Is There Jewish Law?: The Case of Josephus

MARTIN BUBER FAMOUSLY accused the translators of the Septuagint of having invented Christianity by “mistranslating” Torah as nomos and argued that it was the “Greek narrowing of the concept of Torah into law that makes possible Paul’s opposition of law and faith. ‘Without the change of meaning in the Greek, objective sense,’ Buber writes, ‘the Pauline dualism of law and faith, life from works and life from grace, would miss its most important conceptual presupposition.’”¹ Whatever Paul did or did not understand, I would exonerate the translators of the Septuagint from having perpetrated a “Greek narrowing” of Torah, suggesting rather