Not faith vs works, but two different Torah communities

 

                

The great scholar and host of the OnScript Podcast Matthew Bates claims that here below we have the most important New Testament article of the last several years by Kevin Grasso.

The phrase “faith in” Jesus was one of Luther’s innovations.

The main contrast was between the interpretation of the Torah that vindicated Christ as God and the other interpretations of the Torah.

But both are "faiths" one can belong to and preach.

It is not a contrast between faith and works.

Paul simply has a different interpretation of the Torah.

The interpretation he thinks is wrong is the one where it is obedience to the commandments, or things like circumcision or food laws, ("works") that leads to righteousness and salvation.

A person will be righteous by virtue of being a part of the faith, the community and way of life of the Christ-followers, NOT merely his own "faith" that certain beliefs about Christ are the correct ones.

Link to a podcast of Bates intervening Grasso HERE

Link to Grasso giving a simple explanation HERE

And here is the Grasso's simplified version of his argument HERE

Dr Kevin Grasso sent me this response as a clarification:

".... It is both a message and a movement. Galatians 1:23 is instructive as to what this sense is. It says "He who use to persecute us is not preaching the faith (τὴν πίστιν) he one tried to destroy" (ESV). The verbs tell us a lot about the meaning of the 'faith' here.

It is something that can be both preached and destroyed. It is, therefore, a message (since it can be preached), and it is something that can be joined (the verb 'destroy' here always takes an object that refers to people). So it is a message that can be adopted and that would lead to a different way of life depending on the content of the message.

The content of the message is the Christ. The way of life was centered around Him rather than Torah. Being a part of the Christ-faith means to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, and as Messiah, he is king. As king, we would owe our complete allegiance to him.

My take would be that Paul is reading Torah in such a way that it points to the Christ-faith as the means to righteousness rather than the commandments of Torah.

In this sense, Paul understood Torah more broadly than mere commandments. Abraham is Paul's example of someone who was righteous by πίστις (the response to the Christ-faith) but did not adopt the system of Torah-commandments because he was simply before the time of Moses.

This shows that the Torah actually supports righteousness by the Christ-faith and not by the commandments (this is how I read Galatians 3 and Romans 4--though that is, of course, an oversimplification)...."

                                    

To me, the makes sense and dovetails with Margaret Barker's work HERE where she posits that Paul was looking at the Jewish Scriptures for a type of Judaism that no longer existed in a complete form at his time...

The Pharisees were just one sect, faithful only to Moses's Torah and the commandments there, which were often about rituals and rules that initiated one into a more nationalistic cult where Yahweh was specifically a god for them (the book of Jonah makes fun of this, presenting Yahweh as God of all peoples, and interacting with them all).

The Judaism Paul has in mind includes more than just the 5 books of Moses, and reflects a Judism before King Josiah's reforms in Deuteronomy that made the cult specifically all about Moses and following his commands....

This was a more original faith, that worshiped a universal greater God.

Islam even came about claiming to be this ancient lost faith....

As David Armstrong writes :


The YHWH of these sources is diverse....But both portraits are of a corporeal, multiply embodied deity, with a divine retinue (inclusive of a goddess wife, Asherah, and numerous sons, though these make the later editors uncomfy). He is also, decidedly, much more cosmic and even supracosmic than the earlier El or YHWH. As Judah’s political fortunes waned between the vying Assyrian, Egyptian, and Babylonian superpowers, a reform of the cult led to an exclusivist and aniconic form of Yahwism, where YHWH became Judah’s sole god, it became impermissible to depict the divine body, limits were placed on the monarchy’s power and self-conception, and a new legislative code were adopted, all under the reign of Josiah, Judah’s penultimate king."

So Paul thinks this ancient way was about faith (meaning loyalty) to a specific king and his way of life, for Paul Jesus Christ, instead of being loyal to Torah prescriptions that only applied to Israelite ethnic and national formation.

This was a major Isrealite trend before Josiahs reforms, when he made Judism all about worship in only one temple, and Yahweh as a God only for them....

When he did that, the Bible says a third ! of the Jews left....Many large Jewish sects at the time had probably never even heard of Moses....

Now that the Temple was gone, Paul naturally looked to other traditions in the OT.

This king will come and give eternal life and free us from the demonic gods that cause death and attack us with strife, and the ancient Isrealites that were loyal to this king, who Paul sees as Christ, were people like Abraham, and others Jewish cults...