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Paul and the Law: A Contextual Approach is unavailable, but you can change that!

No issue in contemporary Pauline studies is more contested than Paul’s view of the law. Headline proponents of the “new perspective” on Paul, such as E. P. Sanders and J. D. G. Dunn, have maintained that the Reformational readings of Paul have led to distorted understandings of first-century Judaism, of Paul and particularly of Paul’s diagnosis of the Jewish situation under the law. Others have...

however, to show the meaning of the term here. The first and most obvious hint of Paul’s meaning comes in the next verse (v. 7). Here he uses the term in the plural to refer to the “letters” carved into the stone tablets of the law. Since Paul claims that the letter “kills” in verse 6 and similarly describes that which was carved by letters in stone as “the ministry of death” in verse 7, “letter” in verse 6 must simply mean “the Mosaic law.” Second, in verse 6 itself Paul’s phrase “new covenant”
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