Cynthia Briggs Kittredge
The Letter to the Romans, the latest and longest of Paul’s undisputed letters, was written from Corinth in about 55 CE to the church in Rome, the capital and center of the Roman Empire. Adapting the conventions of letter writing and employing ancient rhetorical techniques, Paul writes to those who share the faith of Jesus Christ, and throughout the letter he invokes a story of God, the Creator, and the people of Israel that is well known by those to whom he writes. In the argument of Romans, Paul displays dramatically the results and implications of Jesus Christ for the story of God and the people of God. As throughout the New Testament writings, the Scriptures of Israel are the primary fund for Paul’s imagination and language in Romans. The first part of Romans (1–8) claims, presents, and elaborates the effects of the death and resurrection of Christ and participation in it through baptism. Romans 9–11 treats the question of the role of Jews and gentiles in the plan of God, and the third part (12–16) exhorts the congregation to a transformed pattern of life.
Another apostle evangelized and established the church in Rome. The first followers of Jesus interpreted his resurrection as God’s vindication of a faithful human being and came to understand Jesus as Messiah. Gradually the community around Jesus, which had begun as a popular Jewish movement, spread the “good news” of the crucified Messiah to the cities of the Greco-Roman world, where the message was received by the gentiles. As faith in Jesus as the Messiah, the culmination of Israel’s hopes, shifted from a Jewish sectarian context to a majority non-Jewish one, many questions about identity and practice arose. Central was the question of the role of the Torah, or Jewish law, for those in the new movement. The New Testament writings witness in different ways to the disputes and debate about observance of the law, relationships with governments, and organizations of households. Paul, as preacher and writer of letters, came to have a significant role in the ultimate resolution of these issues, both in his own time and in the decades that followed his ministry.
Paul writes the letter to the church at Rome, where he has not preached, to build and strengthen his ties with them as he prepares to deliver the collection of offerings from gentile churches to Jerusalem, the home of the church and the symbolic origin of the gospel. Paul seeks their support as he plans for his mission to Spain. The focus of energy in Romans is the relationship of gentiles and Jews in the plan of God, a subject central to Paul’s understanding of his identity and his vocation, essential to the well-being of the community, and of ultimate significance for salvation.
Biblical scholars reconstruct the occasion of the letter and Paul’s reasons for writing from clues within the letter itself, especially the information in the opening and closing (Rom. 1:8–15; 15:22–33). One ancient source outside the letter (Suetonius, Life of Claudius) appears to refer to the expulsion of the Jews from Rome under the emperor Claudius. On the basis of this passage, it is conjectured that perhaps the return of Jesus-believers of Jewish origin to the community of gentile believers, who now dominated in the Roman house churches, may have caused discord that Paul addressed in the exhortation to forbearance in Romans 14.
Paul, the writer of the letter to Rome, understands himself as an apostle, called to the work of preaching the gospel to the gentiles. (Paul describes his call in Gal. 1:11–12.) The “gospel” or “good news” (euangelion) is that Jesus, the Messiah, is the culmination of God’s plan to bless all nations through Israel, to rescue the world from sin, and to re-create it to its original glory. The conviction that God, the Creator, was the God of all people originated in the exile and is expressed in the prophetic writings of Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40–54). Paul, a Pharisee who had previously been zealous to oppose those Jews who believed Jesus to be God’s anointed one, was called to preach Jesus as Messiah.
At the same time, many others who followed Jesus read the Scriptures together and enacted the story of his death and resurrection in worship. Multiple strands of speculation about divine redeemer figures whom God would send to bring justice or to save the faithful are found in the Hebrew Bible and texts from the Second Temple period (Nickelsburg). However, the execution of the Messiah was not recognized as a conventional part of the script. In the patterns of death and resurrection and exile and restoration within Israel’s Scriptures, believers in Jesus found metaphors and images to interpret their own lives and the lives of the nations. Jesus’ faithfulness and his death as “sacrifice of atonement” (Rom. 3:25) come to represent the righteousness of God and God’s promise of salvation for all. Understanding Romans in its ancient context requires placing it within the shared symbolic universe of the early Christian tradition, furnished with the stories and images from Israel’s Scriptures. In order to appreciate the resonance of its language and concepts, it is also necessary to read it in dialogue with the political rhetoric of the Roman Empire, which also declared good news and the coming of rulers who promised peace.
