The Second Great Divide

Then you are to say to them, ‘It is because your forefathers have forsaken Me,’ declares the Lord, ‘and have followed other gods and served them and bowed down to them; but Me they have forsaken and have not kept My law.  Jeremiah 16:11 NASB

Law – There are two unbridgeable chasms between Christianity and Judaism.  The first, of course, is the Trinity.  From the perspective of orthodox Judaism, the Trinity is a sure sign of pagan idolatry.  A Christian Trinitarian who thinks there is common ground because both religions speak about “God” is sorely mistaken.  A divine Jesus is possible, in the first century sense of “divine,” but “Jesus is God” is not possible—ever!

The second great divide is the Christian claim that believers are no longer under the law.  Here are two examples of the Christian idea:

We, according to Paul, died to the law, meaning that its ability to identify us as sinners and demand our life in payment for our sins was fulfilled through the sacrifice of Jesus.

But now we have been released from the law because we have died to that in which we were held so that we might serve in newness of the spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter (Romans 7:6).  For those of us who are truly converted and have God-spirit, the law can no longer identify and punish us as sinners. That said, the educative role of God’s law calls for our obedience, which is fulfilled through the new life in the Spirit. That is what Paul means when he wrote in Romans 6 the following. For sin shall not rule over you because you are not under law, but under grace (Romans 6:14).[1]

WE ARE SINNERS NOT BECAUSE WE BREAK THE LAW;
WE BREAK THE LAW BECAUSE WE ARE SINNERS.

We sin because we have a nature that wants to sin, to rebel against God. The only way to overcome sin is with a new nature. This truth must sink into one’s being if he is to understand God’s revelation about sin, righteousness, and man’s condition. Apart from such understanding, everything God has revealed in the Bible about sin will be misunderstood. . . . churches spend most of their time in the gospels, which concerns the Jews who were under the Law. No one who spends time with Paul will conclude the Church is under the Mosaic Law. . . Paul taught that Israel alone had received the Mosaic Law and was under its administration. Gentiles were excluded from the Law, as was the Church, the body of Christ (Ephesians 2.11-13; Romans 3.1-2, 6.14). However, Paul taught that when Gentiles or the Church come in contact with the Law, it has the same effect it had on Israel: it condemns (Romans 3.19). [2]

Perhaps this great chasm isn’t entirely the fault of the anti-Jewish early Church fathers.  Perhaps the origin of the problem started with the rabbis themselves.

Translators of the Septuagint committed a fatal and momentous error when, for lack of a Greek equivalent, they rendered ‘Torah’ with ‘nomos,’ which means law, giving rise to a huge and chronic misconception of Judaism and supplying an effective weapon to those who sought to attack the teachings of Judaism.  That the Jews considered Scripture as teaching is evidenced by the fact that in the Aramaic translations Torah is rendered with oraita which can only mean teaching, never law.  In the Avesta, religion is called law (daêna), and the Persians had no way of distinguishing between religion and law.  In Judaism even the world Torah is not all-inclusive.  ‘A man who had Torah but no yirat shamayim (awe and fear of God) is like a treasurer who was given the key to the inner chamber but not the keys to the outer chamber.’  Nor does the term mitzvot, commandments, express the totality of Judaism.  The acceptance of God must precede, and is distinguished from, the acceptance of the commandments.[3]

Did the rabbis simply make a mistake?  Is the Church liable for creating the gap between torah and nomos?  Not entirely!  The rabbis themselves were already moving in the direction of “law” as nomos.  Why?  Heschel provides an answer: “The rendering of ‘Torah’ with ‘nomos’ was not done thoughtlessly.  It is rather an example of a tendency toward legalism or pan-halakhism which regards halakhah as the only authentic source of Jewish thinking and living.”[4]  In other words, rabbinic Judaism was already moving away from the Tanakh as its authority; moving toward the Talmud, and this movement was enhanced by the translation of torah with nomos.  This has an incredible implication for Messianic believers.  Paul was a part of the rabbinic tradition.  How much of what Paul writes follows this rabbinic trend toward Talmudic legalism?

Given the Grand Canyon divide over the meaning and purpose of “law,” we might approach this situation as linguists, not theologians.  If I were to ask you, “What is the meaning of the word ‘gay’?,” you could turn to the dictionary.  But you would know that the real meaning is found in the usage by a particular population.  The true meaning of a word is how it’s used.  “Cool” isn’t always about temperature.  The same linguistic concept applies to the word “law.”  But here’s the insight we need to sort out this mess.  If we want to know what the word “law” means in the Bible, then we need to see how it is used by the authors and audience of the Bible, not by theologians who came hundreds of years later.  We need to know how the word torah is used, not how it was doctrinally interpreted by later thinkers.  We could claim, of course, that the proper meaning of the would “law” is the meaning given to the word by later Church thinkers, but all we would really be saying is that we accept the use of the word by these later thinkers rather than the use of the word by the authors of the biblical books.

You might claim that Paul is a biblical author and he uses the word nomos quite often, but what this overlooks is that the original use of the word is torah, and if we don’t understand what torah means in its original context among Hebrew speakers, then we won’t know how Paul uses the word either.  That’s Heschel point. The Greek term nomos is not the equivalent of torah, despite Paul’s choice of the word.  Judaism’s idea of torah is not the same as the Christian Church’s idea of nomos.  Biblical Jews and Bible Christians are fundamentally divided over the word “law” because they don’t share the same definition of the term.  Just like they don’t share the same definition of the term ʾeḥad (“one” in Deuteronomy 6:4).  How much the movement toward halakhic singularity influenced Paul must be addressed, but nothing much will come of even that investigation until we first acknowledge that torah and nomos are on opposites sides of the second great divide.

Topical Index:  law, nomos, torah, LXX, Jeremiah 16:11

 

[1] https://www.biblestudy.org/apostlepaul/what-did-paul-teach-about-the-law-of-god.html

[2] https://doctrine.org/paul-and-the-law

 

[3] Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 171.

[4] Ibid., p. 172.