David Lincicum Book order

According to a persistent popular stereotype, early Judaism is seen as a „legalistic“ religious tradition, in contrast to early Christianity, which seeks to obviate and so to supersede, annul, or abrogate Jewish law. Although scholars have known better since the surge of interest in the question of the law in post-Holocaust academic circles, the complex stances of both early Judaism and early Christianity toward questions of law observance have resisted easy resolution or sweeping generalizations. The essays in this volume aim to bring to the fore the legalistic and antinomian dimensions in both traditions, with a variety of contributions that examine the formative centuries of these two great religions and their legal traditions. They explore how law and lawlessness are in tension throughout this early, formative period, and not finally resolved in one direction or the other.

Attending to the realia of ancient practices for reading Scripture, David Lincicum charts the effective history of Deuteronomy in a broad range of early Jewish authors in antiquity. By viewing Paul as one example of this long history of tradition, the apostle emerges as a Jewish reader of Deuteronomy. In light of his transformation by encounter with the risen Christ, Paul's interpretation of the end of the Pentateuch alternates between the traditional and the radical, but remains in conversation with his Jewish rough contemporaries. Specifically, Paul is seen to interpret Deuteronomy with a threefold construal as ethical authority, theological norm, and a lens for the interpretation of Israel's history. In this way, the volume sets Paul firmly in the history of Jewish biblical interpretation and at the same time provides a wide-ranging survey of the impact of Deuteronomy in antiquity.