Can We Speak of the Law in the New Testament in Monolithic Terms?

The Issue at Hand

The current debate over the Law in the NT has advanced the discussion along familiar lines. Continuity/Discontinuity continues to set the extremes of the continuum, with scholars placing themselves toward one pole or the other. Evangelical scholars have also renewed the discussion of the Law in the NT, as evidenced by the number of current articles and publications on the subject.¹

Within the ETS, the Dispensational Study Group (which convenes annually at the national meeting) has focused attention on the issue. At the 1993 annual meeting, the topic for the Dispensational Study Group was “The Law and Christ”. Such a topic requires definition of terms at the outset, something which the subsequent dialog proved was lacking. The discussion began on the unspoken assumption that the meaning of “Law” was the written code of Moses, leaving the impression that current trends in scholarship, which have established the multifaceted nature of the 1st Century Judaisms, were either unknown or regarded as unacceptable for the present debate. One would have thought that the work of scholars such as E. P. Sanders, W. D. Davies, and Jacob Neusner (to name only a few) regarding the whole scope of “Law” in the early Judaisms would have given the dialog a much needed breadth. All the more since it seems quite clear the 1st Century debates and divisions among the sects of Jews related not to the presence or lack of “law” but to the application of it to everyday life. These dividing interpretations of the Law were the issue at hand, and existed as oral halakha.

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