Paul’s Letter to the Romans in the Interpretive Tradition
Interpretation of Paul’s Letter to the Romans has had enormous impact on Christian theology throughout history. Placed at the head of the canon of Paul’s letters, theologians have read Romans as a systematic theology, as the singular apostle’s last will and testament. Christian theologians and exegetes have read the dualistic rhetoric concerning Jews and gentiles in the letter as representative of real, historical Jews, as opposed to “Christians,” those believers with whom Paul identifies. The antipathy toward “works righteousness,” that is, the idea that one can “earn” salvation through effort, good works, or obedience to the law, is prominent in Christian theologies and finds its support in Romans (Rom. 4:1–25; 9:30–33). The polemic of the Reformers that caricatured the Jew, based on the language of Romans, as obsessed with “works righteousness” contributed to the antisemitism in Europe that was complicit in the Holocaust (Ruether; Carroll). Aware of the violent historical effects of the anti-Jewish reading of Romans and informed by more accurate depictions of Second Temple Judaism (Sanders), contemporary interpreters of Romans read the letter within the variegated landscape of Jewish practice and belief of the first century. Biblical scholars seek to interpret Romans with the categories of first-century thought and in terms of the shared cultural language of the time, rather than with anachronistic categories of Judaism and Christianity and concepts of individual salvation (Stowers). In Paul’s context, they argue, the question of God’s dealings with Jews and gentiles would have been in the foreground. Recent attention to the context of Romans in the Roman Empire has highlighted the ways Paul uses and subverts imperial language and patterns of thought (Wan 2000; Elliott 2008). When Romans is read intertextually with literature of the Roman Empire, new emphases and themes emerge. The rediscovery of the Roman Empire as a context for reading Romans coincides with a self-consciousness about the imperial context of North American biblical interpretation.
Romans in Contemporary Discussion
The transition from reading in the context of the “introspective conscience,” that is, in terms of a modern psychological reading, to reading the letter in the historical context of Jewish and Christian self-definition has offered new ways for interpreters to engage with the rhetoric and politics of the letter (Stendahl 1963). Focus on Jews and gentiles, on peoples or communities with whom God is in relation, suggests analogies with “peoples” in the present with whom God is in relationship. How can Romans 9–11 be put into conversation with the conflicting faith claims in the world? Within Paul’s wrestling with the fate of Israel and the nations in the comprehensive plan of God, is there a conviction about God’s commitment to all peoples? Within the apocalyptic framework that sees the whole creation groaning as divine purposes work themselves out (Romans 8), there are resources for thinking theologically about ecology and the fate of the earth (McGinn). Paul’s language about the power of sin over human beings and within systems is one powerful, first-century diagnosis of those who have been oppressed by sinful systems (Tamez). Paul’s counsel to this community to live in a way that does not conform to the world but that requires transformation of values might be read as instruction to Christian people in the present who are negotiating life in a complex and pressured culture. The letter’s focus on mission, the trajectory of the gospel to the whole world, and God’s ultimate plan to save all people has been read in light of mission in the contemporary world (Jewett).
The attempt to read Romans in its historical context has been fruitful for theological reflection. It has identified the anti-Jewish impact of the previous tradition of interpretation and the limitations of an individualistic focus. At the same time, reading Romans with its own categories and concepts raises difficult questions about how to “translate” the vision of God and humanity from its social and historical context in the first century into a culture with radically different categories of thought and modes of imagination.
Romans 1:1–17: Paul Introduces Himself and the Gospel
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
In densely packed phrases, Paul conveys how he understands his role. The “gospel of God,” for which he is set apart, is continuous with the promises made by the prophets in the Holy Scriptures. Paul’s own call is that of a “servant,” or literally a “slave,” of Jesus Christ. He quotes a traditional confession of faith that may have been valued by the church at Rome (1:3–4) that Jesus was “declared” or installed as Son of God at his resurrection. In tension with other statements in Paul’s letters that assert that Jesus was equal to God from the time of creation (Phil. 2:6–11), this formula gives another perspective on Jesus’ sonship—that it was revealed in his resurrection. The resonant term, “servant,” connotes both humility and honor and evokes the suffering servant figure of Second Isaiah. Paul’s purpose, given to him through Jesus Christ, is “to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles” (1:5). Although in the modern period faith has come to mean assent to a particular truth claim, here pistis describes an attitude and way of being that encompasses loyalty and trust. “Faithfulness” is a closer translation. Romans asserts God’s faithfulness (3:3), cites the faithfulness of Jesus, and urges faithfulness as the path for gentile followers of Jesus. Those to whom he writes are also “called” to be God’s holy people (Rom. 1:6–7).
