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What were Jesus and the Pharisees Talking about when they Talked about Law?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2015

David A. Skeel Jr.
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Extract

Jesus' Legal Theory—A Rabbinic Reading opens with a startling claim. The increasing number of legal scholars who have begun exploring the relationship between Christianity and American law in the past several years have neglected to consider the insights of Jesus himself. “[N]otably absent from this literature,” Professor Saiman writes, “is any extensive examination of Jesus, and his views about jurisprudence and legal theory. Despite the overall diversity of his writings, there is little discussion about what Jesus thought about law, lawyers, legal rules and the legal order.” What, the article asks, does Jesus' own legal theory look like?

Type
AALS Jewish Law Section Papers
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , 2007 , pp. 141 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2007

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References

1. Saiman, Chaim, Jesus' Legal Theory—A Rabbinic Reading, 23 J.L. & Religion 99 Google Scholar.

2. Mark 2:27 (English Stand. Version).

3. Supra n. 1.

4. Id. at 105.

5. Id. at 106.

6. Id. at 100.

7. Id.

8. Id. at 34.

9. For much more detailed analysis of the relationship between God's law and the secular law, and of the proper scope of secular law, see Skeel, David A. Jr., & Stuntz, William J., Christianity and the (Modest) Rule of Law, 8 U. Penn. J. Const. L. 809 (2006)Google Scholar; Stuntz, William J., Christian Legal Theory, 116 Harv. L. Rev. 1707 (2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Professor Saiman does in fact briefly allude to this possibility (p. 99), but in my view it is dismissed too quickly.

11. For elaboration, see Skeel & Stuntz, supra n. 9. This suggests another irony in contemporary American evangelicalism—the tendency to assume that legislation can and should be used to solve most social problems, despite Jesus' suggestion, as Professor Saiman puts it, that “law is an ill-suited medium through which to structure social relationships.” (p. 100).

12. For a survey of this literature and the debate it has spawned, see Sargent, Mark A., Competing Visions of the Corporation in Catholic Social Thought, 1 J. Cath. Soc. Thought 561 (2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. See e.g. Johnson, Lyman P.Q., Faith and Faithfulness in Corporate Theory, 56 Cath. U.L. Rev. 1 (2006) (relevance of religious conceptions of faithfulness to corporate governance)Google Scholar.