Frogster
Galatians is the best!
You quote Eph 2, but if you read on, Paul goes into the spiritual temple, as Peter did, not the law, not Israel, not Judaism in chapter 2.I'd disagree, a better understanding of the Jewish cultural context gives a different interpretation. To start with, the Torah never instructs all Gentiles to become circumcised or to become Jewish proselytes, or even how to become Jewish proselytes, so by rejecting what the circumcision group was asking in Acts 15:1, they were ruling against man-made traditions and upholding the Torah. As I said before, if the Torah had instructed all Gentiles to become circumcised, then the Jerusalem Council had no authority to countermand God. They couldn't add to or subtract from God's law (Deuteronomy 4:2), but only had the authority to make interpretations about how it was intended to be obeyed, and they upheld the Torah by correctly ruling that it did not intend for all Gentiles to become circumcised.
The Jews had an oral law or traditions of the elders (Mark 7:3-4), which consisted of traditions and rulings for how to keep the written law of the Torah and fences around it to protect it from being accidentally broken. For instance, when God commanded them not to do their work on the Sabbath, they had many rulings for what did and did not count as work, such as how far someone could walk. They traced the command for this back to Moses and they reasoned that you couldn't keep the Sabbath if you didn't have their traditions for how to keep the Sabbath, so they gave a greater importance to their own traditions than to the commands of God, which Jesus criticized them for (Mark 7:6-9). They would never have considered teaching someone how to keep the Sabbath without teaching their traditions for how to keep it, so all of this was wrapped up in their concept of what it meant to live according the custom of Moses (Acts 15:1). If you think about it, the Israelites would certainly have asked Moses for clarification for how to obey many of the laws out of the desire to obey in the right way, so Moses would have to had made rulings and started traditions for how to obey it. Whether the traditions that they had are the same ones that Moses started is a separate issue, but the point is that the Jews thought their traditions traced back to Moses.
So Paul was rejecting both that Gentiles had to follow their traditions and that they had follow the law in order to be saved, but he was not rejecting God's holy, righteous, and good law. He said our faith does not abolish the law, but rather that it upholds it (Romans 3:31). The heavy burden was their mountain of traditions for how to follow God's laws, not God's laws themselves. Jesus said his yoke or interpretation for how to follow the law easy and his burden was light and God said in Deuteronomy 30:11 that His commands were not too difficult for them. You can't find anywhere in the OT where anyone thought that God's laws were a heavy burden, but just the opposite. The Psalms are full of high praise for the law, especially 119, and considered the law to be a delight. The Jews frequently gave thanks to God for giving them the Torah as instructions for life, so they would never have considered it to be a heavy burden.
God gave the Torah to His chosen people, Israel, but Ephesians 2:12 and 2:19 say that Gentiles were once alienated from Israel, but are now fellow citizens. In 1 Peter 2:8-9, it says that Gentiles are no counted among God's chosen people, a holy nation, and a royal priesthood, so they should conduct themselves accordingly in compliance with God's instructions. In 1 Peter 1:13-16, it says that Gentiles should have a holy conduct, so how can Gentiles be a holy nation and have a holy conduct if they aren't supposed to follow any of God's instructions in the law for how to do that?
Jesus did not come to start a new religion, but rather he was born a Jew, became a Jewish rabbi, had Jewish disciples, and was the Jewish Messiah in fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. Jesus brought fullness to Judaism by teaching how to obey the Torah, by demonstrating through perfect sinlessness how it should be obeyed, by providing a means for salvation, and by including the Gentiles.
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