In Second Temple Judaism, “works” was already a familiar category of religious thought, and it did not primarily mean generic good deeds or moral effort. It referred especially to concrete practices by which a community expressed covenant loyalty and marked itself off as God’s people. This way of speaking appears clearly in the Dead Sea Scrolls, particularly in the document often called 4QMMT (“Some of the Works of the Law”), where specific rulings about purity, calendar, food, temple practice, and marriage are called “works.” These “works” were not attempts to earn God’s favor in a purely abstract sense; they were the visible boundary-markers of faithfulness and identity, the way a group demonstrated that it belonged to the covenant community defined by the Torah.
Within that cultural framework, Jewish identity was not merely ethnic but covenantal and enacted through practices such as circumcision, Sabbath observance, dietary laws, and participation in the temple system. To “do the Law” meant to live inside that identity. When Paul and the earliest apostles speak of “works,” especially in contexts like Galatians and Romans, they are drawing on this established Jewish vocabulary. They are not inventing a new concept of “works” but engaging an existing one that their contemporaries would have recognized as referring to concrete Torah-defined practices that marked out who was in and who was out of the covenant community.
What becomes distinctive in Paul is how he reinterprets that category in light of the Christ event. For him, the death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit have created a new mode of belonging to the people of God, one not bounded by the ceremonial and identity aspects of the Mosaic Law. When Paul argues that justification is not “by works of the Law,” he is saying that covenant membership is no longer established by those traditional identity-markers. Circumcision, food laws, and purity regulations no longer function as the boundary lines of God’s people, because faith in Christ and the Spirit’s transforming presence now define that community.
This shift does not imply that the Law was meaningless or that moral obedience is irrelevant. Rather, it reflects a change in how God’s covenant purposes are understood to be fulfilled. The early Christian movement, while deeply rooted in Jewish thought, came to see the Mosaic “works” — precisely those practices highlighted in Jewish discussions like those preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls — as provisional signs pointing toward a larger, more inclusive reality. In that sense, the apostolic use of “works” is best understood as an internal Jewish conversation reshaped by the conviction that God’s promises had reached their decisive fulfillment in Christ.
— AI-generated