After the greeting of “grace” and “peace,” Paul thanks those in Rome, praises their faith, asserts his unceasing prayers, and expresses his wish to visit them. Just as he has reaped a harvest among the rest of the gentiles, so he wishes to proclaim the gospel to those in Rome. When he states that their faith is known throughout the world, Paul reflects the importance and centrality of Rome in the ancient empire. He explains his unfulfilled desire to visit in order to build a relationship as well as to recognize their independence from him. As he began his self-introduction with a summary of the gospel (Rom. 1:2–4), so he concludes his greeting to the church with another definition of the gospel (Rom. 1:16–17). This summary makes sense within the apocalyptic perspective of the letter: that in Jesus, God’s plan for the fulfillment of history is nearing its finale. God’s judgment is at hand. “Salvation” denotes the rescue of the world from negative judgment and death. God’s rescue will encompass the Jew first and also the Greek.
For Paul and his contemporaries, the categories of Jew and gentile organized the world. Throughout Romans, Paul will argue for both the priority of the Jew and for the inclusion of the gentile. The word “gospel” (euangelion) is used in the prophets to speak of the coming of God (Isa. 40:9; 41:27; 52:7; 60:6; 61:1) and in political imperial rhetoric to refer to the victory of a ruler. The gospel reveals the “righteousness” of God, or God’s “justice.” The root of the Greek word translated “righteousness” is the word meaning “just,” or “justice.” Through Jesus Christ God is “making right” the relationship between humans and God. Faith, or faithfulness, is the criterion for salvation. Human faith reflects God’s faithfulness. Using the conventional formula for citing Scripture, Paul quotes the prophet Habakkuk. In its original context in Hab. 2:4, faith expressed Jewish solidarity in the face of adversity (Nanos 2011). A better translation, noted in the NRSV margin, is “the one who is righteous by faith will live.” Righteousness through faith makes life possible. The “righteous one” may also be an allusion to Christ, understood to be the ultimate example of faithfulness to God.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
Beginning with Augustine and interpreted by Martin Luther, “faith” in 1:16–17 came to be understood as individual “belief.” “Faith” was internal assent to a proposition about Jesus as Son of God. As such, faith was what defined a Christian and what was required for the individual to be “saved.” This understanding of “faith” continues to dominate in Christian communities who characterize themselves as “evangelical” and who require an experience of “conversion.” The sequence of “the Jew first and also the Greek” has been the basis for influential schemes of “salvation history.” Dependent on the narrative in Luke-Acts, this construction of the story of the early church imagines that the gospel was offered to Jews first, who rejected it, then given to gentiles instead. The implication of this scenario—that the Jews have surrendered their role as the people of God in favor of the church—does not recognize Judaism as an ongoing religion of faithful people in relationship with God. Recent interpreters of Romans have disputed this conclusion and the exegesis on which it is based. Mark Nanos argues that Paul addressed Romans solely to gentiles and that for Paul, the covenant with God through Torah remained intact for Jews (Nanos 1996).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Contemporary interpreters of Romans have recontextualized Paul’s language in the first-century discussion about Jewish and Christian identity and self-definition, rather than in terms of modern categories of faith and individual salvation. Within this first-century discussion, the obligation of Torah observance was the concrete expression of God’s covenant with Israel and the definition of Israel’s identity. As a nuanced understanding of the complexity of Judaism in the first century has grown, it has become more and more difficult to make easy analogies between categories in Romans and parties or positions in the time of the contemporary interpreter. Readers of Romans have been confronted with the distance between the ancient and contemporary contexts (Gager), and in some ways, this cultural gap has made interpretation more difficult. However, the recovery of the centrality and priority in the letter of the salvation of peoples, Jews and gentiles, rather than of individuals, has drawn renewed attention to the corporate nature of faith and the impact of the good news on society and nations. Rereading faith as “faithfulness” broadens the practical nature of faith into an orientation of one’s whole being rather than a single act of assent. When “justice” is understood as the root of “justification,” then the impact of the good news goes beyond the status of individuals and affects the network of relationships in society.
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
In a highly structured argument, Paul illustrates how the gospel solves the deadly dilemma of human sin that is shared alike by Jew and gentile. Because sin would prevent any and every person from being declared just at the time of God’s judgment, in order to be justified and therefore “saved” or “redeemed,” God put forward Jesus Christ as “a place of atonement” (3:25, alternate NRSV reading). The effectiveness of Jesus Christ is compactly summarized in the climax of this section, 3:21–26. Leading up to the dramatic summary of the solution, Paul lays out an extended presentation of the problem: an exposition of the evil of gentiles and then of Jews. Paul and other Jews in the Hellenistic world understood that the law, given to the Jews by God as part of the covenant, was a powerful means of dealing with sin by offering a way to live righteously in accordance with the will of God (Stowers). As he does throughout Romans, Paul argues against the possibility that the law is an adequate solution for sin. He simultaneously wants to maintain the particular and unique relationship of the Jewish people with God and uphold the value of the law, while at the same time arguing that any reliance on the law or on religious identity in an exclusive way will result in failure.
