobedience. Reconstruction of the gospels Jewishness Even a casual reading of Sander’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism, written in 1977,5 should teach us differently. The themes of God’s grace, election, the ”direction of the heart,” the minor relevance of the aspect of retribution, and the great emphasis on moral attitudes beyond the strictures of the law - all present in early Jewish law traditions - are shown to imply the precise opposite of the legalist, cultic, selfcentered righteousness that Christian scholarship

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attributed to Judaism in the thought of Bultmann. In our Churches, we have not really begun to draw the consequences from this revolution in our way of thinking. With a more realistic picture of 1st-century Judaism, our image of Jesus’ opposition to it must change, and with that, our appreciation of the role of the Torah in Christian ethics must also change. At the present, after several decades of new research into the Jewish context of Jesus’ preaching, we can no longer ignore the continuity between Jesus’ statements and those of his Pharisaic contemporaries. Liberal theology did so. Where Jesus states like the Pharisees, that God rewards full obedience, Bultmann does not hesitate to point out that behind the idea of reward lies the promise of redemption to those who obeyed for reasons other than the reward. Jesus’ use of the concept of reward is thereby given a theological depth to counteract the possibility that obedience for reward perverts the ”moral motivation.” However, such a sympathetic reception of language that opposes Bultmanns own intuitions is not given to the Pharisaic teachers. The assumption is that the theological evaluation of the Pharisees, as presented by some readings of the gospel context, provides us with enough clues to accept in Jesus a statement that is virtually identical to a statement made by His Pharisaic contemporaries and still affirm such a statement by Jesus and reject that of the

Pharisees. All of the explanations of Jesus’ original gospel by Bultmann are determined by his opinions about Pharisees. They are context-derived and biased in as far as they generalize from the gospel-accounts and do not offer an explanation for the intent behind the Pharisees’ position beyond a notion like their “zeal for the law.” I will endeavor to show in some of my next contributions that the intent behind the Pharisees’ disputed rulings can sometimes be reconstructed with some certainty, not in a concrete historical fashion, but by locating the “pattern of religion” (Sanders) involved, and that this actually throws an important light on the meaning of Jesus’ saying and the reasons behind it.

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Jesus against the Law? According to Bultmann, Jesus does not reject the authority of the Old Testament, but distinguishes critically among its diverse commandments (which only means that he has a specific hermeneutic) and has a sovereign attitude towards it. This last point is of course of primary importance. The relationship between the authority of the Torah and the authority of the Messiah is a vital issue. If Jesus as Messiah is sovereign and above the law, then so are His followers. If the Messiah however upholds the Law, then His followers cannot be exempt.

Did Jesus stand above the Law? How can Bultmann claim that this sovereign attitude is without a doubt (1) attributable to Jesus Himself? After all, Bultmann makes a highly technical distinction between Jesus’ sayings and Gemeindebildung (redaction within the congregation and for the latter’s needs), because the image of Jesus as standing above the law was a necessary part of the confession of Jesus as the Messiah. The notion that Jesus supersedes the Torah might very well be part of a tradition that emphasized Jesus' status. It would be easy to loose sight of Jesus' teachings about the Law. Jewish Christians would not make that mistake easily. They after all would expect the Messiah to prove His status by upholding the Torah. If these expressions of Jesus' sovereign status above the Law are indeed part of the apostolic interpretation of Jesus’ gospel, however, they cannot revoke Jesus’ own sayings with regard to the authority of Torah. That leads to the first conclusion: Jesus authority as the Messiah actually enhances the authority of the Torah en does not diminish it. But (2) how can Bultmann claim that, even given his sovereign control over the Torah, Jesus actually did abrogate the law, over against the evidence of Matthew 5:17, which at least in the primitive Church was held to be authoritative?

I give it to you to consider whether it makes sense that the Church would keep Jesus' statements about the Torah which contradicted her own contemporary practice if it had not been convinced that Jesus had actually said it. Bultmann can also (3) at the same time claim that words that deny both Jesus’ rejection of tradition and of the Torah are actually part of the Gemeindebildung, whereas in his view, words that reject the Torah must be authentic. That sets up a definite bias in favor of Mark against Matthew. A case in point is the expression in Matthew 5:17, where Jesus states that He did not come to abolish the law. Bultmann has this to offer: “...in comparison with other words of Jesus and taking His actual behavior into account this cannot possibly be a genuine saying of Christ; it must be a Gemeindebildung from a later age.” We beg to differ, and the reason is precisely this: that Bultmann rejects it as genuine because he interprets it as (close to) an affirmation of Pharisaic legalism. If, however, one can interpret the affirmation of Torah not as a form of legalism, but as something common to all strands of Palestinian Judaism, there is no problem. It certainly cannot be denied that Jesus was a Jew. The solution to the problem need not be the hypothesis that Matthew wrote for a Judaizing congregation, nor the introduction of a semantic framework

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in which ”to fulfill” suddenly becomes connected to Pauline Christology. There is no real hindrance to accept that there was enough in Pharisaic Judaism that could be adopted and adapted both by Jesus and by the early Church. That there is a problem with the absolute nature of this affirmation of Torah in Matthew 5 should lead us into the opposite direction. Precisely the incongruence between the position of the Church and this saying must mean that it is attributable to Jesus, by the standard of critical method that what is in conflict with what can be expected must therefore be genuine. Notwithstanding his general rejection of a favorable attitude towards the law in Jesus, Bultmann accepts that Jesus did not abrogate fasting in Mark 2, did not speak out against the Temple cult and did not reject the Old Testament. If Bultmann is ready to accept such a favorable attitude toward the Law by Jesus, why does he have to explain Mat. 5:17 with recourse to some later stage in the theology of the early Church? What if the statement was first made by the Church on the basis of all the other things Jesus taught and did? The final phrasing of Matthew 5:17 still remains in continuity with Jesus’ own attitude, Even if it derived its inclusion in the gospel from the absence of Jesus' criticism of the law rather than from an actual statement that Jesus had made. But Bultmann not only diminishes the weight of

Jesus' statement by reference to its origin in the post-resurrection Church, he also diminishes it by his interpretation of its phraseology. The impact of the saying is reduced to mean a general acceptance of the Old Testament as sacred literature, and reduced further by its attribution to a Judaizing congregation. The assumptions behind Bultmanns position therefore lead him astray here, as we will show later by looking at the relation between gospel context (reflective stages) and (reconstructed) logion context. It is clear that a saying as recorded in Matthew 5:17 is a real hindrance to accepting the law-free gospel as something that derives from Jesus, and not from the pagan majority Churches and their (vulgarized) Paulinism. In it, Jesus states that He did not come to abolish the law but to uphold (fulfill) it. His followers should too. So, what does this statement actually mean? We will discuss that in the next article.

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1

Chapter 1 of my doctoral thesis The Law of Christ, (Maastricht: Shaker, 2001). I have reworked the entire chapter. 2 John E. Toews, "Some Theses Toward a Theology of Law in the New Testament," in: Williard Swartley, ed. The Bible and Law, Essays on Biblical Interpretation , Elkhart, 1982. 3 Rudolf Bultmann, Theologie des Neuen Testamentes, Tübingen, 1953, p. 10. 4 Ibid. 5 E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, London, 1977.