The relation of jesus to the law

To begin with, the relation of Jesus to the law was passive, like that of every Jew. born under the law (Gal 4*); the requirements of the law in regard to circumeision and purification were complied with in His case as in that of any child of Jewish birth (Lk 27+). He was taken up to the temple when He had completed His twelfth year (Lk 2"), and became, like other Jewish youths, πὴ ΡΠ 13 (or 73> 73) a son of the law.

He would be instructed in it, and its responsibilities would be laid on Him, simply because it was the law of the nation of which He was a member. He He was | must have accepted it as part of the national inheritance to which He was born. The NT gives us no means whatever of judging how the passive unconscious relation to the law was changed into the conscious and responsible one which we see when our Lord entered on His public work.

No doubt He grew into that power of judgment and liberty of action which characterize His ministry ; but we cannot tell what eflort and perplexity, or whether any effort or perplexity, accompanied this growth. When we consider the shortness of His ministry, it seems extremely improbable that we should be able to trace within its narrow limits any ‘evolution’ or progressive change in His attitude to the law.

That attitude was really determined by His character, by the spirit of son- ship, of free appreciation of God’s will, of un- restrained love to man; and His character was complete when He identified Himself with our sinful race in His baptism, and received there the attestation of the heavenly Father as His beloved Son.

No doubt, as one thing in His life led on te another, and as opposition defined His attitude, it became more and more clear what His relation to ‘the law,’ both as a divine institution and as a divine institution administered and corrupted by man, must be; but in principle this was deter- mined from the beginning.

Hence it is not necessary, under the idea that clear self-conscious- ness is the last result of action, to attempt to trace in detail the practical impulses under which our Lord’s attitude to the law was gradually defined, or to assume that He was learning His own mind all the time (so practically Holtzmann, NT Theologie, i. 130-160); we may take the Synoptics as they stand, and aim at a more systematic view.

(1) Speaking positively, Jesus recognized the law as a Ἐξ εὶς as a divine institution, and therefore as invested with indefeasible divine authority. He expressed His sense of this authority in the strongest possible language ; and, with the idea of the law as embodied in writing present to His mind, declared that ‘till heaven and earth should pass, one jot or one tittle should in no wise pass from the law till all should be fulfilled’ (Mt 58, cf. Lk 167).

It has been asserted that Jesus, whose attitude {as we shall see) to certain parts of the law was at least critical, could not have used such language, and that it belongs to the Judaism of the Firat Gospel. But it is found also in the Third, which is Gentile or Pauline rather than Jewish, and the assertion is pedantic.

Jesus certainly believed that the law embodied a revelation of God ; it was, in short, God’s law; and without considering in what respects it might be subject to modification or expansion, He could say broadly that just because it was God’s law, not the dot of an i or the stroke of a ¢ could be abrogated by any power on earth.

And when confronted, as He is on both the occasions when He uses this strong language, with the deformed righteousness of the Pharisees (Mt 5%, Lk 1617), by which the law of God was virtually annulled, we can easily believe that He could and did express Himself thus vehemently. This seems truer, psychologically, than to say with Wellhausen (Israelitische u. Judische Geschichte?, p.

382) that He found room everywhere for His soul, and was not straitened by what was little in the law, so highly did He exalt the worth of that which was great: the latter one should do, the former not leave undone. It is a more placid and | controlled statement of Christ’s relation to the law in principle which is found in Mt 5", the text or theme of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘ Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.

’ The law and the prophets is a compendious expression for the 74 LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) ancient religion as embodied in the OT. To no vart of this—neither to the statutory elements in it nor to the elements of promise, neither to its morality nor to its hopes—was Jesus in any sense hostile.

There must have been something in His conduct or teaching to raise the question, some- thing which created difficulty for men who identified the law with the current interpretation of it in the Rabbinical schools or in the religious practice of the day ; but when it was fairly stated, it created no difficulty for Jesus. In His con- science there was no sense of antagonism or antipathy to the old revelation either of God’s will or of His purpose.

On the contrary, He had come to identify Himself with that revelation, and to consummate it. The πληρῶσαι in Mt 5” applies to the OT in both its parts. It is true that in the rest of Mt 5 it is the law alone which is taken account of, and this has made it possible to doubt whether πληρῶσαι means ‘ toshow the full meaning of,’ or ‘to keep perfectly’; but the very absence of the object in v.

’’, and the disjunctive # (the law or the prophets), show that Jesus was thinking of the OT as containing elements at once of require- ment and of promise, and asserting that all it meant in both kinds would be brought to its con- summation in Him. Hence in principle there is no antagonism between Jesus and the law, be- tween the NT and the OT. For the conscience of Jesus they needed no reconciliation. The New Testament was in Him, and He was thoroughly at home in the Old.

It agrees with this that Jesus refers freely to the law as a religious authority, and as the way to lite. ‘If thou wouldst enter into life, keep the commandments’ (Mt 1917, ‘What shall I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus said to him, What is written in the law?’ (Lk 10). ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them’ (Lk 16”).

It agrees further with this, that in the most un- sparing denunciation of Pharisaism and hypocrisy, e safeguarded with scrupulous care the sanctity of the law they hedged” and abused: ‘The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: all things therefore that they say to you do and observe’ (Mt 23%), Like Mt 5'8 this saying has been impugned on the ground that Jesus could not, in consistency with His real opinion, have spoken thus.

This is the criticism of persons who have never spoken to a crowd, and who do not know that the large consistency of leaving a sound and homogeneous impression on the mind is in- different to the abstract precisian consistency which dictates such doubts. Why should not Jesus say, ‘As interpreters of the law of God, show them all due reverence; as keepers of the law of God, beware of following their example’?

They were poor interpreters, no doubt, but the function itself was a legitimate one, and all that they did in the exercise of it was, primd facie, entitled to respect. Even if it were not so without ualification (and in part, of course, it was not, as Jesus immediately goes on to show), the qualifica- tion could be left to take care of itself ; the main interest of the moment was to expose the Pharisaic practice Be which the law was so wickedly annulled.

hat making void (ἀκυροῦν) the law of God (Mt 15°|| Mk 718) which Jesus laid to the charge of the Pharisees was exactly the opposite of the πληρῶσαι, which He used to define His own relation to it. With them, in spite of all the hedges which guarded it, it lost its rights; with Ein, in spite of all His freedom, it came to its rights. (2) Besides this positive attitude of Jesus to the iaw as a whole, we have to take account in His life of what may be called a more critical attitude.

Without any sense of hostility to the | LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) law, He was conscious of its imperfection; this is implied even in His having come to fulfil it. Of this there are various indications. (a) He speaks of the old revelation as a whole, as of a thing which has had its day. ‘The law and the prophets were until John: from that time the kingdom of heayen is preached’; it isa new era, in which they have no longer the same significance (Lk 16°, Mt 11°).

There is a para- bolic hint of this also in Mk 2 and || Mt 917, Lk 5%, (6) He delights in summaries of the law, in which it is at once comprehended and tran- scended. ‘ Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets’ (Mt 7%, cf.

Mt 22°'-#), Such summaries lift the soul above all that is statutory and positive in the law; in other words, they enable it to conceive of religion as the keeping of law, and yet as without any element of legalism. (c) He presents a positive new standard of life from which legalism has disappeared. Sometimes it is His own example (Jn 13), interpreted as in Jn 13 into a new commandment of love like His own.

Sometimes it is the example of the heavenly Father, whose love, impartial and inexhaustible, is the pattern for His children (Mt 5“). It is by this standard of love that all the nations are un- consciously judging themselves now, and will be judged by Him at last (Mt 25°"), Sometimes it is represented as ‘the will of my Father who is in heaven’ (Mt 72!

12°), All these modes of conceiv- ing the standard of disciple life, though not annulling ‘the law’ but fulfillin it, are neverthe- less indifferent to it, either as a historie decument or as a national institution. : (d) Jesus distinguishes within the law oetween its weightier matters—judgment, mercy, an faith ; and its more trivial ones—the tithing of mint, anise, and cummin (Mt 23% || Lk 11").

‘This is not exactly the same as to say that He subordinated the ritual to the moral, though no doubt He did. Nothing could put this more forcibly than Mt 5%, A man is to leave his gift before the altar, to be reconciled to his brother. There is no law except love ; no statute that can be pleaded against it, no rite so solemn but must give way to it.

