Paul and Jesus

Moses saw the extraordinary glory of God at Mount Sinai, he received the revelation of the Torah, and he inaugurated the covenant between God and the nation of Israel. Paul likewise believed that he saw the glory of God—in the face of Christ, that he received the Torah of Christ, and that he became the administrator of God’s new covenant with a new spiritual Israel. In view of the new, all that was old was now fading and passing away. Paul refers to the covenant that Moses brought as the “dispensation of death,” contrasting it to the new covenant that he calls the “dispensation of the Spirit”: “Now if the dispensation of death, carved in letters on stone, came with such splendor that the Israelites could not look at Moses’s face because of its brightness, fading as this was, will not the dispensation of the Spirit be attended with greater splendor?” (2 Corinthians 3:7–8). Indeed, this “greater splendor” of the new covenant is so much more brilliant that “once it comes, what once had splendor has come to have no splendor at all, because of the splendor that surpasses it” (2 Corinthians 3:10). Paul then makes the startling assertion that God has hardened the minds of the Jewish people so that when they “hear Moses read,” the reading of the Torah actually becomes a veil to keep them from seeing the splendor of Christ! (2 Corinthians 3:14–15).

One has to appreciate how utterly alien this idea is within Judaism. The reading and study of the Torah was considered the central duty and occupation of every faithful Jew:

Rabbi Hillel said: Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving your fellow creatures and bringing them close to the Torah. (Pirke Avot 1:12)

Rabbi Shammai said: Make your study of the Torah a fixed habit. Say little and do much, and receive all men with a cheerful face. (Pirke Avot 1:15)⁶

According to the New Testament, Josephus, Philo, and other contemporary sources, the Torah was read regularly in synagogues throughout the Roman world and both Jesus and his Jerusalem apostles participated in these activities in the homeland, as did the apostles in the Diaspora—the term for Jews who were living outside the Land of Israel.⁷

According to Paul, this listening to Moses is the very problem at the root of Jewish unbelief in Jesus. If one lays aside the Torah and turns to Christ, the veil is suddenly removed and those who were blinded by the Torah of Moses can see the true glory of God in the face of Christ: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Paul links the Spirit of Christ, the glory of Christ made in the image of God, and the ongoing transformation of those who are in Christ from one degree of glory to another. This cluster of ideas is consistent in all Paul’s letters, as we have seen. Paul’s Gospel is the revelation of the hidden mystery that God is creating a family of glorified Spirit-beings. That message necessitates a new covenant or Torah of Christ and a newly formed people of Israel—now defined by the Spirit and no longer by the “flesh.”

Elijah’s Sinai revelation came much later than Moses’s. The nation as a whole had turned to idolatry during the reign of the infamous and wicked king Ahab and his wife, Jezebel. Elijah was deeply discouraged and had reached the point of thinking that he alone was left as a devoted worshipper of God. His journey to Sinai was not a casual one, but a panicked flight to escape arrest and execution by the king. His intention was to encounter God at the mountain, as Moses had once done, and lay before him his desperate plight (1 Kings 19).

Paul quotes Elijah’s complaint as well as God’s revelations to him and draws a startling parallel to his own Gospel message and mission:

Do you not know what the scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel? “Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.” But what is God’s reply to him? “I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. (Romans 11:2–4)

Paul makes use of this Elijah story to address one of the most obvious questions arising from his contention that his new covenant Gospel has superseded the Sinai revelation given to Moses. What about God’s promises to the nation of Israel? What about the great majority of the Jewish people who had not “turned to Christ” but were living their lives based on the Torah revelation of Moses at Sinai? Since God had chosen them, given them the Torah, and made a covenant with them, had he suddenly changed course and rejected his own people? At issue was the faithfulness of God.