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Individuals and communities play critical roles, both theoretically and practically, in the preservation and development of Jewish law. Some of these roles allow for considerable autonomy, at least if that term is understood as the employment of one's intellectual creativity and ethical judgment. Jewish law does not purport to micromanage all of a person's decisions. Quite the contrary, in many instances, it provides and encourages moral choice so that, in part, a person can become a moral agent rather than merely someone who does moral acts.In Part I, we examine how the scope of autonomy is shaped by basic Jewish law axioms. For example, Jewish law assumes that the Pentateuch, also known as the “Written Torah” or “Written Law,” contains words which were communicated to humankind directly by God. Yet, unlike the approaches of some fundamentalist religions, Jewish law does not always construe these divine words literally. In fact, Jewish law authorities openly acknowledge that various Pentateuchal passages, taken by themselves, are incomplete, incomprehensible or at times ostensibly inconsistent. Jewish law assumes that God transmitted to humankind two interrelated bodies of teachings: one, the Pentateuch, was to be written down, and the other, known as the “Oral Torah” or the “Oral Law,” was to be transmitted from Teacher to Student. It is the Oral Torah that clarifies, resolves and supplements the Written Torah. Indeed, because the Oral Torah is necessary to understand the Torah, Jewish legal sources say that “the Oral Torah is the more important of the two.” Throughout this article, unless stated to the contrary, the term “Torah” refers to the Written Torah, the Oral Torah, or both, and the phrase “Torah Law” pertains to the laws that arise from the Torah.

Then men said, ‘Let us make God in our image, after our likeness; and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air.’ So men created God in their own image, in the image of man they created him; with the attributes of justice and mercy they created him.

This paper is an attempt to follow up and expand on the following statement which I made in an earlier paper published in SJT: The Christian doctrine of original sin has no place within a rabbinic system which avoids the crucial difficulty in Christian theodicy — that of the creation of evil ex nihilo at the time of the Fall.In developing this statement I would like to sound a warning note to NT and patristic scholars who utilise rabbinic sources as background material for the study of early Christianity. It is often assumed that rabbinic texts, along with the literary remains of the other sorts of Judaism in existence in the first century A.D., can be used as a mine of material for illustrating the sort of beliefs with which the early Christians started out and against which they subsequently reacted. Thus, for example, to approach closer to the title of this paper, in considering the famous Pauline passage on the Fall (Rom. 5.12–21), it is customary for NT scholars to marshall all the evidence from the OT, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and rabbinic Judaism to try and explain the origin of the Christian doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin. But all too often the rabbinic evidence is used rather indiscriminately without regard to the date of its origin or to the possibility that rabbinic views on these matters may have changed in the course of the centuries during which the Talmudic literature was evolving.

There have been two principal ways of comparing Paul with Judaism, each of which has suffered from characteristic defects. One has been holistic in a certain sense. Taking “Paul” to be essentially represented by the doctrine of justification by faith and “Judaism” to be essentially represented by works righteousness, many Christian scholars have understood Paul and Judaism as antithetical. The characteristic weakness of this sort of comparison is that Paul is oversimplified, Judaism is both oversimplified and misrepresented, and the comparison is made in order to show the superiority of Paul to Judaism. That is, such comparisons have generally been pejorative and biased. The other principal method has resulted in more of a genuine comparison. Instead of dealing with generalized essences, this approach concentrates on individual motifs. It may properly be called atomistic, although the termMotivsgeschichtemight better describe the method. Those who have followed this approach have generally answered the question of whether or not there is a positive relationship between Paul and Judaism affirmatively. The characteristic weakness of this approach — and this is a much less serious weakness than that of the other approach — is that a conclusion about some of the parts may lead too quickly to a conclusion about the whole. One may, for example, learn a great deal about the relation of what Paul says about Adam to Adamic speculation in Judaism without being able to determine whether or not Paul's religion was basically Jewish. As David Flusser has seen, building blocks from one edifice may be used to put together quite a different construction. Seeing the similarity, or even the identity, of some of the stones should not lead one to conclude that the building is the same. Thus a comparison of the two wholes as represented by their generalized essences generally goes awry, but the same may also be true of a comparison of any number of parts. Is there any way around this difficulty?