The tendency of legalism is to reduce command- ments to a level; they are all parts of a divine law, and it is not for men to pick and choose be- tween them; and the Jewish conscience, to which the law was one law and God’s law, could not find itself at home in the division of it into ritual and moral. For it there was a moral obligation to keep what we call the ritual law.

But as this distinction of Jesus mastered the mind, the sense of moral proportion came back, and it was felt, by some at least, that there were elements in the law which were waxing old and ready to vanish avey. (e) Jesus expressly and formally criticised the law as it was interpreted in the conscience and practice of His countrymen. In Mt 5% we have a series of illustrations. The sixth commandment (v.24), the seventh (v.2"), thelaw of perjury (v.*""), the lex talionis (ν. 358.)

the law as to the treatment of neighbours and enemies (v.**""), are discussed in succession. It is not always clear when it is the letter of the OT itself, and when it is only the current legal rendering of it, which is under review; but in either case Jesus adopts a free critical attitude towards it, and exalts it to a new power.

On one of the subjects touched in this chapter, in connexion with the seventh command- ment, namely, the law of marriage and divorce, Jesus on another occasion tacitly withdrew a per- mission which He recognized as conceded by the Mosaic law (ἐπέτρεψεν Μωυσῆς), in the interest of the ideal of marriage. ‘ Because of your hard: LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) 75 LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) ness of heart Moses allowed you to put away your wives, but from the beginning it was not so’ (Mt 198 || Mk).

The question was one on which Jewish schools were divided, and Jesus legislates upon it in independence, indeed, of Dt 24), but in harmony with the law embodied in the creation narrative, Gn 2%, From the point of view of legalism it is impossible to say why the authority of Dt should be relative and that of Gn absolute; and the itiveness with which Christ pronounces marriage indissoluble, except by the sin which, ipso facto, annuls it, shows that He has completely tran- scended the legal standpoint.

(See, further, art. MARRIAGE). The same holds of His criticism of the Sabbath law, the subject on which He came most frequently into contlict with His country- men: cf. Mt 191-15 (the disciples pinching the ears of corn; the healing of the withered hand); Lk 13°17 (the woman with a spirit of infirmity), 1416 {the dropsical man); Jn 517 (the paralytic at Bethesda) ; Jn 9 (the blind man restored to sight). Cf. Lk 6° (Ὁ ; the incident of the man working on the Sabbath).

Here it is impossible to say that Jesus was hostile to the law of God, or to any ideal of the Sabbath having its rootsin the OT. But He was irreconcilably hostile to the accumulation of tradi- tional human precepts into which the prohibition of labour, in the interest of man and beast, had been expanded by the Neha ingenuity of the scribes (ef. Schiirer, GJV® ii. 470ff. [HJP τι. ii. 96f.])

He was hostile to the method of interpretation which defeated God’s purpose in giving the law, and changed a Beatie into a burden. He was espe- cially indignant that on a day which was made for man He should be forbidden to do works of humanity, by exercising His power to heal.

As Son of Man, the head of the kingdom in which humanity was to come to its rights, He claimed to be Lord of the Sabbath, and to judge all statutes concerning it according to their agreement or disagreement with its humane intention. It is in connexion with conflicts of this kind that we first read of His enemies plotting His death (Mk 35): He wounded their pride in their legal holiness too deeply to be forgiven.

It is one of the defects of legalism that the less the grounds of the law can be discerned—in other words, the more positive and arbitrary it is—the greater seems the merit of punctually observing it. Hence the numberless pee binone into which the fourth commandment ad been developed had a greater importance for the legally-trained conscience than the weightier matters οἱ the law ; and the assumption of free- dom toward them, as by Jesus, was regarded as the most daring impiety.

How far the teaching and practice of Jesus were immediately grasped by His followers we cannot tell; there are indica- tions in the Gospel (Lk 13) that there were many prepared to appreciate them.

Butif in relation to the Sabbath and to the law of marriage we can say that Jesus criticised the legalistic practice of His time by reference to the ideal enshrined in the OT Stcelé, we are on different ground when we come to consider— (7) The attitude of Jesus to what we should call the ritual law—that part of the law and custom of the Jews which was purely positive, and in which there was really no Ean content.

As far, indeed, as this was represented by the cultus of the nation, He treated it with at least silent respect. We do not know that He was ever resent at a sacrifice, but neither do we hear that e ever denounced sacrifice.

He certainly spoke of the temple as His Father's house, and as destined to be a house of prayer for all nations; and in a flame of zeal He drove from it the traders who made it a Sanaa tpn and aden of robbers (Mt | AS 1e temple tribute, not, indeed, | He predicted its fall, and with it the collapse of 2118).

He paid t because He was bound to do so,—on the contrary, He, and His disciples also, as the king’s children, were free from such imposts,—but to avoid offence (Mt 17%"), He did not shrink from touching the leper (Mt 8-4), being raised above the thought of ceremonial pollution; but He told him to go and show himself to the priest, and offer the gift which Moses commanded, for a testimony to them.

There is a combination here of inward liberty and indifference, with a formal outward respect determined by circumstances, and _neces- sanly ceasing with them. Cf. also Lk 174.

(In this connexion it may be noted that the idea of σκάνδαλον as a thing to be avoided in conduct is part of the new moral ideal of Jesus, dependent on the primacy He gives to love; we are bound to consider others—as He did, for instance, in paying the temple tax—with a consideration which we may not need ourselves; and to deny this con- sideration, and out of selfishness injure others or lead them into sin, is denounced by Him in the most passionate words, Mt 18").

But there is one point in which, according to the evanyelic tradition, Jesus completely broke not only with the practice of His time, but with the law of Moses itaelt—-the distinction, namely, between clean and unclean foods, and the observance of various ritual purifications by washing, Mk 7+, Mt 15'**. ‘The discussion here starts from the violation by His disciples of ‘the tradition of the elders.

’ To this, naturally, Jesus could allow no authority; but He went further, and assailed it as a morally malignant thing which practically annulled the law of God. He appealed to Scripture (e.g. to the fifth commandment, Mk 7%) against this tradi- tion—to the law of God against the ordinance of man—precisely as the Reformers appealed to the Bible against the Church (Holtzmann, NT 7heo/. i. 141).

But in explaining to the people (‘ Hear me, all of you, and understand’) the principle on which He acted, He went further still, and, as the evangelist expressly asserts, ‘made all meats clean’ (καθαρίζων πάντα τὰ βρώματα, Mk 7). In Lk 1157 the same subject is treated more from thie point of view of indifference ; it is only when the dish is filled with the proceeds of rapine that there is anything offensive in insisting on its being out- wardly (i.e.

Levitically) clean; but in Lk 107 (the mission of the Seventy) there may be a reference to the more thorough view. The missionaries are to eat and drink what they are offered, with no needless scruples. This decisive breach with the law was felt to be what it was both by the opponents of Jesus and by Jesus Himself: ‘Then came the disciples and said unto him, Knowest thou that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?’ ...

‘Let them alone,’ He answered ; ‘they are blind guides; and if the blind guide the blind, both shall fall into a pit’ (Mt 1512". It is at this point, where this decisive breach with: legalism is accomplished, that Jesus is compelled to leave Palestine (Mt 15%! || Mk), to give up the attempt to win the people, and devote Himself to the training of the Twelve.

It was only to a select company that His mind could now be unfolded; a great gulf had been fixed between Him and the worshippers of the law, across which no under- standing was possible. Nor do the Gospels give us the means of knowing how far He was able to carry the education of the Twelve on this subject. The ‘meats and drinks and divers washings’ were art of a system; what of the remaining part of it? What of all that element of the law which was identified with the temple and its worship?

What of animal sacrifice? What even of the covenant sign, circumcision? As for the temple, 76 LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) the ritual worship. But was this element in the law to have fulfilment through Him, or was it nly to be destroyed? The one hint we have of an wswer to this is the fact that Jesus spoke of His own death as the basis of a (new) covenant between God and man—that covenant which Jeremiah fore- told (31°), which has as its fundamental blessing the forgiveness of sins.

