Does righteousness come from following the Law?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The tension here runs along two seams at once: an intra-Pauline seam (Romans 2:13 versus Galatians 2:21) and a Luke-versus-Paul seam (Luke 1:6 versus Galatians 2:21). They must be kept distinct, because the first is largely harmonizable and the second is not.

Romans 2:13 states the principle plainly: "not the hearers of the law are just (dikaioi) before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified (dikaiōthēsontai)." In context (Romans 2:1-16) Paul is establishing divine impartiality — God judges Jew and Gentile by the same standard of deeds before he reaches the verdict of 3:9-20 that "all are under sin" and 3:23 that "all have sinned." The dominant Reformed harmonization, argued at length by Douglas Moo, reads 2:13 as a true-but-unrealized principle: the Law genuinely justifies its perfect doer, but since no one perfectly does it, the clause functions to drive every reader toward grace. This is exegetically defensible — the future passive dikaiōthēsontai sits inside a courtroom argument whose punch line is universal condemnation. On this reading Romans 2:13 and Galatians 2:21 do not contradict, because both deny that anyone is in fact justified by works of Torah. Galatians 2:21's logic — "if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died for nothing" — is the same coin from the other side: the cross presupposes that the Law could not deliver righteousness. So far the intra-Pauline material coheres, and the entry should concede this.

What does not dissolve is Luke 1:6. Luke describes Zacharias and Elisabeth as "righteous (dikaioi) before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless (amemptoi)." This is not hypothetical and not aspirational. Luke names two specific people and asserts, in the indicative, that they achieved blameless Torah-observance and were righteous before God on that basis. The vocabulary is deliberately Septuagintal — it echoes the description of Noah (Genesis 6:9) and Job (Job 1:1, amemptos) — and situates the couple squarely within the piety of Second Temple Judaism. Joseph Fitzmyer notes that Luke's infancy narrative is steeped in this Jewish-Christian idiom of covenant faithfulness. Luke simply does not share Paul's anxiety that Torah-keeping competes with the cross; for Luke, observant Jews can be and are righteous.

The deeper historical point comes from E. P. Sanders and the New Perspective. Sanders argued that Second Temple Judaism was not a religion of works-righteousness but of "covenantal nomism" — one entered the covenant by grace (election) and kept the commandments to remain within it. On this view Romans 2:13 and Luke 1:6 reflect the native Jewish framework, in which doing the Law and being righteous belong together. Paul's break, as James Dunn and N. T. Wright develop it, was not a critique of Jewish legalism but a Christological inference: because God acted decisively in Christ, the Torah could no longer be the boundary-marker of the people of God. Galatians 2:21 is the conclusion of that inference, not a premise derived from prior reflection on human moral incapacity. Hans Dieter Betz reads 2:21 precisely as the rhetorical climax of Paul's defense of his law-free gospel.

The upshot: the canon preserves two theological streams. The mature Paul forecloses Torah as a path to righteousness for Christological reasons; Luke, writing within a stream still comfortable with Jewish piety, affirms Torah-righteousness as a present reality. The intra-Pauline statements can be reconciled; the Lukan affirmation and the Pauline foreclosure cannot be fully integrated without flattening one author into the other.

Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable — the Pauline material coheres, but Luke and Paul represent unintegrated streams.