"No Fences: Pharisees, Philosophers, Legalists, and Jesus" Chapter 2
Updated: 2 days ago
Chapter 2: Surely There’s a Dress Code, or Something?
“This matter arose because some false believers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves.” – Galatians 2:4
Thank you for your patience while I attempt to establish a framework which I believe underpins the New Testament behavior instructions to Christians. Most of the New Testament letters were written primarily to former pagans having trouble being formerly pagan. An illustration: It's like an adopted child came home from school to a note saying: "Clean your room. Love, Dad." She saved it, and it became a treasured object because of what it says and because of who wrote it. After all, it's written proof that she is loved, and that someone calls her his daughter. Eventually, the note is passed down to the next generation. Now, imagine the grandchild who reads it in an orderly house (and doesn't quite get the original significance of why it was kept). Then, this child begins retrofitting their bedroom into an ISO Class 5 cleanroom more suitable for bio-technical research than for human habitation.
Satan loves legalism. Why would the Accuser do this? By building a fence six inches inside our yard (like the Pharisees with their extra rules with whom Jesus contended; see John 8:44), he can get countless believers thinking that something is wrong and yet doing it anyway, which is sinful (Romans 14:23). This makes us smell like a bunch of hypocrites instead of the aroma of Christ, ruining our witness. Some believers are better at this version of the-floor-is-lava than others, turning churches into behavior-improvement country clubs. Even though tax collectors and whores beat Pharisees into the Kingdom (Matthew 21:31), Pharisees still have an audience. Jesus said that theirs was a heavy yoke, and that they weren't helping (Matthew 23:4). His yoke is easy. His burden is light (Matthew 11:28-30). He is the Truth (John 14:6) that sets us free (John 8:32). Life did not get worse under grace than it was under the Old Covenant⁹.
The two greatest commands were always Believe and Love (looking at the Old and New Covenants), but if they were the only commands the Bible would be much shorter. Let's look at Acts 15 to learn about what The Council at Jerusalem of apostles and early Jewish Christians determined what was to be asked of Gentile believers:
Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.” This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So, Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. (Acts 15:1-2)
Prophets like Isaiah predicted that in the end times, the Gentiles would worship the Lord as well. If they fully converted to Judaism, they wouldn't be Gentiles anymore, would they?
The church sent them on their way, and as they traveled through Phoenicia and Samaria, they told how the Gentiles had been converted. This news made all the believers very glad. (Acts 15:3)
Skipping ahead…
After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.” (Acts 15:7-11)
Notice that God purifies the heart by faith; you don’t purify it, and you don’t keep it pure by any mechanism other than belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. Odds are, if you are reading this, you were never under the Law of Moses (Ephesians 2:12), you aren't under it now (Romans 6:14), you're not even being tutored by it (Galatians 3:24), which is a good thing, since trying to keep part of it for righteousness results in a curse (Galatians 3:10)ᴵᴼ. Opting for grace instead establishes the Law as the perfect impossible standard God intended it to be (Romans 3:19), you have died to the Law (Romans 7:4), and Christ is the end of Law-based living for you (Romans 10:4)¹¹. He is coming with His reward, because He is the only one who ever earned one, and He is kind enough to share it with us. For us, it's an inheritance, pure and incorruptible in Heaven instead of down here where we could mess it up (1 Peter 1:4). You don’t earn an inheritance; you get it because Someone died. If He is Lord, why don't we do as He said? Because only He ever could or did do what He said. We are sheep, and He is the Good Shepherd. He makes us lie down in green pastures because we as sheep don’t have sense enough to do so otherwise; He leads us beside still waters because we’re too dense as sheep to drink from running water (Psalm 23); I trust Him to take care of me because I know I can’t.
Resuming Acts 15 at verse 19:
“It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.” (Acts 15:19-21)
Since verse 21 clarifies that the verse 20 prohibitions are to be understood in light of an assumed Gentile familiarity with the Law of Moses, we can see that modern blood transfusions don’t seem like the eating of blood from Leviticus 17:11-12; additionally, we can see that the sexual immorality that is prohibited pertains to what is enumerated in the Leviticus 18 passages that also applied to people who were not under the Law of Moses, etc.