To connect the forgiveness of sins with the shedding of blood is in the Bible sri a to conceive the shedding of blood as sacrificial ; only sacrificial blood atones for sin. In the great word spoken at the Supper, therefore, Jesus hints at a fulfilment in His own person of that whole side of the law which has to do with spurosohing God in worship, Mt 26%.

He gives the impulse and the justification to that inter- pretation of His life and death in relation to the (Levitical) law which we afterwards find in the Ep. to the Hebrews.

On the whole, then, it may be said that the attitude of Jesus to the law was that of entire loyalty to it as the revelation of God’s will, entire comprehension of it in its principle and aim, entire subordination of every expression of it to its prin- ciple, entire superiority to all human interpreta- tions of it, as designed perhaps for its greater security, but actually making it of no effect ; and entire indifference, not indeed to the law as con- stituting an order for approaching God in worship, but to those elements in the law which, because in themselves without ethical significance, operated to corrupt conscience, and to divide men from one another without moral ground.

II. THe ATTITUDE OF THE EARLY CHURCH TO THE LAW, AND ESPECIALLY THE PRACTICE AND TEACHING OF 51. PauL.—A. At first the law presented no problem to the Christian society. All the members of that society were Jews, and devout Jews. The Ananias who baptized St. Paul is described as εὐλαβὴς κατὰ τὸν νόμον, and as having testimony borne to him by all the Jews inhabiting Damascus (Ac 22"), and this character was no doubt typical.

The early Christians, in company with the apostles, assiduously frequented the temple (Ac 2 31 51 *°); the observance of the law, so far as it was observed by common people, would be a matter of instinct with them—a part of their nationality, the relation of which to their religion never presented itself to their minds.

The charges made against them by the priests have never any reference to the law, and the proofs adduced for the Messiahship of Jesus, which seem to have filled a considerable space in apostolic preaching, were related not to the law, but to prophecy. ΑΒ far as the Bk. of Acts gives us any indication, difficulty first emerged in connexion with the preaching of St. Stephen.

He was charged with speaking ‘ blasphemous words against Moses and against God’; with incessantly ‘speak- ing words against this Holy Place and against the law’; with saying that ‘Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place, and change the customs which Moses delivered to us’ (Ac 6).

From these accusations we can only infer that the new wine was Depoaning to burst the old bottles, and that the enemies of Christianity, with senses sharpened by hatred and fear, saw perhaps sooner than its friends that it was essentially irreconcilable with the established legalism of the Jewish Church. It was divine and human; Judaism was national and traditional ; it could not harmonize finally with the traditional and national framework.

But in the Christian society itself, so natural was it for Jews to live as Jews, even after they accepted Jesus as the Christ, that the difficulty was not felt. This di‘ficulty was first forced on the attention of every one by the circumstances attendant on the reception of Cornelius into the Church. While | LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) St. Peter, divinely led from Joppa to Czsarea, was yet preaching the gospel in Cornelius’ house, the Holy Spirit fell on all those who heard the word (Ac 10%).

The circumcised believers who were there were amazed, but St. Peter saw the significance of the event, and at once had them received into the Church by baptism, and associ- ated familiarly with them (Ac 113.

When his conduct—which really meant that the ceremonial law, as a Jewish national law, separating the Jews as God’s people from all others, had ceased to have religious significance—was called in question at Jerusalem (Ac 11%), he defended it apparently with the full consciousness of what it meant. ‘If God gave them the same put as he gave us also when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I should obstruct God?’ (cf.

Ac 157), It is implied here that the gift of God—in other words the Holy Ghost—is the essential of Chris- tianity, and the only one; where it is found, nothing else counts, and no questions are to be raised ; circumcision is nothing and uncireumcision is nothing. But if this is so, then (so far as it isa term of communion and a condition of salvation) does not the law as a whole, to which men were bound by cireumcision, cease to have any religious significance?

Is it not possible already to define the Church as a society in which there is neither Jew nor Greek ?* This inference, which was involved in St. Peter’s conduct, and in his defence of it, was not, however, clearly drawn at once. The exceptional case of Cornelius was regarded as exceptional; one man and his family could not make a Church, and this isolated instance might perplex rather than en- lighten the simple-minded.

But with the ex- tension of the Church to Antioch, and especially with its extension beyond Antioch through the mission conducted by Paul and Barnabas, the subject was brought up with greater urgency. In the account of the first mission of these apostles, we have a hint of the peculiar Pauline attitude to the law: ‘in this man (Jesus) every one who be- lieves is justified from all things from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses,’ Ac 13%.

It is not in this, however, but in the doctrine of a crucified Messiah, and perhaps in personal jealousy, that an explanation may be found of the opposi- tion ofered to the mission en route. Not Jewish Christians attached to the law, but Jews who were not Christians at all, resisted the preachers.

When Paul and Barnabas returned, they summed up the result of their mission in the words: ‘God has opened the door of faith to the Gentiles,’ Ac 14%, But this ‘conversion of the Gentiles,’ though the news of it caused great joy in Phenicia and Samaria (Ac 15°), awakened very different feelings even in Christian circles at Jerusalem. Emissaries from Jerusalem insisted on teaching (ἐδίδασκον, Ac 15?)

the brethren at Antioch—men who had be- lieved in Jesus Christ and received the Holy Ghost —that without circumcision they could not be saved. It was a deliberate challenge not only to the work of Paul and Barnabas, but, as they believed, to the work of God; and as it involved the unity of the Church, it was arranged that Paul and Barnabas with some brethren from Antioch should go to settle it with the apostles and elders at Jerusalem.

It was not a question on which the apostles to the Gentiles could compromise; and everything depended, not indeed for the future of Christianity, but for the present peace of the Church, on the conciliatory spirit and insight of the leaders of the Church at Jerusalem. Room wag given for discussion (Ac 15’), but the question was settled by the argument of St. Peter—an argument * We have assumed above that the Cornelius episode is historical, and also in its right place.

LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) Pe ia identical in principle with that of ch. 11: ‘God who knows the heart bore witness to them (the Gentiles) in that he gave them the Holy Spirit just as he did tous; and he made no distinction tween us and them, in that he purified their hearts by faith.’ For the Gentiles, at all events, a place in the Church and a part in salvation is in no way dependent on circumcision, or on keeping the law of Moses. This was the principle for which St.

Paul contended ; and it was in consist- ency with it that he refused to have Titus cir- cumcised on the occasion of this visit to the Jewish Church (Gal 2*), and that he withstood St. Peter to the face when, during a subsequent visit to Antioch, he yielded to Jewish pressure, and withdrew from tellowship with Gentile be- lievers.

The recognition of this principle on both sides does not discredit the decree ot Ac 15%%, The decree is a measure of expediency, necessarily of a temporary character, but one to which (in the in- terests of peace and of the Church’s unity) St. Paul could easily enough agree—once his principle had been recognized.

Where Judaism was ocused, in Jerusalem for instance, the law would assert itself as inevitably as nationality or patriotism ; in purely Gentile Churches no question as to its place in revelation or its religious significance might ever be raised; in places where Jew and Gentile were much in contact there would no doubt be inconsistencies, misunderstandings, and practical compromises and accommodations of various sorts. Of these the decree is a specimen. B.

The centre of interest in the NT is now in the practice and the doctrine of St. Paul.—(a) In the course of his second mission he visited Europe, and in a few verses of the Ist Ep. to the Corinthians, written to a Church founded in the course of this mission, he gives a clear and precise account of the principles on which he acted. ‘Being free from all, I made myself a slave to all, that 1 might gain the more.

And I became to the Jews as a Jew, that I might gain Jews; to those under law, as under law, not being myself under law, that I might gain those under law ; to those without law {i.e.

the Gentiles as ‘outlaws’ from the Jewish oint of view), as without law, not being without aw to God, but under law to Christ (ἔννομος be- eause the Christian lives in the law, he is not under it as one to whom it speaks from without and from above, and whom it oppresses), that I might gain those without law’ (on the whole Sree 1Co 9% see the masterly note of dwards, Comm. ad loc.) It is in pursuance of this policy that St.

Paul at the outset of this journey circumcises Timothy (Ac 16°), and delivers to the Churches on his route the decree of the Jerus. Council (Ac 164) ; it is still in pursuance of it that he preaches at Corinth a gospel to which everything is indifferent but Jesus Christ crucified (1 Co 2"), and declares that circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision nothing (1 Co 718). In these verses in 1 Co it may be assumed that St.

