In continuity w/Second Temple Judaism (sort of)

There is no reason to think that Paul hereby sets himself in principled opposition to Second Temple Judaism. Although he criticizes a Jewish pride in the Law that is not matched by practice (2:17–29) and is no doubt aware of alternative construals of the Abraham story (4:1–2), he does not here present the Jewish tradition, or his fellow Jews, as wedded to a soteriology of “works” in contradistinction to “grace.” One can well imagine why many Jews (and not just Jews) would have found Paul’s perfection of divine incongruous gift theologically dangerous; Paul knows himself that this is so (3:8; 6:1). But there is nothing inherently “un-Jewish” about Paul’s theology on this matter: as we saw in Part II, he is part of a contemporary Jewish debate about the operation of divine mercy and gift. Within this debate, what is distinctive about Paul is not that he believed in the possibility of God’s incongruous grace, but that (a) he identified this phenomenon with a very specific event (the love of God in Christ), that (b) he developed this perfection for the sake of his Gentile mission (founding Jew-Gentile unity on novel terms), and that (c) he thereby rethought Jewish identity itself, tracing from Abraham onwards a narrative trajectory of the power of God that creates ex nihilo and acts in gift or mercy without regard to worth.—J. M. G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift, 491