"... Nowhere does Paul, in his exposition of this scheme, mention Solomon, Jeroboam, or Zedekiah. He does, though, mention David, in a very similar fashion to MMT C25f. In Romans 4.6–8, he cites David in support of his primary contention, that the family of Abraham is marked out by faith, not works of Torah. David, he says, speaks of the blessing that comes on one to whom God ‘reckons righteousness apart from works’, and he quotes Psalm 31.1 (LXX) to prove the point: in the Psalm, David speaks of forgiveness, of God not ‘reckoning’ or calculating one’s sin ... What, then, is Paul attacking under the label ‘works of the law’? Not, we must insist, what one might call proto-Pelagianism, the belief that one must earn one’s justification and salvation by unaided good works. Nor, we note, is he attacking the idea that true religion is about outward observances rather than inward attitudes. That caricature of Paul has become so popular that Paul is still sometimes criticised as though he had anticipated Luther, or even Kant. But nor, more importantly for the present discussion, is he attacking the sort of extra-biblical halakoth which feature in most of MMT: detailed commands concerning animal fetuses, observing certain purity laws relating to streams of liquid, and so on ... Rather, Paul is denying that the basic biblical commands, which in his day were the most obvious defining marks of Israel over against the nations, are of any continuing relevance in defining the true people of God, the people in and for whom the promises of Deuteronomy, and for that matter the promises to Abraham, were now coming true ..."