Romans 1:18–32 depicts the evil of those gentiles who do not possess the law, but are able to know God through observation of the creation. Popular philosophers of Paul’s time contended that God could be perceived through the natural order. Although they know better, gentiles do not honor God, but worship idols in the form of people and animals. Because of their idolatry, God “hands over” these people (the verb is used three times) to behavior that epitomizes lack of control and chaos, including to “lusts of their hearts” (1:24), “degrading passions” (1:26), and a “debased mind” (1:28). The epitome of disorder is the women’s exchange of natural intercourse for unnatural and men’s surrender of natural intercourse for passion for one another. In the construction of gender in the ancient world, sexual intercourse reflected the power relationship between male and female. In this arrangement, males were active and females passive (Brooten 1996). The asymmetrical pattern was built into “nature” and into God’s creation. When humans fell into idolatry, wrong worship, the result is the violation of these gender patterns. The description of disorder and lack of control is meant to evoke horror.
Paul addresses a question to “you,” a person who is judging others (2:1). Asking a rhetorical question to an imaginary opponent is a feature of the diatribe, a form of discourse used by Greek philosopher rhetoricians of Paul’s time. Paul asserts that the self-righteous will be judged for their sinful deeds as well. Possession of the law, while a gift, does not prevent sin; it only makes it more visible. Because of sin, God’s wrath and fury are the inevitable fate of all. A series of quotations from Scripture is the climax of Paul’s portrait of universal sinfulness and its dire consequences (3:9–18). The portrayal of the inescapable plight reaches its turning point in 3:21. Now, without reference to the law, God’s righteousness is “through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” The Greek genitive phrase translated to mean faith “in Jesus Christ” may also be translated to mean the faithfulness of Jesus, his trust in God exhibited in his life, which discloses God’s righteousness. God has created a way for humans to be made right with God, justified, and judged righteous that is available equally to “all.”
Images that describe how God’s rescue is accomplished come from the worship and language of the early Jesus believers. “Redemption” is a metaphor that comes from the context of slavery and refers to the freeing of a person who is held hostage. God put forward Christ Jesus as a hilastērion, a “sacrifice of atonement” or “place of atonement” or “mercy seat.” This term refers to an element in the ritual on the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16:3–15). In using this term, Paul alludes to a wider network of meaning that is not explained here but that makes a metaphorical connection between the death of Jesus and the ritual of atonement. While God overlooked sins committed in the past, at this present time, he shows himself to be righteous and makes righteous the one who has faith in Jesus or who has the faith of Jesus (3:26).
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
Paul’s affirmation that gentiles can know God through the “things he has made” expresses the belief, shared by Stoic popular philosophy, that the order that inheres in all created things reflects a divine order. In the history of interpretation and the development of doctrine these verses have been the locus for development of “natural theology,” the idea that nature teaches the order of God. Paul’s description of the consequences of idolatry, God’s surrendering humans to the chaos of their passions and the exchange of what is natural for what is unnatural, continues to be read as the condemnation in Scripture of homosexuality for women and for men. The horror that the passage is meant to evoke in its ancient context echoes and amplifies the misunderstanding and suspicion of sexual relationships between same-sex couples that has been widespread in culture since that time. This passage gives cultural abhorrence of homosexuality scriptural legitimation. Caricatures of Jewish judgmentalism and hypocrisy as well as gentile debauchery and depravity have remained powerful and harmful throughout history. Paul’s statement that “a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart—it is spiritual and not literal” (2:29) has led to the spiritualization of the identity of Jew and gentile as symbolic categories, rather than as real historical peoples. Influential theologies of the atonement that explain how Christ’s death is a sacrifice for sin have been based in the language of hilastērion in this passage.
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Contemporary interpreters have grappled with how to translate the teaching and proclamation of these verses into the worldview and symbolic universe of the present. For example, many question the ancient understanding that the order of active male superiority and passive female subordination is woven into creation. Ideas about gender have changed over time in interaction with culture and religion. In more and more societies, equality of men and women is a fundamental value. Therefore, the logic of the text that understands same-sex intercourse to be a violation of this natural order and therefore an apt example of the consequences of idolatry is no longer accepted. For those who hold more traditional views about the relationship of male and female, its logic remains convincing.
