Paul and the Law

The phrase erga nomou (ἔργα νόμου, works of the law) appears at the center of Paul's argument in his two most law-focused letters, Romans 3:20, 3:28, and Galatians 2:16 (three times in one verse), 3:2, 3:5, 3:10. Romans 3:20 states the principle most bluntly, "by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin," echoing Psalm 143:2.

What exactly Paul is excluding when he excludes "works of the law" is the whole question this page exists to lay out. Everything below is an attempt to answer it, and serious scholarship has not converged on a single answer.

The reading most associated with the Reformation, particularly Luther, understands "works of the law" as human moral effort and achievement generally, any attempt to earn righteousness before God through obedience, religious performance, or merit. On this view Paul is diagnosing a universal human temptation, using the law (and law-keeping) as a means of establishing one's own righteousness, which fails because no one keeps the law well enough, and so justification has to come by faith alone, apart from any human contribution.

This reading has real exegetical support, Paul does say plainly that "no one will be justified by works of the law" and grounds that claim in universal sinfulness (Romans 3:9-20, 23). Contemporary scholars who defend some version of this reading against the New Perspective, while taking its criticisms seriously, include Stephen Westerholm, Thomas Schreiner, and Douglas Moo.

E.P. Sanders's 1977 study Paul and Palestinian Judaism argued, from a comprehensive reading of Second Temple Jewish literature, that ancient Judaism was not the legalistic, merit-earning religion the traditional reading assumed it to be. Sanders described the pattern he found as covenantal nomism, one enters the covenant by God's grace and election, not by earning it, and obedience to the law is the response to a covenant relationship already given, the means of staying in rather than getting in. If Sanders is right about what Second Temple Judaism actually taught, then a reading of Paul built on opposing a legalistic Judaism needs to be reconsidered, because that Judaism may not be what Paul was actually arguing against.

James D.G. Dunn, who coined the term "New Perspective on Paul," argued more specifically that "works of the law" in Paul's letters refers primarily to boundary markers, circumcision, food laws, Sabbath observance, the identity practices that distinguished Jew from Gentile, rather than good deeds or moral effort in general. On this reading Galatians and Romans are centrally about whether Gentile believers must adopt Jewish identity markers to belong fully to God's people, not a general statement that any human effort toward God is wrong.

N.T. Wright's version places the debate inside Paul's larger covenantal and eschatological story, justification is fundamentally about who counts as a member of the single family of Abraham, Jew and Gentile together, in the present stage of God's unfolding plan, rather than primarily a description of how an individual moves from guilty to righteous before God. "Works of the law," on this view, are the Torah practices that functioned as badges of covenant membership rather than a system of earning merit.

Romans 7:14-25 is written in the first person and describes an agonized struggle, "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing... wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" (7:19, 24). Who is speaking is genuinely disputed, and there are more than two positions.

One reading takes it as Paul's own ongoing Christian experience, the believer's real, continuing struggle with sin even after coming to faith, consistent with a doctrine of the Christian as simul justus et peccator, simultaneously righteous and sinner. Another reading takes the "I" as Paul speaking on behalf of Israel, or humanity generally, under the law before Christ, a rhetorical device (prosopopoeia, speaking in another's voice, a recognized technique in ancient rhetoric) rather than autobiography, pointing to the sharp shift in Romans 8 toward language of freedom, the Spirit, and "no condemnation" as evidence that chapter 7 describes a condition Paul considers past. A third reading hears an echo of Adam or of Israel specifically at Sinai, the giving of the law as the moment sin "sprang to life" (7:9). None of these readings has settled the debate; each has real, careful defenders.

Galatians 3:24-25 calls the law a paidagogos (παιδαγωγός), a word older translations render "schoolmaster" but which named something more specific in the Greco-Roman household, a slave or guardian responsible for supervising a freeborn child, walking him to school, disciplining him, until he reached maturity. The role was custodial and temporary by definition, not an ongoing teaching office. "So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian" (3:24-25). The image supports a real, positive, but time-bound function for the law, not a claim that the law was worthless.

Romans 10:4 says "Christ is the telos (τέλος) of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes," and telos genuinely carries two live senses in Greek that this verse does not resolve on its own. It can mean end or termination, Christ brings the law's role to a close, or it can mean goal, culmination, the point a thing was always aiming toward, the way the telos of a journey is its destination rather than its cancellation. Both readings have real grammatical and contextual defenders, and the ambiguity is in the word itself, not a gap in scholarship that further study is expected to close.

The Sanctum's purpose on this page is to lay out the actual state of the argument, not to settle it. The traditional reading and the New Perspective are both held today by scholars who have read Paul carefully and read Second Temple Judaism carefully, and they disagree about what "works of the law" excludes, who is speaking in Romans 7, and whether Christ is the law's end or its goal. A reader who wants a single tidy answer to "what did Paul think about the law" will not find one here, because the honest answer is that this remains a live, working debate, and pretending otherwise would not be scholarship, it would be picking a side and calling it settled.