Written by Part 3 of THE OTHER GOSPEL Series by eFireTemple
The Two Statements
There are two statements in the New Testament about the law of Moses. They cannot both be true.
The first is from Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:17-19:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. Truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.”
The second is from Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, 2:14-15:
“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations.”
Paul says the law has been set aside. Abolished. Destroyed as a wall. Jesus says the law will not lose so much as a single pen stroke until heaven and earth themselves disappear.
Heaven and earth have not disappeared.
This is the contradiction at the center of Western Christianity — and it has been papered over for two thousand years.
Why This Matters
Most Christians, if asked, would say that Jesus came to fulfill the law and that Paul explained what that fulfillment means. The two are seen as continuous — Jesus the teacher, Paul the theologian. One picks up where the other left off.
This article argues that reading does not survive contact with the actual texts.
The contradictions are not subtle. They are not matters of interpretation that a careful reading resolves. They are direct, unambiguous statements moving in opposite directions. Understanding how Christianity arrived at Paul’s position — rather than Jesus’s — requires understanding one of the most consequential theological moves in the history of religion.
What Jesus Actually Said
Matthew 5:17-19 is one of the most precisely worded passages in the Gospels. Jesus anticipates the objection before anyone raises it: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law.” The fact that he preemptively denies this suggests the accusation was already circulating — that his teaching was being heard as a departure from Torah. His answer is emphatic denial, followed by the most extreme language of permanence available: not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen.
The Greek word translated “smallest letter” is iota — the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet, used here to translate the Hebrew yod, the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The “least stroke of a pen” refers to the keraia, a small decorative mark that distinguishes one Hebrew letter from another. Jesus is saying: down to the level of typographic detail, the law stands.
And then the sentence that should make every reader of Paul stop: “Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven.”
Anyone. Who sets aside. Even the least commands. And teaches others to do the same.
That is a direct description of what Paul does.
What Paul Actually Said
Paul’s position on the law is not a single statement but a sustained theological argument running across multiple letters. The clearest statements are worth examining side by side:
Galatians 3:24-25:
“The law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.”
Galatians 3:10:
“For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse.”
Romans 7:6:
“But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.”
Ephesians 2:14-15:
“He himself is our peace… by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations.”
Colossians 2:14:
“Having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.”
This is not ambiguous. Paul is not saying the law has been subtly reinterpreted or spiritually internalized. He is saying it has been canceled, set aside, rendered obsolete. The law was a guardian — a temporary caretaker — for a period that is now over. Following it now, in Paul’s framework, actually puts you under a curse.
The Standard Defense — and Its Limits
The standard theological response to this tension is what scholars call the fulfillment interpretation: Jesus fulfilled the law, which means it has reached its intended purpose and is no longer binding in its original form. The law pointed toward Christ; Christ arrived; the pointing is done.
This reading has a long tradition behind it. N.T. Wright, one of the most rigorous contemporary New Testament scholars, argues that Jesus and Paul are more continuous than contradictory — that Paul is unpacking the implications of what Jesus’s death and resurrection mean for Torah observance, not inventing a new religion. The law, in this reading, finds its telos (its goal) in Christ, which is what Paul means in Romans 10:4 when he writes that “Christ is the end of the law.”
This is a serious argument and deserves an honest response.
The problem is that Matthew 5:17-19 does not use the language of fulfillment as completion. Jesus uses the language of permanence and continuity. He does not say: the law will be fulfilled and then superseded. He says: not one stroke will disappear until heaven and earth disappear. Those are not the same statement.
Moreover, Jesus explicitly attaches a moral consequence to setting aside the law’s commands — the person who does so will be “least in the kingdom.” If fulfillment meant the law’s authority was finished, that warning would be incoherent. You cannot be penalized for setting aside something that no longer applies.
The fulfillment interpretation requires the text to mean something it does not straightforwardly say. That is not impossible — texts require interpretation — but it is worth naming honestly: the interpretation is doing significant work to reconcile two statements that, read plainly, point in opposite directions.
The Passages That Make This Worse
The law tension is not limited to Matthew 5 and Paul’s letters. It runs through the New Testament in ways that compound the problem.
Mark 7:18-19 — The Food Laws
In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus declares all foods clean, effectively setting aside the Levitical dietary laws. The parenthetical note in verse 19 — “(In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean)” — is widely recognized by scholars as a Markan editorial comment added to the text rather than Jesus’s own words. But even setting that aside, Jesus’s argument in this passage is about internal purity versus external observance, not a formal declaration abolishing dietary law.
Paul, by contrast, is explicit in Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8-10 that food sacrificed to idols and Gentile food practices are permissible. His reasoning is theological — the law does not bind — rather than situational.
Matthew 23:2-3 — Jesus Defends the Scribes and Pharisees
In a passage that almost never receives the attention it deserves, Jesus tells his disciples:
“The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you.”