Paul’s argument depicts the universal sinfulness of all and the human need for salvation. He condemns self-righteousness and judgment of others on the basis that all sin. Just as sin is not limited to any one group of people, neither is God’s salvation. Paul affirms that God’s salvation is totally inclusive, of both Jew and gentile. As “justification by faith” came to mean that believing in Jesus was necessary for salvation, “faith” or lack of faith became the new dividing line between people and drew a boundary for God’s mercy. However, when faith is reconceived as “faithfulness” and as “trust” modeled on the faithfulness of Jesus, it becomes a holistic orientation that might be mutually understood by Jews and Christians. Faithfulness comprises righteous action and works within the expanse of God’s righteous judgment. In Rom. 1:18–32 idolatry is the chief cause of chaos and misery for human beings. While sexual immorality may be more easily recognized, idolatry is ultimately more destructive. Christian readers of this text might ask how to identify idolatrous worship in their own communities and reorient themselves to God.
Romans 4:1–25: Abraham Is Ancestor of Jews and Gentiles
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
The story of Abraham (Genesis 12–17) provided Second Temple Jews with Scripture from which to draw lessons, preach, and on which to elaborate. In other Jewish writings from this period, Abraham represents a great hero of monotheism, the first Jewish convert from paganism, and the epitome of obedience to Torah. In the New Testament, the author of the Epistle of James extols Abraham as an exemplar of justification by works when he offered his son Isaac (James 2:21).
Paul interprets the Genesis story with his own questions in mind. Developing the question about Jewish identity and circumcision that he raised in 3:1, and offering additional support to his claim in 3:29 that the one God is the God of gentiles as well as Jews, Paul presents Abraham as a model of one who is justified by faith. In this argument, Abraham becomes the spiritual father or ancestor of the gentiles, the people who are symbolically incorporated into his lineage.
Paul employs conventional Jewish techniques of scriptural commentary and argument and builds his commentary around scriptural quotations: Gen. 15:6 (cited in Rom. 4:3, 22); Ps. 32:1–2 (Rom. 4:7–8); Gen. 17:5 (Rom. 4:17); and Gen. 15:5 (Rom. 4:18). He explores the text of Gen. 15:6 from different angles to illustrate the theme, “We know that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law” (3:28). Paul plays on the word “reckoned” throughout this part of Romans, first using it in the context of payment to contrast righteousness that comes as wages with that which comes as a gift (3:28; see 3:24). Paul uses the verb “reckon” again in 4:6, citing Ps. 32:1–2 as a second corroborating scriptural support. Paul next argues that Abraham, the patriarch whose covenant with God was represented by the sign of circumcision, actually was “reckoned” righteous before his circumcision (4:9–10). The account of the sign of circumcision in Gen. 17:10–11 occurs after God’s “reckoning” of righteousness to Abraham (in Gen. 15:6); therefore, Paul argues, Abraham was to be made the ancestor also of all who are not circumcised, but who follow his example of faith.
God’s promise to Abraham that he would be made a great nation (Gen. 12:2) and “the father of many nations” (Gen. 17:5; Sir. 44:19–21) came through faith and rests on grace. The scriptural promise, “I have made you the father of many nations” (Gen. 17:5), is interpreted to mean that Abraham’s descendants include all who share his faith. The God in whom Abraham believes, who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence things which do not exist,” is the God of resurrection and creation. Abraham’s faithful response to God’s promise is elaborated in a short vignette portraying his “hoping against hope,” his consideration of his own nearly dead body and Sarah’s barren womb. He grows strong and gives glory, thus depicting the ideal heroic exemplar of faith. Paul’s argument closes with the repetition of the thematic verse and a claim that the words of Scripture “it was reckoned to him” were written not only for his sake but for “ours also,” referring to the audience of Romans. The concluding formula is likely an early Christian creedal statement summarizing the belief “in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:24–25).
