ABSTRACT
Circumcision in the flesh was a sign of the covenant between God and Abraham. The Apostle to the Gentiles appears to take the risk of arguing that the pre-Mosaic justification of the Gentile Abraham is by faith as such rather than faithfulness to the covenant of circumcision. For Paul, this ritual was the seal of righteousness based on faith, understood as sheer trust in God's promises. Paul was in the position of 'moderate' Muslims who can find little scriptural basis for their proposed reforms of classical Islam while their conservative counterparts have countless texts to hand. The reformers, like the Devil, must sometimes distort texts while pretending to merely interpret them for the novel contexts of a new age. Paul links the claim that faith and works yield salvation and self-righteousness respectively with the traditional Jewish view that Jews were under the curse of exile.
