When he looked back on his life as a Pharisaic vigilante, Paul believed that he had been in thrall to what he called “sin.” He would always adamantly deny that the law was identical to sin; no, he insisted, the Torah was “a good thing” but, despite his punctilious observance of the commandments, he had remained “a prisoner under the law of sin which controls my conduct.”19 He was, therefore, “a slave to sin,” because he had found it impossible to do what he knew, in his heart, to be right.