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
New Testament evidence shows Abraham to have been a major figure of exegetical and theological speculation for Christian writers (see James 2:21–23; 1 Pet. 3:6; and Hebrews, passim). Abraham’s wife Sarah and slave Hagar figure in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians as mothers of the slave and the free child, of Mount Sinai and Jerusalem (see Gal. 4:21–31). Later, Protestant theologians understood Abraham to be the representative of justification by faith in opposition to works righteousness, which they regarded as characteristic of the Roman Catholicism they opposed. John Calvin was concerned with questions about Paul’s exegesis of the Abraham story that preoccupied his own forebears and contemporaries. These included how to reconcile Paul’s portrait of Abraham’s faith with his laughter in response to God’s promise of a son (Gen. 17:7) and how to resolve the apparent contradiction between Paul’s and James’s exegesis of the Abraham story. As all exegetes do, the sixteenth-century interpreters looked to the biblical text to address their pressing theological questions (Steinmetz).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Contemporary scholarship sees Paul’s argument here within the context of Jewish styles of biblical exegesis in the first century. Extrabiblical and legendary traditions about Abraham’s adventures and virtues show the variety and fluidity of scriptural commentary. When Paul constructs the argument that Abraham is the father of both Jews and gentiles, we see theology built up out of story and patterns within God’s activity. The presence of other versions and variations within the New Testament in James, Hebrews, and Galatians testifies to the creativity of early Christian theology. The emphasis of scholarly commentators is no longer to harmonize the statements of different New Testament authors or to arrive at one consistent reading of the accounts of Abraham in Genesis.
The negative contrast Paul sets up between being justified by works and justified by faith has been read by Christians to denigrate both ancient and modern Judaism. Recently scholars have corrected that historically inaccurate portrait of Jewish belief and practice. By reading Romans 4 within the context of Second Temple Judaism, contemporary scholarship understands that Paul is not arguing for the replacement of Israel by the church or contrasting grace and faith with the negative foil of the law. Rather, he is finding, within the story of God in Torah, grounds for gentiles being included in God’s promises.
Keen awareness of the function of gender in the text and the role of gender in the culture causes some readers to note that Sarah does not play a role as an active agent of faith here in Romans as she does in Hebrews 11 and in Galatians 4 (Trible and Russell). God’s sacrifice of his Son Jesus on the cross is able to rearrange genealogical relationships and make gentiles into the patrilineal line of Abraham (Eisenbaum).
Romans 5:1–21: Christ’s Gift of Righteousness Brings Life
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
In Romans 5–8, Paul elaborates the results of justification that were summarized in Rom. 3:21–26. The section begins and ends with an affirmation of the love of God (5:5; 8:39). Paul speaks of justification with the parallel images of “having peace with God” and “being reconciled to God,” metaphors that have their meaning in the context of warfare and conflict. The audience of Romans would have recognized the echoes of imperial rhetoric that claimed the peace of the Pax Romana as the benefits gained by the emperor (Georgi). Here, however, the peace is gained not through the perpetration of violence. Rather it is Jesus’ death (“through his blood”), not on behalf of the righteous, but on behalf of the unrighteous, that is the means of peace and the way to be saved.
In Paul’s anthropology, boasting is a characteristic human activity. Boasting and being ashamed are part of the language of honor and shame typical of Greco-Roman culture (Jewett). For a Christian, it is what one boasts about, and on what basis, that matters. While Paul criticizes boasting in 2:17; 3:27; 4:2, here boasting is celebrated as positive and justified. Here the speakers, “we,” who are made right with God through faith, as Abraham exemplified in the previous example, may boast in hope and because we are saved from God’s wrath (5:3, 11). The phrase “glory of God” alludes to the story of Adam in Genesis (Gen. 1:26–28; Ps 8:5–8), whose transgression caused him to lose the glory of God that he possessed. The sequence of virtues, linked in a chain-like structure, culminates in God’s love.
Paul explains how this salvation works through a comparison of Adam and Christ, two corporate figures, men who represent humanity. As a “type” of the one to come, Adam is parallel to Christ, who will rectify the damage caused by Adam’s trespass. Paul retells the story of humanity as a sequence of reigns, each dominated by a different ruler. Each ruler personifies the quality of the age and tyrannizes his subjects, here as either death or life. While death, the result of Adam’s sin, rules in Adam, through Christ those who have been given the gift of righteousness will rule in life. The verb to exercise dominion (basileuein) is translated in the NRSV as both “rule” and “reign.” In extrabiblical literature, Adam is held responsible for human death (4 Ezra 3:7; Wis. 2:23–24). While Paul’s Jewish contemporaries would have understood the giving of the law through Moses to rectify this deadly situation, in the story Paul tells, the law plays a role as a minor character (5:13, 20) that increases the trespass. While the two figures of Adam and Christ are parallel, and one’s action cancels the other, Paul stresses how much greater is the gift of Christ. The increasing and abounding of grace leads to eternal life.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
Augustine found in Rom. 5:12 the locus of the doctrine of original sin that he developed from the phrase eph’ hō, “in whom.” Arguing against his theological adversaries the Pelagians and the Manicheans, Augustine diagnosed the fact of original sin in the human person as a child of Adam. Sin was propagated through Adam to all subsequent descendants, passed down by parents to their children. The baptism of infants, he argued, was necessary to cleanse them from sin. Luther radicalized Augustine’s notion of original sin, elaborating that “all humanity sinned with Adam in Adam’s sin.” Original sin, according to Luther, is “complete lack of righteousness in all the parts of a person, and a predisposition to commit evil, a loathing of what is good, a delight in what is evil” (Reasoner, 49). Augustine and Luther’s reading of this part of Romans has profoundly shaped church teaching and Western culture. On the other hand, historical-critical biblical scholars contend that, read in its context, Rom. 5:12 is an incomplete sentence that serves only as the basis for showing the parallel figure of Christ and the positive benefits of Christ’s death for human beings to reign in life. As we have seen with other parts of Romans, the history of interpretation emphasizes one part of this passage strongly, while biblical scholars see Paul’s emphasis elsewhere.