Paul is interpreting the principle on which he had acted when at Corinth, and on which he acted everywhere. The man who is called (i.e. who becomes a Christian) uncircumcised is not to cir- cumcise himself ; the man who is cireumcised when the call comes to him is not to undo or disguise the fact: as far as the gospel and membership in the Church are concerned, circumcision and uncireum- cision are neither here nor there. It is of this principle and practice that St.

Paul says: so I ordain in all the Churches (1 Co 7!7). The Jewish opposition to St. Paul at Corinth seems also to have fastened on this aspect of his work: it no longer flowed from Pees jealousy, as probably in Galatia. The charge laid against him before Gallio was that he persuaded men to worship God παρὰ τὸν νόμον (Ac 18:8), by which is no doubt meant, in violation of the Mosaic law. Judaism was 8 religto licita, and as the teaching of St.

Paul was frankly inditlerent to the national character in virtue of which the law possessed this public standing, his enemies thought to bring him within the scope of the Roman law as violating it. Yet with all this he was anxious to maintain com- munion with the mother Church at Jerusalem, and at the close of his journey formally paid his re- spects to it once more (Ac 18”). (Ὁ) To the third mission of St. Paul, which is ordinarily dated as commencing 55 or 56 [Turner, 52] A.D.

, belong the great controversial Epistles, 1 and 2 Co, Gal, and Ro, in which his doctrine of the law (for he was obliged both by his spiritual earenienve and by the challenges of his adversaries to have a doctrine) is expounded in all its aspects. Law in a sense is the subject of all, but especiall of the two last named. The very frequency with which the word occurs is significant. It is found 32 times in Gal, 76 times in Ro, 8 times in 1 Co; elsewhere in the Epistles ascribed to St.

Paul only 6 times. In Gal the reference is mainly to what we should call law in its ritual aspect, for the claim made on the Christians of Galatia by the Judaizers was that they should submit to be circumcised ; in Ro, on the other hand, it is the moral law which is the subject of discussion. Yet this distinction is not one which would be present, at least vividly, to St. Paul’s mind.

He thinks of the law as one, and as the law of God; and his point is that statutory obedience is not the way of salvation. Much of the dithiculty which his opponents had in understanding St. Paul must have been due to the apparently (and inevitably) equivocal atti- tude which he assumed to the religion of Israel. On the one hand, the gospel was a specifically new thing. It was independent of the law. It did for him what the law could not do (Ro 8°).

It had to be defined by contrast with the law ; sometimes it seemed as if it could be defined only by opposition to the law, as in 2 Co 3 where they are confronted as γράμμα and πνεῦμα, as ἀποκτέννειν and ζωοποιεῖν, as κατάκρισις and δικαιοσύνη, as Td καταργούμενον and τὸ μένον. Even in Ro, which is written in a more conciliatory mood, pains are taken to show that in principle the two religions (the law and faith, works and grace, wages and promise) are mutually exclusive (Ro 4).

On the other hand, the con- nexion of the new religion with the old is as in- dubitable. The δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ preached in the gospel may be χωρὶς νόμου, yet it is witnessed to by the law and the popnels (Ro 3", οἵ. 13.117 10°). The last passage referred to is particularly striking, for in it St. Paul applies to the gospel words spoken by Moses about the law, and that for the very poxpone of pointing the superiority of the gospel to the law.

In other words, he read the OT as a Christian book, and yet proved from it the thesis that the OT religion was not Chris- tianity. But though this inevitable formal diffi- culty must often have led to misunderstanding in controversy, it is no more than formal, and the apostle’s position is intelligible enough.

The OT, ΑΞ as a code, is not Christian, is indeed antichristian, as every religion based on statutes and therefore legal in spirit must be; but as a revelation it has the promise of Christianity in it, and bears witness tu the gospel. (c) Before examining St. Paul’s doctrine, or the various suggestions of his Epistles, oa the law, it is necessary to observe more closely lis use of the word. (a) He sometimes has it with, sometimes without, the article.

The question has been raised whether the meaning is the same in the two cases. If we ask questions which were not present Β | 78 LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) to the mind of the writers whom we are interpre- ting, we are apt to get unreal and unreliable answers; and in answering this question there has been little agreement among scholars. No doubt when St. Paul says ‘the law,’ without any quali- fication, he is thinking of the law of Moses.

There was nothing else in the world to describe by that name. The one specimen exhausted the species. Is anything else meant when he speaks of ‘law’ without so defining it? The answer given by such scholars as Lightioot and Gifford is that in such cases what St. Paul has in view may indeed be the law of Moses, but it is that law not arises as Mosaic, not as the historical institute with which the Jews were familiar, but indefinitely, and simply in its character as legal.

In spite of the objections of Grafe, this view seems thoroughly sound. Even what is regarded as a decisive case on the opposite side (Ro 5” νόμος δὲ παρεισῆλθεν) is much more effective and relevant to the apostle’s argument if we render ‘ Law came in,’ instead of ‘The Law.’ St. Paul is writing of the great pears forces which have dominated the history of humanity, Sin, Law, and Grace, and it is in their character as such, not in their historical definiteness, that he is concerned with them.

It is only when this is admitted, that what St. Paul says of law has any interest for others than Jews. It was because he could conceive of the law of Moses not as Mosaic, but simply as legal, that he could find an analogue to it among the Gentiles, and preach to them also a gospel (and the same gospel) which meant emancipation from legalism.

‘The Gentiles, he says, in explaining how it is possible for them to be judged by God, though they have no law (in the sense in which Israel had) yet do by nature the things required by the law, and so display ‘the work of the law written in their hearts’ (Ro 3.4), They have the idea of a task to be done, just as the Jews have; and there is a ‘natural legality,’ to use an expression of Chalmers, in men which disposes them to aim at achieving righteousness in this way.

‘The first thought of man, Jew or Gentile, is that he will do the things that are required of him,—in other words, keep the law,—and on the ground of what he thus achieves claim as of right the approbation of God. This is what St. Paul means by attaining righteousness ἐξ ἔργων νόμου, by works of law. The Mosaic law is included, but it is included not as Mosaic, but as legal, and it does not exhaust the concept.

The law may be the form that haunts the mind of the ‘natural legalist’ the world over; and to all such alike, Jew or Gentile, St. Paul declares that the way they are treading can never lead to acceptance with God. It does not matter what the special content is which is embodied in the legal form; it may be mainly what we call ritual, as in the Ep. to the Galatians, or mainly what we call ethical, as in the Ep.

to the Romans; in no case whatever can statutory obedience con- stitute a claim on God or command His approba- tion. ‘By works of law shall no flesh be justified in his sight’ (Ro 3”). (8) There is another point to be cleared up in St. Paul’s use of the word. There are passages in which ‘ the law’ is used with a genitive in a way which suggests to a modern, perhaps especially to an English reader, that the word is used with some approach to the sense it now bears in physical science.

Thus ‘the law of sin which is in my members’ is interpreted as the sinful mode in which ‘my members’ normally or habitually act (Ro 7%); similarly also ‘the law of the spirit of the life in Christ Jesus’ (Ro 8*). But the passage most relied on to prove this senseis Ro 72 εὑρίσκω doa τὸν νόμον, τῷ θέλοντι ἐμοὶ ποιεῖν τὸ καλόν, ὅτι ἐμοὶ τὸ κικὸν παράκειται.

This is often interpreted to mean, LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) ‘I find therefore this regularly recurrent pheno- menon,—this “law ” in the sense of modern science, —that when I would do good, evil is present with me’ (so Winer, ed. Moulton, p. 697, who renders τὸν νόμον normam ; and ef. Meyer or Sanday and Headlam, ad /oc.) But the ‘law’ of modern science belongs to an intellectual world which was not then in being, and there can be little doubt that by εὑρίσκω dpa τὸν νόμον St.

Paul means to say, ‘this is what I find as far as the law is concerned,—I mean well, but am perpetually baffled by the presence of evil.’ (So Vaughan). The words τὸν νόμον refer to the law of Moses, under which St. Paul had his experience of legal religion ; but it is the experi- ence also of every one who has tried legal religion in any shape, Mosaic or another. So in the other passages referred to above, ‘the law’ is to be conceived as related to a legislator, and not as in modern physics.