Jesus is instructing his followers to obey the Pharisaic interpretation of Torah. He critiques the Pharisees’ hypocrisy in the verses that follow — but he explicitly upholds their teaching authority on the law.
Paul, by contrast, regards the Pharisaic tradition as precisely what Christ has superseded. His own identity as a former Pharisee (Philippians 3:5) is something he treats as loss, as rubbish compared to knowing Christ.
James 2:10-12 — James Upholds the Whole Law
James — the brother of Jesus, leader of the Jerusalem church — writes:
“For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For he who said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘You shall not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker. Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom.”
James is not treating the law as abolished or superseded. He is treating it as the ongoing standard by which his readers will be judged. His framing is entirely consistent with Matthew 5:17-19. It is entirely inconsistent with Paul’s argument in Galatians.
What Happened in 70 CE
The destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 CE is essential context for understanding which version of this debate survived.
The Jerusalem church — led by James, practicing Torah observance, attending the temple, maintaining continuity with Jewish practice — was centered in a city that was destroyed. Its community was scattered. Its leadership was gone. The institutional center of the version of Christianity closest to Jesus’s own practice ceased to exist.
Paul had already been dead for several years. His churches, spread across the Gentile world — Corinth, Ephesus, Rome, Galatia — were geographically unaffected by the Jewish War. They survived. They grew. The letters Paul had written became the foundation of a theological tradition that had no competing institutional center left to challenge it.
History is written by survivors. The Christianity that survived 70 CE was Pauline Christianity. The version of the faith that upheld Torah observance, that was led by Jesus’s own family members, that was rooted in the Jerusalem community — that version was buried under the rubble of the city Rome destroyed.
This does not prove Paul wrong. But it does explain how a genuine theological dispute was resolved not by argument but by catastrophe.
The Luther Problem
No examination of the law question is complete without addressing Martin Luther, because Luther’s interpretation of Paul became the foundation of Protestant Christianity — and Luther’s reading of Paul shaped how half of Western Christianity still understands this question.
Luther’s central doctrine was sola fide — justification by faith alone. He derived this primarily from Paul’s letter to the Romans. And in translating Romans 3:28, Luther made a decision that has affected Christianity ever since.
The Greek text of Romans 3:28 reads: “For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.”
Luther’s German translation rendered it: “So halten wir nun dafür, daß der Mensch gerecht werde ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben.”
He inserted the word allein — alone. “Justified by faith alone.” The Greek does not say alone. Luther knew this. When challenged, he defended the addition on grounds that it captured the sense of the passage in natural German idiom.
Whatever one thinks of the translation choice, the consequence is significant: Luther’s Paul became the interpretive lens through which Protestant Christianity read Jesus. When Matthew 5:17-19 appeared to contradict Pauline doctrine, the solution was to read it through the fulfillment interpretation — because the alternative, taking Jesus’s words at face value, would have dismantled the theological system Luther had built.
James 2:24 — “a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone” — was so uncomfortable to Luther that he called the letter of James “an epistle of straw” and attempted, unsuccessfully, to remove it from the canon of scripture.
Think about what that means: the most influential interpreter of Paul in the history of Christianity tried to remove Jesus’s own brother from the Bible because he contradicted Paul.
The Question the Text Raises
This article is not asking its readers to conclude that Paul was wrong and Jesus was right. That is a theological judgment each reader must make for themselves.
What this article is asking is simpler: do you know that this disagreement exists?
Do you know that Jesus said the law would not lose a single pen stroke, and Paul said it was nailed to the cross? Do you know that James — who grew up in the same house as Jesus — wrote in direct contradiction to Paul’s central doctrine, and that Luther wanted that contradiction erased from scripture?
The institutional church has had every reason not to advertise this tension. Resolving it in favor of Paul was the decision that made Western Christianity what it became — with all the consequences that followed, from the marginalization of Jewish Christians in the early centuries to the anti-Semitic undercurrents in some strands of supersessionist theology, in which the Jewish covenant is presented as definitively finished.
The tension does not disappear when you resolve it in Paul’s favor. It merely goes underground, where it continues to shape how the faith is practiced and who it includes.
The honest reading of the New Testament does not flatten this tension. It names it, examines it, and asks readers to decide what they actually believe — and whose voice they are actually following.
What Comes Next
The law question is one contradiction. But it is connected to a deeper one — the question of how a person is actually saved.
Jesus taught that the gate is narrow and that what matters is whether you did the will of the Father: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner. Paul taught that what matters is whether you have faith in what Christ did for you.
These are not the same answer to the most important question in Christianity.
That is the subject of Article 4.
Next in the series: Faith Alone: The Doctrine Jesus Never Taught
Part 4 of THE OTHER GOSPEL Series — eFireTemple