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Paul uses a variety of terms for salvation that are at home in different semantic settings. Here the metaphors for salvation, synonyms for justification, have their meaning in the setting of warfare and conflict. The rhetoric of this passage can be read as disguised commentary on the language of pacification and imposition of peace of the Pax Romana (Elliott 2008; Georgi). In the language of domination and rule, interpreters have seen an apt description of the way in which political and economic systems dominate human life in the present. Focus on imperial language in Romans has alerted interpreters to the contemporary imperial context of interpretation. Paul’s mythological scenario might be translated into the present as analogous to global capitalism or globalization (Elliott 2008). The dramatic totalizing language of ruling, “exercising dominion,” is apt for the reality of these systems of power. Attending anew to Paul’s language of corporate connection and corporate identity can act as an antidote to commonplace assumptions about individualism in contemporary culture. The solidarity of sin in Adam is overcome by a parallel, yet superior “solidarity in grace” through Christ. Jesus “represents the weakness of God and thus the dominion of grace, the sole form of dominion befitting both humanity and God” (Georgi, 100).
Romans 6:1–23: United to Christ in Death and in Resurrection
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
The argument is advanced with a rhetorical question from an imaginary dialogue partner (6:1). The question appears to draw a conclusion from 5:20: if sin increases and grace abounds all the more, does that mean that one should continue to sin? Paul introduces and expands on narratives of baptism and enslavement to show that the free gift of justification does not give believers license to sin, nor does it cause sin to be impotent. Rather, sin still flourishes as a power with which to contend and not surrender. Paul personifies sin as a ruler, who exercises dominion, rules (basileuein), and who demands allegiance. Paul and his audience understand that those who undergo the rite of baptism into Christ are participating in the narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection, a two-part movement of dying and rising. Death is in the past and resurrection is still in the future, a hope and expectation. The association of baptism and death is made also in Mark 10:38–40 in Jesus’ response to the request of James and John for positions of honor. Jesus’ response shows that early believers linked baptism with the death of Jesus. Paul connects the death in baptism to the destruction of the body of sin. He concludes that those he addresses are, just as Jesus, dead to sin and alive to God.
The language of life and death and of freedom and slavery organize this passage, and the categories shift and reverse in the course of Paul’s argument. Death and slavery represent negative states that are reversed and overcome in the resurrection and baptism. The exception to this pattern is the conclusion of this passage, where slavery to righteousness is presented as the positive alternative to slavery to sin.
With the military imagery of weapons, Paul exhorts that bodies are to be employed as instruments of righteousness rather than as weapons of wickedness. As in 1:18–32, passions lead to danger and make one out of control. Sharp contrasts structure the argument: dead to sin/alive to God, not present to sin/present to God, not as instruments of wickedness/but instruments of righteousness, not under law/under grace.