‘The law of God’ (Ro 7”) is the law which God enjoins; the law ‘of the mind’ (v.

%) is the law which the νοῦς or practical reason of the man prescribes, or the law of God as re-enacted in conscience ; the law of sin is the mode of life (not in which sin is normally ex- hibited, but) which Sin, personified as a rival to God, enjoins upon man and compels him to follow ; the law of the Spirit of the life in Christ Jesus is the mode of life (not in which spirit acts auto- matically, and on the analogy of a physical force, but) which the Spirit authoritatively prescribes, and, as being in its essence impulse as well as law, enables man freely to realize.

There are, however, cases in which the genitive with νόμος is of a different kind, and in which νόμος itself seems to be used in a larger sense, almost= ‘religion,’ as something instituted by God. Thus in Ro 3” St. Paul says boasting is summarily excluded, and asks διὰ ποίου νόμου ; through what sort of law? In other words, What sort of char- acter must we suppose Christianity as a divine institution to possess, in order that this result must follow?

Is it to be characterized by works, or by faith? The latter, says St. Paul: the geni- tives in the verse being those of the characterizing quality. In v.*! of the same chapter νόμον is ambiguous. It may refer to the OT religion as a whole; and then the answer to the question, Do we annul (the) Law through faith? would be given in ch. 4, where St.

Paul shows that the justi- fication of Christians has its prototype in that of Abraham,—in other words, that the old order is confirmed (ἱστάνομεν), not subverted, by the new. But véuov may be generic, and the question may mean, Do we then annul Law—all that has ever been known as moral order, all that has ever been supposed to safeguard morality whether of Mosaic or other origin—by our faith, i.e. by our new Christian religion?

In this case, the proof of the assertion that we do not annul but establish Law by Faith—that the Christian religion is the only effective guarantee of morality—is given, not in ch. 4, but in chs. 6-8, where Christianity is shown to involve the possession of the Holy Spirit. (¢) We may now proceed to notice more particu- larly what St.

Paul teaches about Law, bearing in mind that it was through the Mosaic law that he obtained the experience out of which he speaks, but that he speaks for the benefit of men who may have had a similar experience although they had never heard of Moses; in other words, that even where he is formally discussing the Law, it is Law itself, in all that is characteristic of it as legal, which he is really concerned with. (1) As regards its place in_ history, it is an entirely subordinate thing.

The great spiritual powers which have had dominance in the life of man are Sin and Grace; in comparison with them, Law isa minor matter. Sin entered the world (εἰσῆλθεν, LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) Ro 5"), and so did Grace, but Law only παρεισῆλθεν τε entered as an accessory, or in a subordinate capacity (Ro 5”). To a Jew, the most important figure in religion was Moses; St.

Paul argues that the importance of Moses in the spiritual history of humanity is an entirely inferior thing when com- pared to that of Adam or of Christ. This is the purport also of the argument in Gal 3%", where he aims at showing that the Promise—i.e.

the Chris- tian religion as it was announced to Abraham, and in a sense imparted to him—was not con- ditioned by the Law, which came 400 years after- wards, and that not by the immediate act of God, but ‘ordained through angels, by the hand of a mediator.’ It is aot so clear whether St. Paul regarded Law, or the reign of Law, either in its more statutory form as in Israel, or in its vaguer form as present to conscience among the Gentiles, as a positive preparation for the gospel.

The figures of the prison-house and the παιδαγωγός in Gal 3% hardly amount to this. As Lightfoot remarks, ‘the tempting explanation of παιδαγωγός els Χριστόν, ‘‘one to conduct us to the school of Christ,” ought probably to be abandoned.’ Eis Χριστόν really means ‘until Christ came.’ During the pre-Christian stage of our life we were ‘shut up and kept in ward under the law’; it was our prison and our moral guardian, but St. Paul does not regard it as leading us to Christ.

The παιδα- ywybs was a slave who had to exercise a certain moral restraint over the boy under his charge ; the law, too, was servile, an inferior type of religion, and all it could do by itself was to attempt a similar restraint. (2) On the mode in which Law acts in the indi- vidual who lives under it, St. Paul has much to say. (a) It brings the knowledge, especially the full knowledge (ἐπίγνωσι5) of sin, Ro 3° 4%, and esp. 77 1 had not known sin, but through the law,’ ete.

The description of spiritual experience in Ro 77 is not to be mechanically interpreted ; it belongs to what may be called ‘ideal biography.’ It is neither the experience of the regenerate nor of the unregenerate man, but the experience, if one might say so, of the unregenerate man seen through regenerate eyes, interpreted by a regenerate mind ; it is individual experience, but universalized ; it is not a deposition for a law court, but some kind of essential eternal truth.

It contains much of St. Paul’s doctrine of the law—a doctrine resting on experience of his own. ‘The starting-point is purely ideal. ‘I was alive without the Jaw (xwpls νόμου) once.’ This is not a date which can be fixed in any one’s life. There is not really a golden age, a happy time to which we ean look teak when we had no conscience, and therefore no bad conscience. It is, however, the assumed starting-point of the spiritual life for St. Paul. It lasts till its peace is invaded by the Law.

When the commandment comes, sin wakes up to life, and the man dies. The prohibition of the Law reveals to man_ his antagonism to it. The Law comes to him, from without, and it 7s without: man and the law, the very moment the law appears as such, are dis- covered to be in some kind of antagonism to each other ; conscience first exists as a bad conscience. (8) The law not only brings the full conscious- ness of sin, it also brings its doom.

The law works wrath, Ro 4°, There is a ‘curse of the law’ which comes upon all who violate it. To know that one has broken the law is to know that he is subject to this curse. The doom of death stares him in the face. St. Paul nowhere gives an analysis of θάνατος, or κατάρα, or κατάκριμα, or any of the words he uses in this connexion, and it is merely mis- leading to introduce such distinetions as physical, spiritual, and eternal death to interpret his mean- ing.

That death which is the doom or curse of LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) 19 the law is one awful indivisible thing, which only a despairing conscience can realize, and which is too overwhelming to be the subject of ‘such dis- tinctions. It includes in every case the feeling that God, whose the Law is, is against those who have broken it. _(y) The Law, according to St. Paul, stimulates sin, and was given for that very purpose. ‘The Law came in beside, that the trespass might abound,’ Ro 5%.

The Law was added τῶν παραβάσεων χάριν, Gal 317: where ‘ because of transgressions’ must be interpreted on the analogy of Ro δ᾽) wa πλεονάσῃ τὸ παράπτωμα. Cf. also Ro 713 ‘that sin through the commandment,’ ὁ.6. through the law in one of the injunctions or prohibitions composing it, ‘might become exceeding sinful.’ This is one of the most daring points in St. Paul’s doctrine, yet it rests or the familiar psychological fact that prohibition provokes resistance.

When the law —any law whatever—says ‘Do not,’ there is something in man which is inclined to say ‘I will.’ The peculiarity is that St. Paul represents God as availing Himself of this characteristie of human nature in order (indirectly) to prepare man for salvation. When he says that the purpose for which Law came in was that the trespass might abound, the purpose is conceived as God’s.

It is as though God saw that the only way to get man to accept His righteousness was to make him despair of his own, and the way to make him despair of his own was to subject him to a dis- cipline under which the sin that was in him would reveal its exceeding sinfulness, its irresistible tyrannical strength, and annihilate all his hopes. It is in this connexion of ideas that St. Paul says the law is the strength of sin, 1 Co 15%.

No doubt it was at this point that his doctrine would seem most impious to a pious Jew. The Law, his adversary would naturally assume, was given to be kept. It was given to guide man in the way of life, to be a light to his feet and a lamp to his path. It was a kind of insanity—so it would seem to him—to represent it as given to stimulate sin, to counteract its own nature, defeat its own pur- pose, and lead to its own supersession by a new religion.

But, in reality, Law is used in two different senses by the parties to this controversy. The Jewish interlocutor whom we have supposed is thinking of the whole OT revelation, which is not necessarily legal at all; St.

