Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

In other words, if Peter and, by implication, those who have come from James try to reestablish a two-tier Jesus movement, with Jews at one table and Gentiles at another, all they are doing is declaring that the movement of God’s sovereign love, reaching out to the utterly undeserving (“grace,” in other words), was actually irrelevant. God need not have bothered. If the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, was sufficient for all time to define the people of God, then there is no need for a crucified Messiah. Or to put it the other way, if God has declared, in the resurrection, that the crucified Jesus really was and is the Messiah, then God is also declaring that Moses could only take them so far. He pointed to a promised land, an “inheritance,” but could not himself take the people into it. Galatians is all about the ultimate “inheritance” that God had promised. And, as we shall see presently, Paul insisted that the “heirs”of this “inheritance”could not be defined by the Torah,but only by the Messiah himself, the ultimate “heir.”