Matthew Novenson: Paul and “Justification from Works of the Law”

Matthew V. Novenson, Paul and Judaism at the End of History (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 56.

Rather embarrassingly for Paul’s modern interpreters, the first person in antiquity expressly to attest the motif of “justification from works of the law” turns out to be. . . Paul himself. Its earliest appearance is in Paul’s own rhetoric, not anywhere “in the wild” in Jewish sources prior to Paul. And what is more, the elusive claim for which we are searching – that a person is justified from works of the law – is precisely as well attested in post-Pauline Jewish texts as it is in prePauline Jewish texts, which is to say, almost not at all. Philo does not claim it, nor does Josephus, nor R. Yohanan ben Zakkai, nor R. Akiba, nor R. Judah the Patriarch. We do not find it in the Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud Yerushalmi, Talmud Bavli, or any of the classical midrashim. Nor, again, in any of the targumim. This is striking (not to say damning) if, ex hypothesi, justification from works of the law is supposed to be a defining characteristic of ancient Jewish piety.