Paul is thinking of it πος ΤΑΙ as legal, as that system of statutes and traditions to which it had been reduced in the Pharisaie circles in which he had been brought up and he is interpreting God’s purpose in giving the law through his own experience—surely an ex- perience in which the hand and purpose of God could be traced—under those conditions. If ex- perience proved anything, it proved that God could mean nothing by the law (as St.

Paul had known it) except to make a full revelation of sin. It was not meant to bring salvation, it was meant to bring despair. (δ) But though the law acts in this paradoxical way, and does so in pursuance of God's purpose, God is not to blame for the sin which is multiplied, nor is the character of the law itself in the least degree compromised. The law is spiritual and holy. Both πνευματικός and ἅγιος are words which indicate the connexion of the law with God.

The commandment, the prohibition or precept in which the law expresses itself, is holy (=divine), just (=answering to the relations which subsist be- tween God and man, or between men themselves), and good (=morally beneficent).

‘The explanation of the disastrous working of the law (disastrous, though God’s grace makes it an indirect ea gey tion for the gospel) is to be found in man himself, and especially in his nature as flesh: am 80 LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) σάρκινος, a creature of flesh, sold under sin,’ Ro εὐ The law, perhaps, ought to be able to do for us something quite different from what it actually does; but it cannot do that other thing; it 1s weak ‘through the flesh,’ Ro 83, St.

Paul nowhere explains how the flesh has come to have this peculiar, native, invincible antipathy to the law, and this is not the place to inquire; it is enough to notice that it is on his conception (which like all his other conceptions is not an abstract but an experimental one) of what the flesh is, that the most characteristic part of his doctrine of the law depends.

It is because the flesh is what it is that the law stimulates sin, plunges man into despair, and so prepares him for the gospel, i.e. for a divine righteousness to which ‘ works of law’ contribute nothing, though witness is borne to it ‘by the law and the prophets.’ The flesh and the law together explain the universal need and the universal craving for redemption. (3) It is necessary, however, to define the relation of law and gospel more closely.

It is true that the law contributes nothing tothe gospel: no statutory obedience whatsoever enters into the δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ preached by St. Paul to sinners whom the law has brought to despair. But the law is not ignored by the gospel. It is God’s law. It is enforced by the most terrible sanctions: its sen- tence of condemnation, its curse, its doom of death, are awful realities, and cannot simply be passed by. Nor in St. Paul’s gospel are they passed by.

The very heart of that gospel is Christ's relation to the law—His relation to the law, not merely as a law which issues commandments, but as a law which has pronounced sentence upon man. When Christ is said to be made under law, to redeem them that are under law, it is this which is in view: St. Paul has a gospel to preach to men under the condemnation of the law, because that condemnation has been taken on Himself by Christ.

This is the idea which explains all the formule the apostle uses in describing the redeeming work of Christ, and which explains above all the fact that the redeeming work of Christ is so constantly identified with His death. Death is the doom of sin, the sanction, the curse, the sentence of the law ; and in dying for us Christ recognized without abatement the utmost claims of the law as ex- pressive of the holy will of God.

It is in this sense that He is said to have become a curse for us, and to have been made sin for us by God; it is in this sense also that God is said in Him to have condemned sin in the flesh. All these passages (Gal 318 4#, 2 Co 5", Ro 85) describe the same thing: the absolute honour paid to the law by Christ in freely submitting to that death in which the law’s con- demnation of humanity is expressed.

We do not discredit this connexion of ideas by saying that death is merely physical, and that the conception of it as the doom of sin is fantastic or mythological. Nothing that happens to man is merely physical.

All that happens to a spiritual being has in the last resort a spiritual meaning ; and when death is interpreted (not through its physiological antecedents or conditions, but as it must be by the philosopher, the moralist, and the theologian) through the conscience, it will be hard to find for it any other significance than that which St. Paul accepts.

It is the dreadful experience in which conscience sees not the debt of nature, but the wages of sin; and it isassuch that Christ is conceived as submitting to it. The same holds of the more elaborate passage to 34-°8. Christ is there represented as set forth ‘asa propitiation, . . in his blood, with a view to demonstrate God’s righteousness, owing to the passing by of foregone sins in the forbearance of i ———__ LAW (LN NEW TESTAMENT) God.

’ The idea is that God’s treatment of sin hitherto—His suspense of judgment—cast a shadow on His righteousness: it might be questioned whether God was really concerned about the difference between right and wrong. But at the cross His righteousness has been cleared from this shadow. How? Because there the doom of sin has fallen upon His own Son. Nothing could show more conclusively that God was inexorable, irreconcilable to sin—that God’s law was an in- violable law.

There is nothing in the argument of Weiss (Comm. on Ro 3”) that punishment and pro- pitiation are alternatives between which God had to choose, but which had nothing to do with each other. God chose to make propitiation for the sin of the world, and He did it, according to St.

Paul,— not in this passage only, but in all the others cited above,—in the following way: He sent His Son to take the sin of the world upon Him in all those consequences of it in which His condemnation and the sanctity of His law are expressed, and especi- ally, therefore, in death. Death in Christ’s case has ropitiatory significance,—in other words, it is the ee of gospel,—because it is the bearing of sin, the full recognition, in their full extent, of the Law’s claims upon man.

To dissolve the relation between the Death of Christ and the sentence of the Law—to take the curse and condemnation out of the Cross—is to annihilate the gospel as St. Paul understood it. It is essential to a doctrine of atonement that it should in this sense at least ‘establish the law.’ (4) But the question remains, What is the relation of the Christian to the Law, or to law in general? Much of the paradox of St. Paul’s teaching gathers round this point.

In all religion, of course, from the point of view of ethics, there is something paradoxical. It belongs to religion, as such, to transcend the ethical point of view, yet to con- serve and promote, indeed to be the only effective means of conserving and promoting, ethical in- terests. Hence moralists are the most severe, if at times the most inept, critics of religion, and St. Paul’s idealism and his paradoxes together pro- voked and still provoke infinite comment.

Yet his position is quite clear. On the one hand, the Christian has nothing more to do with law in any way. ‘I through law died to law that I might live to God.’ An exhaustive experiment of living under law convinced him that there was neither life nor righteousness to be found that way, and he was done with law for ever. ‘I am crucified with Christ ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

’ The old end of life is not renounced ; his aim is still righteousness; but the old means are renounced. Righteousness is not to be achieved out of his own resources, and brought to God for His approval; it is to be the work of Christ dwelling in him through His Spirit.

Law was weak through the flesh, and could not do what was wanted; but the Spirit is stronger than the flesh, and can secure in spite of it what the law failed to secure; in us (Christians), as we walk not after the flesh but after the spirit, ‘the just demand (τὸ δικαίωμα) of the law’ is fulfilled, Ro 8.

Sin has not dominion over us, for we are not under law (the working of which has been explained above under 2 (γ)), but under grace ; law only enslaves to sin; but grace gives the quickening spirit and liberates. Hence in the Christian religion, as St. Paul understood it, nothing statutory could have any place. To give a legal authority to any formal precept, ethical or ritual, is to shut the door of hope, and open again the door of despair.

It is to contemn the Spirit, which is Christ’s gift, and the cross, by which He won it, and to renounce the LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) 8 liberty with which He has made us free. St. Paul was not an antinomian (for the just demand of the law is to be fulfilled in all Christians), but he was certainly an anomian.

He recognizes no law in the Church but the law of the spirit of the life in Christ Jesus, and while that is both law and im- pulse it is essentially personal, and can never be reduced to statutory form.

He can speak of Christianity indeed (to which circumcision is no- thing and uncireumcision is nothing) as ‘the Bote of the commandments of God,’ 1 Co 7"; but all legalism is eliminated when the law is described as having its fulfilment in love, Ro 13, Gal δ᾽", and ‘the law of Christ’ is explained as ‘bearing each other’s burdens,’ Gal 6°. Legalism, in short, and Christianity (life in the Spirit) are to St. Paul mutually exclusive ideas ; and though in a formally constituted society, i.e.

in sense a cor- pein in the eye of the law, a legal creed and a egal organization might become necessary, the idea that the existence of Christianity depended upon them could only have seemed to him a fatal contradiction of all that Christianity meant. (e) At the close of his third mission, St. Paul came again to Jerusalem.

