Jewish Law in Gentile Churches: Halakhah and the Beginning of Christian Public Ethics

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Jewish Law in Gentile Churches: Halakhah and the Beginning of Christian Public Ethics. By Markus Bockmuehl. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003, xvi + 314 pp., $29.99 paper.

Sooner or later any student of the NT must address the issue of how the Jewish and Gentile sectors of the early church related to each other. One topic that continually confronts scholars is whether or not each branch held to the same ethical code. Markus Bockmuehl of Cambridge University addresses this issue in his book Jewish Law. He invites us to examine a somewhat neglected subject of the dependence (if any) of Gentile Christianity on the Jewish understanding of the Torah. He proposes that the Gentile Christian …