Corpus-Paul

[Mike Myers <mmyers AT helium.biomol.uci.edu>]

Liz wrote:

Then I meant *then,* now I mean now too, since you ask.
Yes, the whole kit 'n kaboodle, literally, all 613, including the 
temple sacrifice. (Btw, the 613 is a myth. Everytime you get a list, 
you get a different set.)
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This is an important question: Is the whole literal law valid now to 
modern Jews, in fact? If you took a poll, I seriously doubt that 
more than a very small minority would say .. Yes, it is. If you 
asked Conservative and Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis and 
scholars as a group that question, I feel pretty sure only a slim 
minority would answer yes, the whole thing is (potentially) 
literally valid today. Certainly not in Israel.

You wrote: 

"This is tangential to the issues which divide Christians from Jews 
it seems to me: the eternal validity of the law, and the role of the 
messiah."

I'm far less sure than you just how much ideological separation 
between most Christians and most Jews stems from the doctrine of the 
eternal validity of the Law, at least today. It separates the 
Orthodox, certainly. But what percentage of world Jewry feels 
constrained by their view of Tenach?

This is certainly not an untimely or unimportant issue. The Beis 
haMikdash had been reinterpreted by Paul, for sure, while it was 
still standing -- or he accepted a reinterpretation handed down to 
him, or "revealed" to him. Without question, throughout his corpus, 
the believers in Christ comprised the temple. Whoever wrote the 
letter to the Hebrews (in the text of which it is certainly implied 
that the Temple was still standing) steeply downsized the Levitical 
cultus, the sacrifices and the Temple, of course. Scattered here and 
there in the gospels, and in the catholic epistles of the NT canon, 
there are indications of this doctrinal metamorphosis of the Temple 
from a building made of stone to one made of men and women. 

Within a few years all this was moot. Whatever mode of making 
righteous was in fact in force, it didn't include the Temple cultus 
perforce. So how much COULD the law separate the early Jewish 
Christians from those Jews who were not aligned with that movement, 
after 70CE? Which law, what parts of it? -- close to half of it was 
no longer even relevant.

Mike Myers

 


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Michael D. A. Myers 
University of California, Irvine
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<mmyers AT helium.biomol.uci.edu>
05/27/1999
11:42:49