Jesus's Legal Theory: 7 Misconceptions About the Law
Earning salvation, impossible burdens, sinful impurities, and other legal myths
Before we can understand Jesus’s legal theory and why I think Morally Fulsome Lawkeeping best describes it (see prior essay), we need to do some ground-clearing.
Centuries of Christian theological tradition have characterized and caricatured the Torah, and Jewish law more broadly, in ways that would have been foreign or unintelligible to Jews of the Second Temple period. Jesus himself operated within that world, not outside it. So if we’re going to understand his legal critique, we first need to correct some stubborn errors about what the Law was and how it functioned.
Herein, then, seven misconceptions about the Law. For these, I’m heavily indebted to Episode 1 of the Jesus and Jewish Law podcast hosted by Drs. Paul Sloan and Logan Williams. I’ve added my own glosses.
Seven Misconceptions About the Law:
“Obeying the Law is about earning salvation.”
“The Law demands perfection and is an impossible burden.”
“Being impure means you are evil or sinful.”
“The Law excludes Gentiles.”
“The Law uniformly obligates everybody everywhere all the time.”
“The Law governs only external actions, not internal dispositions.”
“In sacrifice, God punishes an animal instead of you for your sin.”
Of these seven, I discuss the first five below. The final two deserve more extended discussion and are reserved for future essays.
Misconception 1: Obeying the Law is about earning salvation.
This misconception is fundamental and, in some sense, props up the others. The idea is that Jews followed a “religion of works” and adhered to the Law as a way to “earn” salvation, but Jesus established a “religion [or better, a relationship] of grace” in which salvation is a free, unearned gift that renders both the Law and lawkeeping irrelevant.
This misconception errs in at least two ways. First, Jesus himself was deeply concerned with individual ethical behavior, linking it directly to one’s fate both in the present age (Matt. 19:16-22) and in the age to come (Matt. 25:31-46).
Second, more basically, this misconception gets the covenantal logic backwards. In the biblical narrative, God does not give Israel the Law and then rescue them as a reward for keeping it. The sequence runs the other way: God rescues Israel first, and then gives them the Law. Exodus precedes Sinai. Redemption precedes obligation.
The sequence was the same with Abraham. God first chooses Abraham—and not for any apparent merit; it was God’s sovereign choice—then establishes a covenant with him, including the blessing of offspring and the obligation of circumcision.
Jews of the Second Temple period understood this well. They had a concept of divine grace at least as robust as that expounded by later Christians. E.P. Sanders puts it this way in his landmark work, Paul and Palestinian Judaism:
[G]race and works were not considered alternative roads to salvation. Salvation … is always by the grace of God, embodied in the covenant. The terms of the covenant, however, require obedience.1
So when Paul says in Eph. 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works,” and then in the very next verse says, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works” (2:10, emphasis added), he’s working with the biblical grain, not against it. God first gracefully extends His salvation, and his people then respond with faith-filled obedience.
Understanding the covenantal sequence and its biblical throughline is key because it accurately frames the Law’s purpose. The Law is not a ladder Israel climbs toward a God who is waiting at the top to gatekeep entry. Rather, it’s the framework for God’s ongoing relationship with a people he has already claimed as his own. God’s aim is to dwell with his people. The Law is the structure that makes that cohabitation possible. Lawkeeping responds to and maintains the covenant relationship. It does not initiate or earn it.
Misconception 2: The Law demands perfection and is an impossible burden.
This error has a more identifiable pedigree. It derives from a particular reading of certain passages in Paul’s letters: God gives the Law to articulate a perfect moral standard, knowing full well that no one can meet it, so that human beings will recognize their own insufficiency and turn to “grace.”
On this reading, the Law is a kind of cosmic setup—a standard deliberately pitched beyond reach. God issues commands he knows cannot be obeyed so as to engineer a crisis of conscience. In this portrayal, God plays Lucy to humanity’s Charlie Brown, setting us up for the placekick only to yank the ball away at the last second.
The misconception has crept into legal scholarship. The late Harvard scholar William Stuntz used it to argue for a position he called legal agnosticism. Jesus defined sin “so radically,” Stuntz maintained, that he made lawkeeping impossible. The lesson Stuntz drew was that society ought not use law to restrain “morally contested behaviors.” As I laid out in a prior essay, this gets both the Law and Jesus’s teaching all wrong.
The Torah is a gift to Israel, not a crushing and unattainable demand. It is a source of life, an object of love, and a font of wisdom (Psalms 1, 119). It contains rules, yes—but it also contains remedies. It has built-in structures for dealing with transgression: sin offerings, restitution, prescribed processes for restoration. The Law anticipates failure and provides for it. It does not demand sinless perfection. As we’ll see, Jesus’s teaching assumed as much (e.g., Matt. 5:23-24, Luke 19:8-9).
But the Law also had limits. It wasn’t designed to right every wrong or remedy every sin. Israelites still needed the forgiveness of God himself and of one another—just as we do. Law and grace were never oppositional forces. Each was a load-bearing pillar in the covenantal relationship.
Misconception 3: Being impure means you are evil or sinful.
