Early Christianity and the Problem of Jewish “Legalism”: Law, Flesh, and Spirit in the Letters of Paul

Emma Wasserman

Kingdon Fellow (2021-2022)

Professor of Religion, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ)

The writings preserved in the Christian bible often vilify Jewish leaders, institutions, and groups and show particular interest in the law of Moses and in figures of Jewish legal expertise. These legal polemics would especially come to serve the Protestant reformers who find in Paul’s letters a true, pristine form of Christianity, the universal religion of faith that triumphs over the ritualistic and exclusivistic religion of Judaism, a convenient stand-in for Catholicism. Due to certain parochialisms of the discipline, historians of early Christianity have tended to reproduce these claims rather than subject them to critical historical analysis and contextualization. My project develops an alternative that situates these polemics within various social arenas in which religious experts debated, shared and exchanged ideas and practices, and competed for authority and prestige. A central argument is that pre-occupations with issues of law reflect the interests of marginal religious specialists who struggled to appropriate the privileges, norms, authority, and coercive force from Jewish experts they conceive of as at the center of cultural legitimacy. In this talk, I focus on claims that Christ realizes a distinctive kind of law (e.g., “the law of the spirit (pneuma) of life in Christ has set me free from the law of sin and death” [Romans 8:2]) and work to understand this as a form of appropriative polemic that has analogues in other Jewish writings. I will also try to show that, although Paul’s letters are often mired in relatively abstract claims about knowledge, sin, and the divine plan for history, they also provide valuable insights into the more practical world of everyday “lived religion,” especially in that they imagine Christ’s spirit (pneuma) as a palpably local form of divinity that creates new kinds of people, forms of community, and practical obligations aptly construed as “legalistic.”

Emma Wasserman is Professor of Religion at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, specializing in early Christian history. Her work aims to situate Christian origins within the social, intellectual, and religious contexts of the Ancient Mediterreanean and focuses especially on the appropriation of philosophy, apocalypticism and cosmology, and on Jewish and Christian traditions of religious polemic. She is the author of two books (The Death of the Soul in Romans 7, Mohr Siebeck 2008; Apocalypse as Holy War, Yale 2018) and her work has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study of Harvard University.