In the days of Jesus and of Paul the Jewish religion had become to all intents and purposes a religion of the Law, a religion of which the central feature was the observance of the statutes, the commandments, and the judgments once delivered to the people by the agency of Moses. The Law had indeed so far replaced the Temple at the heart of the Jewish faith that that faith was able to continue and endure, as a religion centred in the Law, even when the Temple had been destroyed. It was the Law that differentiated the Jew from his Gentile neighbours, and the Law was his pride and his glory. Yet it is against the Law that Paul delivers one of the most emphatic and sustained attacks in the entire corpus of his letters.