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Jewish law of St. Paul the Apostle

Paul’s central convictions made it difficult for him to explain the proper role of Jewish law in the life of his converts. Paul believed that the God of Israel was the one true God, who had redeemed the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, given the Israelites the law, and sent his Son to save the entire world. Although Paul accepted Jewish behaviour as correct, he thought that Gentiles did not have to become Jewish in order to participate in salvation. These views are not easily reconciled. If the one true God is the God of Israel, should not one obey all the commandments in the Bible, such as those regarding the Sabbath, circumcision, and diet? If “love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, quoted in Galatians 5:14 and Romans 13:9) is valid, why not the rest of the commandments in Leviticus 19? Paul reconciles Jewish law with Christian faith by using Jesus’ words “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another” (John 13:34). He states that this single commandment is a fulfillment of the entire Jewish law (Galatians 5:14). He was sure that his Gentile converts were not obliged to accept circumcision and many other parts of the law. In his surviving letters, however, he does not work out a principle that would require his converts to observe some but not all of the Jewish law. It is noteworthy that he did not regard Sabbath observance—which is one of the Ten Commandments—as obligatory (Romans 14:5; Galatians 4:10–11).

One point is especially difficult. Paul maintained that the law is part of the world of sin and the flesh, to which the Christian dies. But how could the law, which was given by the good God, be allied with sin and the flesh? Paul, having nearly reached the point of equating the law with the powers of evil (Romans 7:1–6), promptly retracts the equation (Romans 7:7–25). What led him to make it in the first place was probably his absolutism. For Paul, everything not immediately useful for salvation is worthless; what is worthless is not on the side of the good; therefore, it is allied with the bad. However, he does maintain that the Jewish law is sacred and that the commandments are righteous and good (Romans 7:12). He continues to say that his mind desires to obey God’s law, while his flesh makes him “a slave to the law of sin” (Romans 7:21–25).

The return of the Lord and the resurrection of the dead

In the Gospels, Jesus prophesies the coming of “the Son of Man,” who will come on the clouds and whose angels will separate the good from the bad (e.g., Mark 13; Matthew 24). Paul accepted this view, but he believed, probably along with other followers of Jesus, that the enigmatic figure, the Son of Man, was Jesus himself: Jesus, who had been raised to heaven, would return. This view appears in 1 Thessalonians 4, which proclaims that when the Lord (Jesus) returns, the dead in Christ will be raised, and they, with the surviving members of the body of Christ, will greet the Lord in the air.

In the Endtime vision of 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul indicates that he thinks that some people will die before the Lord returns but that many (“we who are alive, who are left”) will not have died. In this passage he does not specify what will be raised, but the implication is corpses. As noted above, this belief was difficult for Paul’s pagan converts to accept, and Paul attempted to overcome their reluctance by emphasizing that the resurrection body would be changed into a “spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:42–54). A second problem was the delay: Christ did not immediately return, and the idea that believers would have to remain in the ground until he came was troubling. Paul responded to this by stating that the transformation to a Christ-like spiritual body was already beginning (2 Corinthians 3:18). He also, however, seems sometimes to have accepted the Greek view that the soul would be detached from the body at death and go immediately to be with the Lord; at death believers will be “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). He restated this view when imprisonment forced him to think that he himself might die before the Lord returned (Philippians 1:21–24). Eventually Christianity would systemize these passages: the soul escapes at death and joins the Lord; when the Lord returns, bodies will be raised and reunited with souls.

As is usually the case with people who predict the future, Paul’s expectations have not yet been fulfilled. His letters, however, continue to reassure Christian believers that eventually the Lord will return, the dead will be raised, and the forces of evil will be defeated.