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The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays is unavailable, but you can change that!

This collection of essays highlights a dimension of Paul’s theology of justification which has been rather neglected: that his teaching emerged as an integral part of his understanding of his commission to preach the gospel to non-Jews; and that his dismissal of justification ‘by works of the law’ was directed not so much against Jewish legalism but rather against his fellow Jews’ assumption that...

In 1984, in dialogue with Heikki Räisänen, I broadened the argument by seeking an explanation for the problematic Gal. 3:10 in the ‘social function’ of the law: that the law served to mark off, ‘separate’ Israel from the nations; that, as Gal. 2:1–16 had demonstrated, works of the law could function as boundary markers, rituals and practices which distinguished Israel from the nations.30 Might that provide the key to Paul’s objection?—that in speaking of ‘works of the law’ Paul had in mind this boundary-marking,
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