The one thing God asks is belief in His Son. The Son fixed us; He asks us to Love. The confidence that our eternity is secure should affect our every interaction with anyone. It allows us to be loving when others are hateful, be kind when others are angry, and feel peace when others are fearful. Love fulfills the requirements of the Law. Which Law? The short answer is all of them, if it's love of God AND of God's Image, humanity. There is more than one Law. You are probably familiar with the Law of Moses, but Jews extrapolated a simplified list of rules applicable to all humanity based on how God treated Gentiles (without the Law of Moses, and frequently before it was even given) in the first few books of the Bible. Those specific expectations were later summarized and called the Laws of Noah, or the Noahide Laws¹². Gentiles’ familiarity with these concepts is assumed because, as we just saw in Acts 15:19-21, “the Law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on the Sabbath.” The Gentile resident aliens (ger toshav) living in ancient Israel were expected to keep certain rules, so later Gentile "God-fearers" like Cornelius in Acts did, too. (I will keep using conceptual shorthand like "Noahide" and later names for things for clarity and brevity, rather than having to list everything the Gentiles had heard that applied to them every time.) Loss of contact with Jewish thought (after the Bar Kokhba revolt) led to this knowledge, once ubiquitous enough to allude to in Scripture with generalities like “sexual immorality”, becoming less and less known among the Gentiles. The Noahide Laws (again, a later name for material from the Old Testament that ancient Gentile "God-fearers" knew was applicable to all mankind) are, in essence:
1. Don't curse God (including not profaning His Name by swearing falsely by it).
2. Don't worship idols (including occult practices in Deuteronomy 18:9-13 that pagan nations were punished for doing).
3. Don't eat blood or flesh torn from a living (aka improperly slaughtered) animal (Genesis 9:4).
4. Establish courts of justice, and don't try to overthrow proper rulers (which in the ancient world definitely included parents – honor thy father and thy mother), since they enforce the rest of these laws:
5. No murder.
6. No theft.
7. No sexual immorality, as defined by the parts of Leviticus 18 and Leviticus 20 that were said to apply to Gentiles as well, which are behaviors Gentile kings in Genesis knew not to do (Genesis 12, Genesis 20, and Genesis 26), things that got the cities on the plain burnt (Genesis 19, Jude 7), and things that got the Canaanites removed from the Promised Land (Leviticus 18:3, Leviticus 18:24-30).
The Noahide Laws were the minimum Torah observance required to be a Gentile "God-fearer" like Cornelius in Acts. If you throw in coveting (which is a sincerely unloving desire to steal another’s property, spouse, etc.) since God cares about the mind (Jeremiah 17:10), this code starts to sound like a modified Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17, Deuteronomy 5:6-21) – minus the Sabbath, plus blood drinking, occult stuff, the full menu of sex crimes, etc. See Exodus 31:13,16-17 to see that the Sabbath was for the Hebrews only. See also Colossians 2:16-17 and Romans 14:5. Jesus is our Sabbath rest (Hebrews 4). A simplified way to express all of this is that God doesn’t change, so if God had a problem with Canaanite behavior before Exodus, then it is reasonable to think He finds it distasteful among His children. He took your sins away so you can live the life He saved you for.
[An aside: Sin vs. Disobedience, Clean vs. Unclean: There are plenty of commands in the Bible like “be fruitful and multiply” that admirable people like Paul and sinless Jesus did not do. For any Bible verse, look at who is speaking, to whom they are speaking, and in what context. Some words were for a specific person or situation. Hebrews 9:22 says that sins are not forgiven without the shedding of blood. If it doesn’t come with a death sentence or a required blood sacrifice, it might not be a “sin”. There is also a distinction between “clean” (in a proper state to attend worship) and “unclean”. Being “unclean” was not a sin, but bringing uncleanness to the Tabernacle or Temple was.]
In addition to the Noahide Laws, the principle of pikuach nefesh (which says that the preservation of human life overrides almost all Jewish law) is informative. No one but Jesus ever kept the Law of Moses. Some of the 613 commands contradicted each other at times. There was much discussion of which commandments "weighed" more than others, or how to prioritize what to obey when. You can see this in Jesus' discussion of priests circumcising on the Sabbath (John 7:23), in His mention of David and his men eating the showbread (Mark 2, Matthew 12), Jesus admonishing the tithing Pharisees (Matthew 23:23) about neglecting the weightier matters (justice, mercy, and faithfulness), and in the questions of which commands (Matthew 22:37-39) were the greatest (Love of God and neighbor). Leviticus 18:5 states:
Keep my decrees and laws, for the person who obeys them will live by them. I am the Lord.
