NOTES for Rom 3:10-12
Paul quotes a text from the Book of Psalms that speaks of universal sinfulness, of the fact that no righteous people remain on earth. These are rather allusions to certain passages from different psalms, so that it is impossible to find the passage cited by the apostle in the form in which it appears in the letter. Such allusions to well-known passages from the Book of Psalms, from the prophetic books, or even from the Pentateuch were not rare in rabbinic discussions.
Paul's main thought is clear: there are no sinless people in the world, and therefore there are no innocent people before God and the Torah. It is precisely the Torah that reveals a person's sinfulness; by it, according to the apostle, sin is known. Here Paul raises a very serious problem, relevant to those who walked the way of righteousness presupposed by the Torah, and above all the inner Torah. It was precisely the inner Torah, perceived and experienced by a person as a spiritual and moral imperative, that revealed to the seeker of the way his own insufficiency.
The Torah, perceived mainly or exclusively in an outward way, could create the illusion of something on which one could establish oneself by contrasting oneself with those who do not know or observe the Torah. But then the Torah is reduced to what the apostle calls "works of the Torah" or "works of the Law," to what we would today call religious duties. And then, of course, the Torah becomes for those who follow it an exclusively religious phenomenon.
Paul, however, speaks of something else. He speaks of the inner Torah and of the spiritual path that following it presupposes. Here the issue is no longer religion. What matters here is to relate each step, each intention, to the inner Torah as to a system of God's intentions opened to a person. This is spiritual work, reducible to no religious practice. But precisely the attempts to relate one's will in its concrete manifestations to equally concrete manifestations of God's will reveal to a person his imperfection.
It turns out that doing this is not at all simple, even with every desire: the will of fallen humanity does not obey a person nearly so easily, and a fallen person cannot even simply track all his intentions, not to mention becoming aware of them. And no "works of the Torah," no religious practice, and no outward religious activity can help a person here. If only because all such practice and any such activity touch only the surface of the human person, the periphery of his existence. But the way of righteousness corresponding to the Torah requires deep changes.