He had with him the collection from the Gentile Churches, and was most eager to maintain brotherly relations between the Gentile and the Jewish sections of Christendom, though he had grave misgivings as to what might happen. Cf. Ac 21!7"-,2Co 8 and 9, Ro 15>". The opposition to his ‘lawless’ Christianity, which had followed him in all his churches and been combated in his four great Epistles, had been busy in Jeru- salem also.

The native Christians there were devoted in their attachment to the law in its national aspects (πάντες ζηλωταὶ τοῦ νόμου, Ac 215). They had been sedulously instructed (κατηχή- θησαν) that St. Paul was teaching the Jews who lived abroad to apostatize from the law, neither circumcising their children nor keeping the tradi- tional customs. This was undoubtedly the logic of St. Paul’s gospel, though there is no evidence, apart from this unscrupulous assertion, that St.

Paul ever sought to denationalize his countrymen ; and it is a fair question whether St. James and his elders did not ask him to do something which would leave an essentially false impression when they asked him to associate himself with certain men in a vow, that all might know that none of the things which they had been drilled to believe about him were true, and that he himself also in his conduct was an observer of the law (v.*). Probably, in yielding to this request, St.

Paul was carrying to an extreme the conciliatory principles of 1 Co 9%; but the tumult which ended in his imprisonment and transference to Rome prevented any further development of the controversy about law between the apostle and the Jewish Christian party. (7) The later Epistles hardly enable us to add anything of importance. In Eph the law as a national institute—the law of commandments con- tained in ordinances, cf.

Col 24—is regarded as a dividing wall between Jew and Gentile; it has been broken down and annulled by the death of Christ, and with it the enmity which severed the tivo great branches of the human family ; they are now one new man. In Col what St.

Paul has to deal with is a movement which in its requirements resembles the ritualistic legalism with which he had been confronted in Galatia; the difference is that in Galatia the legalism attached itself directly to the law of Moses, in Colosse it seemed to be connected with some philosophical or theo- sophical system, possibly of Essene affinities, and therefore more exacting in its demands than the letter of Moses’ law. Cf. Col 2. St.

Paul was equally irreconcilable to it in both cases, and for VOL. 1Π1., ττὸ thesame reason. As dead with Christ, the Christian was dead to that whole mode of being, that whole conception of life, which allowed order to be pre- scribed from without. It was worse, of course, when the multiplied prohibitions, ‘Touch not, taste not, handle not,’ had no divine sanction (ay) the Mosaic law had) or even the pretence of it, but were merely a tradition of men.

The conscience which has received the Spirit of Christ is shirking its own responsibilities when it allows others to lay down the law for it. To be perfectly free, and to take the whole responsibility of freedom, is the only way to wholesome morality and to Christian sanctification. ‘Therefore let no one judge you in eating or drinking, or in respect of a festival or new moon or Sabbath.

’ All laws and customs as such tend to extinguish the feeling of personal responsibility, tu blunt the keenness of individual conscience ; hence to bind them on the conscience, in their character as legal and customary, is anti- christian. In Ph 3!" there is a sudden fierce flash, provoked we cannot tell how, of the ideas and tem- per that belong to the great controversial Epistles. In the Pastoral Epp.

, which represent a considerabl later date, we can see that questions connected with law still engaged attention, though there is nothing indicative either of the passion or the interest in principle which characterize the earlier years of the apostle.

Titus (3°) is warned to decline μάχας νομικάς, as though the whole subject were prac- tically settled; and we catch the same half-con- temptuous tone in 1 Ti 1’, where persons are referred to, Judaizing no doubt, who wish to be vouo- διδάσκαλοι though they have no idea of the functions of law. It may be questioned whether the two verses following come up to the insight of Ro 7, but they have their own truth, and probably served the writer’s purpose.

When the battle was prac- tically over, and the victory won, even St. Paul may have expressed himself in this almost indifferent commonplace; perhaps he despaired of gaining access to the general mind for any profounder statement of the truth. The legalism of the persons who forbade to marry and commanded to abstain from meats (1 Ti 43) cannot have been Mosaic, but must have been of some philosophical type, akin to that found in Colossve. III, THE LAW IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS.

—The Pauline aflinities of the Ep. to the Hebrews cannot be denied, but the conception of law in it is very different. Law here is sometimes expressly the law of Moses (7% 9! 10%), but it is regarded not so much as a set of statutes to be punctually obeyed, as a religious constitution under which the nation had to worship. Cf. the use of the verb νομο- θετεῖν in 7 88.

The fundamental idea of the book is that there is one people of God through all ages, though it has stood at different times in different relations to Him. Its relation to God, its nearness or distance, depends on the kind of priesthood it has; and when the priesthood is changed there is necessarily also a change of law: that is, the re- ligious constitution is altered, 7%.

The old law— the religious constitution under which the people of God lived when mediation was that of the Levitical priesthood—‘made nothing perfect’ (7"); there was no absolute or final religion then, ne purgation of conscience, no sure immediate joyful access to God. Christianity, on the other hand— the religious constitution under which the people of God live now, when mediation is that of the Melchizedek priest, the Son of God—is the τελεί- wots of what was promised of old.

The new covenant is legally constituted on the basis of better promises (8°). It has, with the definite outline of reality, the good things of wich the law had only a shadow (10°). There is nothing in St. Paul which exactly Β2 LAW (IN NEW TESTAMENT) corresponds to this: not even in Col 917, still less in what he says of the promise in Gal 3 or of the promises in 2Co 1. In fact, we do not find in St.

Paul any conception of Leviticalism as pos- sessing a religious significance, as dealing even in a pathetically disappointing way with spiritual necessities in man, which would find their slept satisfaction only in Christ. In the Ep. to the Hebrews Christ is still regarded as making pro- pitiation for sins (2!7), but His death is not put, so pony as in St. Paul, in relation to the Law. et in 10°, where such emphasis is laid on Christ’s obedience, it is to be noted (see v.)

that the obedience required of Christ is specifically that of a Redeemer: i.e. ex hypothesi, the obedience of One who becomes one with the sinful not only in nature but in experience and in lot (one of the leading thoughts of the Epistle, ef. 210-18) taking on Himself their flesh and blood, their temptations and disgipline, the whole burden, curse, and doom of theif sins, and so setting them free. Yet the difference between the conception of Law here and in St.

Paul is seen in this, that while St. Paul ex- presses the result of this redemptive death by δικαιοῦν, in Hebrews it is expressed by ἁγιάζειν. In other words, the result to St. Paul is that there is no con- demnation, the claim of the Law against the indi- vidual is annulled; to the writer to the Hebrews the result is that worship is made possible ; the soul is able now, as it was not before, to draw near to God; true religion is put within its reach.

This distinction justifies us, after all, in saying that the distinction between moral and ritual law belongs tothe NT. St. Paul does mainly think of law as moral—God’s demand for righteousness ; Hebrews thinks of it as ritual—the medium through which or the constitution under which we worship. But in both cases the law comes to an end with the gospel. Christ finishes it as a way of attaining righteousness, Ro 10‘. Hebrews finishes it also as a mode of worshipping God, 131, IV.

THE LAW IN THE OTHER NT Booxs.— Among the remaining books of the NT, those which exhibit most indications of the controversy which had raged between Jewish and Gentile Christians are the Apocalypse and the Ep. of James. In the former (2°’) the Church in Thyatira is threatened because it tolerates ‘the woman Jezebel who. . teaches and seduces my servants to commit forni- cation, and to eat things offered to idols,’ i.e. to violate the compact of Ac 15%, ef. Rev 2%.

There may have been a spurious, antinomian influence at work here, which appealed to St. Paul’s name, but it is absurd (with Renae Saint Paul, pp. 303, 307, L’Antechrist, p. 363 ft.) to regard this as a denunciation of St. Panl’s doctrine. Although, too, the Apocalypse lays great stress on works, it never regards them as having the character of statutory acts of obedience: in other words, they are not legal.

They are the works of Jesus (2*), and are co-ordinated in 2” with love, faith, ministry, and patience (Holtzmann, NT Theol. i. 465). “A favourite expression for the Christian life (the keeping of the commandments of God, 1917 1413. ef, 3°) 1s probably borrowed, like other things in the Apoc., from St. Paul (1 Co 7). The conception of a reward (22?

