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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > April 1998

The Law in the Gospel

The law is an essential precondition for the gospel: When Jesus and Paul speak, they speak the language of law.

By Ronald S. Hendel

Martin Luther taught that the Bible—both Old and New Testaments—consists of two sorts of writings: law and gospel. He regarded as gospel the parts of the Bible that were directly conducive to salvation. The rest he regarded as law, as an unnecessary burden and an obstacle to salvation. Luther found law and gospel intermixed in both the Old and New Testaments: In the Old Testament, Genesis was gospel because Abraham was saved by his faith, but books such as Esther were merely law. In the New Testament, the letters of Paul were gospel, but the letter of James was […]

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Endnotes

1.

The quote is from Luther’s preface to his translation of the New Testament in 1522. On Luther’s distinction between law and gospel, see Roland H. Bainton, “The Bible in the Reformation,” in S.L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3, The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 19–21.

2.

Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell, eds., Qumran Cave 4—V. Miqsat Ma‘ase Ha-Torah, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert 10 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). See the insightful essays on this text in Moshe J. Bernstein and John Kampen, eds., Reading 4QMMT: New Perspectives on Qumran Law and History (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996).

3.

MMT Sec. C.11.26–27.

4.

This similarity was first pointed out by Moshe Weinfeld in a response to Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell, “An Unpublished Halakhic Letter from Qumran,” in Janet Amitai, ed., Biblical Archaeology Today (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1985), p. 430; and see John Kampen, “4QMMT and New Testament Studies,” in Reading 4QMMT, pp. 129–135.