The halakhic principle (way to interpret the Law) of pikuach nefesh amounts to “saving lives”. The religious leaders (that Jesus told His Old Covenant audience to listen to in Matthew 23:2-3) reasoned that if the point of keeping the Law was to live, then laws could safely (or even had to) be broken if lives were in jeopardy except for certain matters that would result in exile or death from divine judgment anyway. Idol worship, sexual immorality, and murder were never permitted, even to save a life; they were to die rather than sin (yehareg ve'al ya'avor) in these matters. You can see traces of these exceptions in passages like Ezekiel 33:26 "Murderers! Idolaters! Adulterers! Should the land belong to you?" This is why the God who says that liars go in the fire rewards Rahab from Joshua, the midwives who didn’t kill Hebrew boys from Exodus, etc., for their falsehoods. Could there be a bit of the old “whisper game” in our English translations? Strangled meat would still have the blood in it, so if "blood" is meant to be murder we have The Three Lines You Die Before Crossing in front of us. Or, the Council of Jerusalem simply re-emphasized the Noahide expectations that weren’t already intuitively obvious within Believe and Love. Consider the “All You Need Is Love” contingent nowadays saying any unscriptural behavior is fine as long as no one gets their feelings hurt. They may know to love someone but be unbiblical on whether they ought to make love to them.
Back during Jesus’ earthly ministry, the Pharisees were mostly in two camps. Shammai and Hillel were two influential Jewish scholars and Torah interpreters a few decades before Jesus’ earthly ministry. Rabbi Shammai’s followers felt that the greatest commandment in the Law was to love God. Among modern Christians, think of the angry people with signs yelling at the world about the issue of the day. (On the subject of "white lies" on a woman's wedding day, Rabbi Shammai's followers said, "If the bride is lame or blind, are you going to say she is beautiful? The Torah says 'Keep far from a falsehood.' You must describe her exactly as she is!") Rabbi Hillel’s followers agreed about loving God, but thought “love your neighbor as yourself” was right up there with it; that should sound familiar. By placing love of neighbor above all else, some modern churches have become super-inclusive to the point of blithely encouraging Christians to keep sinning. On the other hand, spreading the love and grace of God is definitely the primary mission. We are not here to fix the world’s behavior (1 Corinthians 5:12); we are here to bring them to life in Christ. Paul could have said many things to the Corinthians, but he stuck with Christ crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2). In context, when Jesus was asked which commandment was the greatest, He was being asked to choose a side in the Shammai/Hillel debates. Jesus’ innovation while endorsing Believe and Love as the greatest commandments was that He included everyone in His definition of “neighbor” instead of just fellow Jews (Luke 10:36-37). However, these are not the only rules. When Jesus rescued an adulteress from being stoned, He did not tell the crowd to be more loving and inclusive of her relationship; He told her to stop committing adultery (John 8:11).
Whether the background on what the Council of Jerusalem decided is helpful to you or not, they asked relatively little of us, and Paul’s interpretation of their ruling seems to be an even easier yoke.
Back to Acts 15, The Council wrote a letter to Gentile believers:
We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul — men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things. (Acts 15:24-29)
Let's also look at Acts 21:
When we arrived at Jerusalem, the brothers and sisters received us warmly. The next day Paul and the rest of us went to see James, and all the elders were present. Paul greeted them and reported in detail what God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. When they heard this, they praised God. Then they said to Paul: “You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law. (Acts 21:17-20)
Understanding that should inform us when we read the letters like the Book of James written to Jewish Christians. This distinction is why James quoted a verse about Abraham’s righteousness in relation to the almost-sacrifice of Isaac, but Paul reached back to Genesis 15:6 (before Abraham was circumcised) to report that Abe’s righteousness was credited to him because of faith, just like it is for all of us Gentiles who believe. With regard to us, in Acts 21, James continued to say:
As for the Gentile believers, we have written to them our decision that they should abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality.” (Acts 21:25)
Much like I attempted earlier in this book, the writers of the New Testament letters began by reminding the audience who they were in Christ. Then, they exhorted them to behave according to that reality. The instructions are built on a foundation of belief, love of God and humanity, and the logical avoidance of specific sins inconsistent with our identity as new creations in Christ that we should attempt to understand from the perspective of recently former pagans in the first century AD. Furthermore, since the Romans thought Christianity was detrimental to their society (disrupting marriages, encouraging slave revolts, etc.), there are behavior instructions in the interest of keeping the Gospel attractive by avoiding being a general nuisance to our neighbors (Titus 2:10). It is my assertion that all of the behavioral instructions in New Testament letters to Gentile churches are derived thusly from believing, loving, avoiding very specific behaviors that were never approved, and maintaining the reputation of the faith. We love Father and want to please Him, but it's easy to overthink things and try to apply them outside the original intended context. Three times in the Law of Moses, the Hebrews were told not to boil a young goat in its own mother's milk. It's hard to extrapolate some principle from that along with the rest of the laws that would summarize what to do in every situation. Therefore, we must trust our God to be great at telling people what He doesn't like.
