Law and Lawlessness in Early Judaism and Early Christianity

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.Lutz Doering: Law and Lawlessness in Texts from Qumran - Grant Macaskill: Law and Lawlessness in the Enoch Literature - Joshua Garroway: Paul: Within Judaism, Without Law - Paula Fredriksen: Origen and Augustine on Paul and the Law - David Moffitt: Weak and Useless? Purity, the Mosaic Law, and Perfection in Hebrews - David Lincicum: Against the Law: Early Christian Law Criticism and the Epistle of Barnabas - Michal Bar-Asher Segal: Law Corpora Compared: Early Collections of Monastic Rules and Rabbinic Literature - Paul Bradshaw: The Ancient Church Orders: Early Ecclesiastical Law? - Steven Fraade: Rabbis on Gentile Lawlessness: Three Midrashic Moments - Christopher Rowland: »By an immediate revelation…by the voice of his own spirit to my soul«: A Perspective from Reception History on the New Testament and Antinomianism - Michael Peppard: Law and Liberty: Circumcision Discourse from Galatia to Germany