The Second Temple Jewish Distinction between Moral and Ceremonial Law and Its Relationship with the Pauline Argument in Galatians

"First, it is only after a lengthy proof that the Mosaic law teaches the unity, omnipotence, and omnipresence of God (132-34) and a discourse on the foolishness of idolatry-ideas popular in Hellenistic philosophical thought-that Eleazar goes on to explain the reason for the more peculiarly Jewish commandments. Second, he explains these commandments as symbolic reminders of the virtues by which the people of God should seek to order their lives: justice, peace, and the contemplation of God (144-167). Again, these are virtues commonly praised in Hellenistic philosophical writing. The author of the Letter of Aristeas was clearly anxious to show that the parts of the Torah which were peculiarly Jewish were not at the center of Jewish religion and only pointed to deeper, more important, and more universally accepted ideas. Similarly, circumcision, food laws, and Sabbath keeping are conspicuously absent in some of the surviving ethical literature of Hellenistic Judaism. PseudoPhocylides, probably written by a Hellenistic Jew between 200 B. C. and A. D. 200, consists of a long list of ethical injunctions, but concentrates on those places where Hellenistic and Jewish ethics intersect. The honor of God and parents (1. 8), the execution of justice (11. 9-21), showing mercy to the poor and helpless (11.22-41), exercising moderation (11. 59-69), and avoiding such sins as greed (ll. 42-47) and sexual immorality (1. 3,11. 175-206) form the ethical center of this work. Aside from one reference to "purifications" (1. 228)-possibly an allusion to ritual washings-there is no mention of those parts of the law which are distinctively Jewish. For whatever reason the sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides were written to reconcile Jewish and Hellenistic culture, and those parts of the law considered expendable were precisely those parts which Paul considers expendable in Galatians: dietary restrictions, Sabbath and festival observances, and circumcision" (Thielman, From Plight To Solution, 55). 

The question really isn't whether some Jews, particularly Hellenists, were making the same distinctions between ritual and moral law that the apostle Paul does, but rather why they are doing it. Paul does not merely dismiss the ritual law as something one can dispose of for any reason. Instead, it is because Christ has fulfilled the ritual law because He has fulfilled all law, ritual or moral. The question from that point is what laws inherently command activity for the Israel of God to carry out that is consistent with the character of Christ in His relation to His people and the world, and what laws are merely shadows of other things.

In this regard, the Hellenists, or any Jewish persons who reject Christ, do not have a basis for dividing up the law, since God requires that it be fulfilled. Since there is no fulfillment in Christ for them, there is everything in the law to indicate that God would strike a man dead for breaking the Sabbath as much as He would for blasphemy. The similarity, therefore, is not in an arbitrary dismissal of law whenever it comes into contact with Gentiles who would have seen it as overbearing and strange, but instead the inclination that God's purpose with ceremonial law was always meant to be fulfilled through something else. For this, Judaism's answer that it is to be fulfilled merely in the doing of the moral law is rejected by the law itself. Its fulfillment must be brought to completion and found not in the community itself, but in another. This is Paul's argument.