9 Regarding the accusation that we assume that pre-Christian Judaism was a religion of earning one's standing before God through Law-keeping, against which Paul's gospel of grace stood as a genuine innovation: E. P. Sanders' Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977) mounted an influential and now widely (though not universally) accepted challenge to that picture. Examining the Tannaitic literature, Sanders argued that the operative pattern of Second Temple Judaism was better described as "covenantal nomism": Israel understood itself as already elected and included in the covenant by God's grace, with Torah observance functioning as the appropriate response to, and means of remaining within, that prior gift — "getting in" was by grace, and law-keeping was about "staying in," not earning entry from scratch (Sanders 1977, 75, 422). N. T. Wright's subsequent work on the "New Perspective on Paul" pressed the point further, arguing that Paul's argument with his fellow Jews was less about grace versus works in the abstract and more about who counts as the people of God now that the Messiah has come (Wright 2013). Sanders' thesis, however, is itself a live target of serious and sustained scholarly criticism. Stephen Westerholm's Perspectives Old and New on Paul and Simon Gathercole's Where Is Boasting? both argue at length, from the same Tannaitic and Second Temple sources Sanders surveys, that Paul's actual complaint in Romans 1–3 is not chiefly about ethnic boundary markers or a caricature of legalism but about a covenantal-response mechanism ("staying in") that in fact fails universally: "all have sinned and fall short" (Romans 3:23), "no one will be declared righteous in his sight by the works of the law" (Romans 3:20), and "all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse" because "cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law" (Galatians 3:10, quoting Deuteronomy 27:26) (Westerholm 2004, 340–58; Gathercole 2002, 191–264). On this reading, "staying in by obedience" is not covenantal nomism's quiet reassurance but its own live problem, since Paul's point is precisely that the mechanism Sanders describes does not, in practice, deliver anyone. Paul's own arguments in Galatians and Romans for Gentile freedom from Torah observance depend on a redemptive-historical claim that a new covenant, inaugurated in Christ, has superseded the old one for the purpose of defining the people of God (2 Corinthians 3:6–11; Hebrews 8:13). Gentiles never were, nor are they now, under the Old Covenant. Jesus’s earthly ministry took place entirely before the Cross, addressed to Jewish disciples and crowds who remained fully under the Mosaic covenant’s jurisdiction; Paul states plainly that the Son was “born under the law” (Galatians 4:4). Sinless Jesus neither added to nor subtracted from Torah in his pre-Cross teaching (Deuteronomy 4:2, 12:32). When a Gospel saying assumes, regulates, or comments on a specifically Jewish covenant practice like fasting (Matthew 6:16–18), tithing (Matthew 23:23), Temple sacrifice (Matthew 5:23–24), etc., that assumption is evidence about Torah-era Jewish practice, not, by itself, a legislative act establishing the same practice as a requirement for the Gentile church that did not yet exist and was never placed under the Mosaic covenant’s specific stipulations. This does not mean Gospel material addressed to a pre-Cross Jewish audience is irrelevant to Gentile Christian ethics; it means further questions must be asked of it. Is the content in view rooted in Jesus’ new commandment of love (John 13:34-45)? Can it perhaps be corroborated by apostolic material actually addressed to Gentile congregations? Where a Gospel citation instead regulates a covenant-specific, boundary-marking practice (the kind of practice Galatians 4:9–10 and Colossians 2:16–17 explicitly tell Gentile believers they are free from) and no independent Gentile-directed apostolic text establishes the same practice as an ongoing expectation, the Gospel citation should not be used as though it settled the question for the New Covenant church.
10 This is the long-standing majority reading of Galatians 3:10–14, sometimes called the anthropological reading: since no one keeps the law perfectly, everyone who relies on law-keeping stands condemned by it (Deuteronomy 27:26). That reading is defensible and still widely held. N. T. Wright's The Climax of the Covenant (1992) argued instead that Paul has in view Israel's specific, corporate covenant curse — the exile pronounced in Deuteronomy 28–30 for national disobedience, from which, in Second Temple Jewish thought, Israel had not yet fully returned even after the physical return from Babylon. On this reading, Galatians 3:13 ("Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us") describes Christ absorbing Israel's specific exilic curse in order to release the Abrahamic blessing to the nations, rather than describing an abstract, individualized impossibility of perfect obedience (Wright 1992, 137–56). James D. G. Dunn's commentary takes a related but distinct "new perspective" line, reading the curse as falling specifically on those who treat the boundary-marking "works of the law" (circumcision, food laws, sabbath) as badges excluding Gentiles from the covenant (Dunn 1993, 169–74). Timothy Gombis has more recently argued for a mediating position that keeps the anthropological element (universal inability to keep the law) while integrating it into the narrative logic of Israel's history rather than treating it as a timeless syllogism (Gombis, "The 'Transgressor' and the 'Curse of the Law,'" 2007). On any of the three readings above, Paul's conclusion is the same at the level that matters here: Gentile believers who put themselves under the Mosaic law's boundary-marking requirements place themselves under a curse-dynamic that Christ, not further law-keeping, has already resolved (Galatians 3:13–14, 3:23–25). Paul's explicit conclusion is that the law functioned as a temporary guardian (paidagōgos, Galatians 3:24–25) until faith came.
