He is “under the Messiah’s law”; he is “in the Messiah.” The Messiah’s people, as he says in a climactic passage in Galatians, have died; they have left behind the old identities and have come into a new identity, the messianic identity.38 That is part of why the gospel is “a scandal to Jews,” but of course it nonetheless makes sense only within a deeply Jewish, and now messianic, view of the world.