1118) no more proves legalism in the author of this book than in Jesus Himself (Mt 511), If there is a future which is determined according to man’s works, and this is the teaching not of Apoe. only but of the whole NT, it is neither legal nor servile, but only sane to let it tell on the pre- sent life. In the Gospel of St.

John the numerous references to the law, with the exception of 1”, have no religious interest ; and there it is contrasted with the gospel as a less perfect revelation, grace and truth (n>x} 199) being the essential attributes of God. LAW (LN NEW TESTAMENT) The Ep. of James is more difficult. It has often been treated as a document of legal Christianity, the aim of which is to refute the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith apart from works of law.

But it is remarkable that the critical passage (2-5), in which faith and works are discussed in their relation to each other, never once uses the Pauline expression ἔργα νόμου. If the writer 1s controverting St. Paul, it must be admitted that he has not grasped the Pauline point of view, and that Luther’s verdict on his work was justified. His conception of faith is not the same as St.

Paul's, and that is why he has to supplement it by werks ; and the works by which it is supplemented, and in which indeed it 1s exhibited, are not what St. Paul meant by works of law. They are not acts of obedience to any statutory embodiment of divine will, As illustrated in ν. ὅδ. they are rather what St. Paul would have called fruits of the Spiriv. They are, if we choose to say so, the fulfilment of a law, but the writer takes care that we do not conceive the law legally.

It is a law which must be actually obeyed, no doubt, but it is also the law of liberty (1% 2”), which Christians freely and spontaneously fulfil; it is condensed, as in the teaching of Jesus, Mt 22", into the ‘royal Isw,’ Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself; and it is perfect. ‘The law, in short, is the same as the word of God, and to St. James this is not external and preceptive.

There is a native affinity be- tween man and the word; when he receives it, it becomes an implanted word, a thing that strikes root in his nature and has power to save his soul (1°). With this word God has begotten him ; it is in his heart, as Jesus promises, spirit and life (Jn 6%); the law, that is, is impulse as well as law to the Christian, and the keeping of it is erfect freedom. Formally a contradiction of -anlinism, it is at bottom the same kind of ex- perience which is here described.

To St. Paul hristianity is a new religious relation to God, which he defines by contrast to legalism; to St. James it is rather a new ethical life, which he describes in terms of law, but of law from which legalism has been eliminated. See, further, JAMES (EPISTLE OF). The conception of St. James is that from which the phenomena of nascent Catholicism can best be understood, and this is a strong argument for pase the book late.

In the other Catholic pistles Law is not mentioned, but it is clear from Jude, 2P and 1Jn, that there were tendencies to antinomianism at work in many places. Such tendencies seem inseparable from every revival of religion, religion, as already remarked, transcending even while it guarantees morality. To counteract them without reintroducing legalism and lapsing from a Christian to a pre-Christian type of religion, was not easy; and the use of νόμος by St.

James, the habit of conceiving the OT as a revelation of God’s will for the ordering of life, and of regarding Jesus as the Legislator ἣν whom the revelation was made perfect, led inevitably and not slowly to the conception of Christianity itself as a new law. This conception is common to Christian writers from Barnabas onward. The new law might have been, and at first was, akin to ‘ the law of liberty ἡ in St.

James, ‘ the law of faith,’ ‘ the law of Christ,’ ‘the law of the spirit of the life in Christ Jesus’ in St. Paul; but as the Church became a State, and orthodoxy took the place of inspiration, the new law was correspondingly degraded, and in the early and the mediwval Catholie Church the very idea of spiritual liberty was lost. The religious idealism of St. Paul was far above out of its sight, and it was not till the Church was born again in the 16th cent.

that the gospel, which brings a righteousness of God to which ιν LAWGIVER works of law contribute nothing, fairly found access into the human mind. Romans the Jewis, pp. 20-68. ype to Introduction); Mackintosh, Christ and aw; Clemen, Die Christliche Lehre von der Siinde, J. DENNEY. LAWGIVER occurs six times in AV of OT (Gn 49, Nu 2118, Dt 337, Ps 607 Heb. 9]- 1088 (Heb. 9], 15 33%) and once in NT (Ja 4"). Inthe OT it is the tr® of pphp, in NT of νομοθέτης.

‘The root ppn means ‘to cut in,’ ‘inscribe,’ ‘engrave,’ and hence, from the practice of inscribing a decree (ph, APR) upon tablets [see LAW (IN OT) above, ᾿ oro ‘to enact or command.’ Thus we find in g 5° ὈΝ σ᾽ *ppin=‘ the commanders of Israel.” The Poel ptep. ppd appears to have two distinct senses: (a) that of ‘leader,’ ‘commander’ (‘law- giver’ is too narrow a term, especially as in the mind of the English reader it is associated so closely with the Mosaic law).

This is the meaning of the word in Dt 33%! (‘a commander's portion was reserved’), where it is used of the leader of the warlike tribe of Gad ; in Jg δ᾽" (‘out of Machir came forth leaders’ [opp || OPPIN of v.*]); and in Is 3323, where 33p7h2 ‘ our lawgiver’ (LX.X ἄρχων) is used in parallelism with s222% ‘ our judge’ and 337> ‘our king.

’ (δ) The other meaning which it appears to be necessary to postulate is that of ‘ruler’s or commander’s staff,’ which it would bear in Gn 4910 (where ppn> is parallel with »32¥), ‘The [royal 3] sceptre shall not depart from Judah nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet’; in Nu 218 ( myn ‘staff’), where RV ‘with the sceptre’ is plainly more appropriate as a rendering of ppnos than AV and RVn ‘by direction 07 order of the lawgiver’ (LXX ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ αὐτῶν, Vulg.

in datore legis); and in Ps θ07-Ξ 1085 ‘Judah is ny sceptre,’ although LXX has βασιλεύς ‘king’ (simi- larly Pesh. and Vulgate). The most controverted of the above passages is Gn 4910, For ¥539 p32 ppnp: the LXX has καὶ ἡγού- μένος ἐκ τῶν μηρῶν αὐτοῦ, Vulg. et dux de femore gus, Targ. Onk. ‘m3 %325 x50), all three taking pene in a personal sense, and understanding 7.39 co to be a promise of an unbroken succession of descendants.

But the parallelism between pphp and τῷ demands that these two words have similar senses (the LXX is consistent in this respect, rendering δῦ by ἄρχων); and as there can be little doubt that ‘(royal?) sceptre’ is the meaning of »3¥, ‘ruler’s staf!’ seems a very ap- propriate sense for pphp. Then again the expres- sion 1527 p29, which is parallel to aj", may mean ‘from before him’ (ef.

m531;'2 used of Jael in Jg 5”), referring to ‘the actual position of the long staff, grasped in the right hand as the chief walks or stands still’ (Ball in SBOT7, adTloc.) Tle mention of the ‘feet’ rather than the hands Ball explains as due to the fact that it is not a short ornamental sceptre that is in view but a long staff reaching to the ground, and he compares the Egyp. hieroglyph for ‘great man,’ ‘chief,’ ‘king’ (wra), which 1s a lizure holding the staff as described above.

He LAWYER 88 notes, further, that similar insignia of authority are still carried by the Bedawin sheikhs and art men of villages, and considers that the idea of a sitting figure, with the staff held between the feet, as seen in some ancient sculptures, does not har- monize so well with the context which suggests movement.

In any case the meaning of the couplet, ‘The sceptre shall not depart from Judah nor the ruler’s staff from before him,’ appears to be that Judah is to retain the hegemony among the tribes of Israel (or probably the royalty [note »3z ab- solutely]), a x2 2 3y, on the meaning of which last words see art. SHILOH, and cf., above all, Driver in Camb. Journ. of Philology, xiv. (1885), and in Expositor, July 1885, p. 10ff See also Dillm. and Spurrell, ad loc.

The only NT occurrence of ‘lawgiver’ is, as we have said, in Ja 4”, where νομοθέτης is coupled with κριτής, the two terms being used of God as at once the Supreme Lawgiver and Judge. This is the only instance in which νομοθέτης is used in the NT, although the verb νομοθετέω occurs in He 7!! 8° and the noun νομοθεσία in Ro 9%, in all these three passages the reference being directly or implicitly to the giving of the law to Israel.

n the work of Moses as the lawgiver of Israel see LAW (IN OT), above, p. 66, and MosEs. J. A. SELBIE.