11 Romans 10:4 states that "Christ is the end (telos) of the Law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes." The word telos is genuinely ambiguous between "termination" and "goal" or "culmination," and this ambiguity is not a rhetorical convenience for either side of the debate; it is a real crux in Pauline scholarship. Douglas Moo's commentary surveys the major options and concludes that Paul likely intends both senses at once; Christ brings the Mosaic law's own trajectory toward righteousness to its intended culmination, and in doing so also brings its era of unique authority over God's people to an end (Moo 2018, 638–47). My argument does not require choosing "termination" over "culmination" at Romans 10:4 alone; the case for whether Gentile believers are bound by Torah rests on the wider argument of Romans and Galatians. Ephesians 2:14–15 states that Christ "has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility . . . by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations." The "dividing wall" (to mesotoichon tou phragmou) is widely, though not universally, read against the background of the Jerusalem Temple's soreg, the low stone barrier marking the boundary beyond which Gentiles could not pass on pain of death — an association supported by the surviving first-century warning inscriptions from the Temple balustrade and noted in the major commentaries on Ephesians (see, e.g., Hoehner 2002, 376–79; Lincoln 1990, 141–43, both surveying and generally endorsing the association while noting it cannot be regarded as certain). Whatever the precise referent of the architectural image, the text's own explanation is unambiguous about the theological point: it was specifically "the law with its commands and regulations" (the Torah's function as a covenantal boundary marker separating Jew from Gentile) that Christ is said to have set aside in order to "create in himself one new humanity" (Ephesians 2:15).
12 Markus Bockmuehl's influential 1995 study argued for reading the apostolic decree against the background of what later rabbinic literature calls the Noahide commandments — a set of obligations understood to bind all descendants of Noah, Jew and Gentile alike, predating and independent of the Sinai covenant (Bockmuehl 1995, 72–101). David Flusser and Shmuel Safrai had argued a related thesis decades earlier, going further to propose that "blood" in Acts 15:20 originally meant bloodshed (murder) rather than the dietary consumption of blood, paralleling a rabbinic formula permitting the transgression of any commandment to save a life except idolatry, sexual immorality, and murder (Flusser and Safrai, cited in Payne 2013). The majority position among recent commentators traces the four prohibitions to Leviticus 17–18’s laws governing not only native Israelites but also the gēr ("resident alien" or "sojourner") living among them. Those laws likewise forbid eating blood, eating meat from animals not properly slaughtered, offering sacrifices to goat-demons, and specific sexual prohibitions. Stephen Wilson's monograph Luke and the Law remains, by the assessment of subsequent scholarship, the single most thorough treatment of the decree and favors this Levitical background (Wilson 1983, 84–102); Ben Witherington's commentary on Acts concurs, and Darrell Bock's commentary finds real but inexact parallels, concluding cautiously that "the list seems to reflect an ethos instead of being the invocation of a specific text" (Bock 2007, 507). A more skeptical position, represented by A. J. M. Wedderburn’s redaction-critical study, questions whether the decree reflects a single coherent halakhic source at all, viewing it instead as a later Lucan summary serving the author's narrative interest in Jewish-Gentile reconciliation (Wedderburn 1993, 362–89). Loveday Alexander and others working on the decree's relationship to the parallel account in Galatians 2 have raised further historical questions about whether Paul's own letters, written closer to the events, show any awareness of a four-item ethical ruling of this kind, since Paul nowhere cites the decree by name even when its content (idol food, sexual immorality) is directly at issue in 1 Corinthians. Nevertheless, Jesus gave the apostles the power to bind and loose (Matthew 18:18), and the rules are the same regardless of how they and the Holy Spirit arrived at them. Richard Bauckham's essay on James's role at the council rightly calls the underlying dispute a genuine "halakhic problem" — a real question about how much of Israel's law bound the incoming Gentiles — and not a formality (Bauckham, cited in Holmén and Hurtado's discussion of the council; see also Bauckham 1995).
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