This misconception has done particular damage to how people read the Gospels. The implicit contrast often drawn goes something like this: Jewish law is exclusionary and harsh, treating impurity as a moral failing and shunning those who contract it. Jesus, by contrast, is loving and inclusive, willing to touch those with skin conditions and associate with the unclean.
But the Law does not treat impurity as sin. Impurity is (largely) a ritual category, not a moral one. And it was a normal part of everyday life. Most ancient Israelites were in a state of impurity most of the time. Childbirth, genital discharges, skin conditions, contact with the dead—these generated impurity, and they were ordinary human experiences, not occasions for moral condemnation. Indeed, some of the conditions that generate ritual impurity, like having children and burying the dead, are positively commanded in the Law.
Contracting impurity is never a punishment or a sign of divine disfavor. What the Law establishes are procedures for managing and resolving impurity, not judgments against those who experience it.
This is key to understanding the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus. When he heals people with skin conditions, is touched by a hemorrhaging woman, and raises a girl from the dead, he is not transgressing some moral code that brands people as “evil.” Rather, he’s a peripatetic purification agent—a mobile, contagious source of life extinguishing the forces of death represented by ritual impurity.2
Framing the Law as an exclusionary system and Jesus as the inclusive rebel maps nicely onto modern sensibilities, but it is neither how the Law functions nor what Jesus was doing. I’ll have more to say about this in future essays. And I hope to persuade you that Jesus didn’t reject or replace the Law’s ritual purity system. Rather, taking a page from the prophetic tradition, he used it as a pedagogical springboard for his insistence on moral purity.
Misconception 4: The law excludes Gentiles.
The Law clearly distinguishes between Israelites and non-Israelites. Certain commandments apply to Jews that do not apply to Gentiles. But distinction is not the same as exclusion, nor does distinction imply superiority (or inferiority).
The Torah extends meaningful protections and provisions to Gentiles living among Israel. Non-Israelites were entitled to a fair trial (Lev. 24:22; Deut. 1:16), could take refuge in the designated cities of refuge (Num. 35:15), were eligible to participate in the poor tithe (Deut. 14:28-29, 26:12-13), could join in the Feasts of Weeks (Shavuot or Pentecost) and Booths (Sukkot) (Deut. 16:11, 14), and could enjoy the benefits of the sacrificial system (Num. 15:14-16, 15:29). The Law also imposed obligations upon Gentiles living among Israel—requirements designed to accommodate their manner of living to the unique obligations of Israel (e.g., Lev. 17:10-16).
The Law, in other words, envisions a community that includes Gentiles, even as it differentiates their obligations from those of native Israelites.
This distinction becomes especially important in the New Testament, when Gentiles begin joining the Jesus movement in significant numbers. The question of how Gentile inclusion works is not settled by collapsing all distinctions, as if becoming part of the covenant community means everyone now has identical obligations. The more coherent framework, and the one that seems to underlie much of the New Testament’s own reasoning, is that Gentiles join the covenant as Gentiles. Jews continue to bear the obligations that the Law assigns to Jews; Gentiles bear the obligations the Law assigns to Gentiles. Acts 15 and 21 are especially important in helping us understand this.
Again, as with Law and grace, differentiation and inclusion are not oppositional forces but mutually reinforcing ways of expressing God’s love for his people.
Misconception 5: The Law uniformly obligates everybody everywhere all the time.
Related to the previous error but distinct from it, this misconception treats the Torah as a kind of universal ethical code, binding on all people at all times in all places in the same way. But the Law doesn’t work this way. It differentiates obligations by (1) ethnicity, (2) role, (3) place and time, and in other ways besides.
Ethnicity: Some of the Jew/Gentile distinctions are described above. Consider another: Leviticus 11:2 specifies that the dietary laws apply “to you”—meaning, to Israel. Deuteronomy 14:21 explicitly allows foreigners to eat an animal that has died naturally, though this is prohibited to Israelites.
Role: The rules governing priests are not the rules governing ordinary Israelites. A lay Israelite who comes into contact with a corpse — such as to bury the dead — contracts impurity (and can, of course, alleviate it). A priest is subject to stricter regulations: no corpse contact except for close family members. For the High Priest, the rule is stricter still: no corpse contact whatsoever, even for a family member. (See Num. 19; Lev. 21.)
Place and time: Some legal prescriptions apply only when Israel “comes into the land.” The sabbatical year (letting the land rest every seventh year) and the Year of Jubilee (sabbatical plus debt remission every fiftieth year) are regulations that apply only to the land of Israel and, of course, are time-specific. (See Lev. 25.) The seven-day Sabbath cycle is also time-specific—certain rules apply during Shabbat but not the rest of the week—and Sabbath controversies in the Gospels are key to understanding Jesus’s views on the Law. More on this later.
The point for now is that the Law isn’t monolithic. It’s careful and intentional about distinctions, and attending to those will help us better understand Jesus’s legal arguments.
Two more misconceptions remain: “6. The Law governs only external actions, not internal dispositions” and “7. In sacrifice, God punishes an animal instead of you for your sin.” Both are important; both require more extended treatment in later essays.
With some of the ground cleared, we can begin constructing a sense of Jesus’s legal theory. We’ll start with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus himself mythbusts the idea that the Law is concerned only with outward actions and not the heart.
E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism 297 (1977).
Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism (2021).