The justification of Jesus came up, however, not long after- wards m a different form. Trypho told Justin (Dial. 07) that if Christians could prove from Scripture that Jesus really was the Messiah, it would be better to argue that He deserved this honour on account of His dutiful obedience to the rites and regulations of the Law than that He owed it to a le';endary virfrin-birth. Justin's reply is that Jesus was circumcised and obedient to the other ordinances of the Slosaic code, but ' not as if he were justified thereby.'
Justin's position is practically that of Mt 315 ; Jesus fulfils every religious requirement (Tratraf SiKaLo<rOvriv) of the Law, but oidy as that is part of His obedience to the Father. It is notice- able, in this conne.'wion, that St. Paul never speaks of Jesus Christ as ' righteous,' nor of His righteousness, although this was .a familiar predicate of Messiah not only in the OT but in the later Judaism, especially in the Eiwchic Parahtea, where righteousness is one of the leading characteristics of Messiah as well as of the saints. Messiah as Son of JIan is ' born to righteousness ' (Ixxi. 14) and possesses it as an essen- tial quality of His nature ; it is primarily the virtue of a con- queror, who establishes tlie right and vindicates the faithful by overthrowing the strong anti-Divine powers of earth ; hut it is beginning to be more than the equipment of the Divine cham- pion or law-giver, and (cf. Test. Judah, xxiv. 1) it is associated with sinlessness as well as with wisdom or knowledge. Even when St. Paul speaks in terms of this militant Messianism (e.g. '2 Th 1-2), he refrains from calling Jesus 'The Righteous One.' § Otherwise, he describes Him as ' born under the law ' and as serving the Jews on earth in fulfilment of Ood's promises ; in Ph 26f- he does not suggest that the obedience of Jesus under the Law amounted in any sense to ' justification,' or even to the maturing of character outlined in He 5Sf- His large use of ' righteousness ' did not include any reference to the sinlessness which he presupposed in the Son of God.
The crisis of the Pauline struggle with the Law is so far behind that the author of 1 John feels at
* Similarly, in the only reference to a Divine SiKaiocrvvrj in Revelation (lOH), the Messiah discharges the two-fold function of a Semitic king — he 'rules and makes war justly' {^v 5iKaio(TuvT7). God is ' righteous ' in the Apocalypse {e.ff. lo-* 16^.7 192),' in the OT sense of vindicating the saints and punish- ing the wicked persecutors.
I This does not corroborate the hypothesis that St. Paul re- garded Jesus as Himself justified by His resurrection, i.e.. that the latter proved Him to be vindicated as sinless by God, so that Christiatis who identify themselves with Him by faith show and appropriate the same Justification. Had St. Paul con- ceived the matter thus, he would have spoken of Christians being 'justified with Christ.' But he never uses this phrase.
t Unless we group with it 1 P 32'!.
5 St. Luke makes him use the term in Ac 22^4 ; otherwise, it is confined to Stephen (Ac 1^), Peter (1 P 318), and John (1 Jn '2').
liberty (cf. Rev ■2'2") to use a legal phrase like 'do- ing righteousness ' (cf. Pss.-Sol. ix. i) : ' he who does righteousiu'ss is treasuring up life for himself with the Lortl '). Its associations were as ohl as t he (i reek IJible, and evidently it could no longer be nnsunder- stood (cf. Clem. Rom. xxxi. 2, etc.). Thus in ■2-" and 3' the 'doing of righteousness' is a synonym for the ' doing of God's w ill ' ; * it is at once the expression and the evidence of regeneration, and consequently the antithesis to 'committing sin.' It is possible lliat the stringent tone of these sayings about the ethical bearing of ' righteous- ness' was called out by some antinomian move- ment which disparaged mere morality in the interests of a Gnostic superioritj', or by a local abuse of the Pauline teaching. Certainly the latter is the case in the E]iistle of James, c.»/. '!-■'. The idea that belief justilied by itself would not have been suggested, so far as we know, by any Jewish type of piety. The formali-m I against which the writer feels it necessary to warn hi.s readers arose from an exaggeration and inisajiiire- hension of the Pauline antithesis t between faith and works — an antithesis which was coined by St. Paul. Hence ' faith ' in St. James is clo.ser to a confession of monotheism (cf. '2'") than to the Pauline conception. This is not ali'ected by the reference in 2'. St. James can conceive the exist- ence of a faith which is devoid of any practical element, requiring the breath of ' works to vitalize it : ' As the body without the breath of life is dead, so faith is dead without works ' (2-'*). From the Pauline standpoint, the reverse would be more true : it is faith that vitalizes works. But ' works ' are moral actions for St. James, not legal observances. The entire omission of any reference to the Law in this section of his Epistle is signiti- cant. It corroborates the impres.sion that justiUca- tion means for him God's recognition of mural conduct, not the free forgiveness of sins, which according to St. Paul made any Christian char- acter and conduct possible. The only allusion to SiKaioa-vvq is in the OT quotation (2-^), from which he draws the inference that Abraham's righteous- ness rested not on his faith alone but on his act of practical obedience in being prepared to sacriHce I.saac. When he says elsewhere that ' human anger does not promote divine righteousness ' (1-"), i.e. the religion of which God approves, and that 'peacemakers reap righteousness' (3") as the harvest of th^ir quiet ertbrts in the Church, he is illustrating the wrong and the right ways of pro- moting the religious life ; 5i.Ka.ioamr) is em|)loyed in its familiar and normal sense to denote the devout life of goodness as that is lived under the standard and scrutiny of God (cf. Ac 10^ : ' he who rever- ences God and lives a good life — ipya^b/j-evo^ SiKaio- crifvrjv — in any nation is welcomed by him '), and the writer urges that wrangling and angrj' contro- versy are not a soil which can be exjjected to foster the growth of spiritual religion (oiKaioin*i; = ' cet etat normal auquel Dieu prend plaisir et atiquel le Chretien doit tendre ' [E. Reuss, Les ICpUre.i cat/wliqnes, Paris, 1878, p. 139]). The second of these phrases is paralleled by the expression in He 12", where those who are trained by the discip- line of God ' reap the fruit of it afterwards in the peace of an upright life' {Kap-n-dif iipriviKov . . . OLKaioaijvq'i) ; here OLKaioji/vri includes participation in the holiness of God's nature (v.'*'} as the char-