In a response to another imaginary question (5:15), Paul uses the analogy of slavery to redescribe the human situation in relationship to Christ. The social world in which Paul lived was a slave society, and Paul used a familiar and extreme image to speak of the alternative between living in the rule of God or the rule of sin. Formerly slaves to sin, now those who are freed from it are slaves to righteousness. While slavery to sin means death (6:21), slavery to God means sanctification and eternal life. Here the alignment of freedom with life shifts to equate slavery to God with life.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
When slavery was a social institution thoroughly embedded in the fabric of society, as it was at the time of the writing of the New Testament, the instructions to slaves to obey their masters were read as Christian teaching about slavery. Because the Bible assumed the existence of slavery, readers who were not slaves concluded that slavery had divine support and approval. The prevalence of slavery in Christian Scripture and the fact that Paul and other authors did not unambiguously speak against it, made it possible to take slavery for granted and to see it as “natural.” However, as criticism of the practice of slavery increased within society, readers sought to use the Bible itself to critique the slavery texts within it. When those who were enslaved and their descendants read these scriptural texts, they put their experience of oppression into dialogue with their faith and drew the conclusion that God did not intend for those made in God’s image to be enslaved by others. The slave society offered the image of slavery, an apt metaphor for the tyrannical reign of sin (Tamez). On the basis of the conclusion of the passage in which “slaves of righteousness” is the positive alternative to “slaves of sin,” some have argued that freedom is not freedom in the modern sense, but enslavement to the proper master. Because there was no alternative to a state of spiritual enslavement, human existence is inevitably some form of obedience (Cranfield, 323; Hays 1996, 38–39, 390).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
The Bible’s historical role both to support slavery and to abolish it affects the way interpreters read the metaphors of slavery and their meaning in Romans 6. While slavery has been judged immoral by most contemporary societies, the enslavement of people by other human beings continues to be a political reality. “Human trafficking” and “sex trafficking” are the modern synonyms for slavery. Slavery is a state of “natal alienation” (Patterson) and remains the most extreme form of human mistreatment and violence. The spiritualization of slavery, its use as a metaphor, can direct attention away from its physical and bodily effects in real people’s lives (Glancy). The reality of physical slavery is masked by the metaphor. On the other hand, to describe sin as an enslaving power highlights sin’s total domination and indicates its evil results. The only effective opposition is “slavery” to God. While many interpreters have concluded from this passage that in a Christian perspective there is no state that is not obedience, others point to the images of freedom and equality in other parts of Paul’s letters (Schüssler Fiorenza; Kittredge 1998). The concentration of slavery language in Romans 6 raises for readers the ethical question: How is it possible to use the language of “ruling” that so permeates Romans without adopting and reinforcing structures of domination and subordination in the present?
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
Paul asserts the holiness and goodness of the law and at the same time insists that it has no positive role in the life of those in Christ. He makes an analogy with marriage. The law of marriage no longer pertains to a woman whose husband has died. Just as Paul’s analogies with slavery depend for their meaning on the existence of a slave society, so his use of marriage depends on the assumption of marriage in which the husband owns the wife and rules over her. A person “belongs” to Christ, as a wife “belongs” to her husband.
In denying that the law is sin (7:7), Paul employs the first-person pronoun to explain the relationship between sin and the law. With the “I,” Paul is not telling his own story but is using the rhetorical form of a “speech in character” to tell the experience of a typical human being. The story echoes the story of Adam in Genesis 2, who transgressed God’s commandment. Sin acts as the serpent (7:11). It alludes also to the story of the people of Israel who rebelled against God when they worshiped the golden calf (Grieb). Philo, a Jewish writer of the Second Temple period, wrote that covetousness or desire is the most basic sin, the source of all others. The dramatic description of the “I” who, because of indwelling sin, is unable to good, but only evil, has a parallel in the Dead Sea Scrolls: 1QS 3–4 identifies an evil impulse dwelling within the flesh that opposes God until God intervenes. Paul sees the person divided between mind and flesh and mind and members, one opposed to the other. In the scope of his argument, his statements about the law are subordinate in importance to the overall story of God’s victory in Jesus Christ, and the statements about human slavery are preparatory to the affirmation of freedom and life. The positive turn comes in 8:1, and Paul summarizes the climax of the story in 8:3–4, that God did what the law could not do, by sending his son, to overcome sin.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
The history of interpretation of Rom. 7:7–25 has focused on the identity of the speaker, the “I.” Augustine, contesting with Pelagius, in early writings argued that the “I” was the person before he/she was in Christ, later that it was Paul himself, and finally that it was the person after conversion who still struggled with sin. For Augustine, the text denied the perfectibility of the human person. The history of reading Romans 7 as an example of the “introspective conscience of the West” (Stendahl) began with Augustine, who first identified the “I” with his own youthful self who was unable to do good on his own. Martin Luther then identified with Paul, interpreted through Augustine, and saw his own overzealous conscience in Paul’s confession of helplessness over sin and the ineffectiveness of the law. The doctrine simul iustus et peccator (“at the same time justified and a sinner”) summarized his reading of Rom. 7:14–20 as a description of the Christian’s ongoing struggle with sin. Paul’s description of the bondage of the will and its interpretation in Christian theology has shaped Western views of the human self as incapable of achieving good. Calvin’s doctrine of “total depravity” is based on an interpretation of 7:14–21.
Interpreters have also made analogies between the “law” of Romans 7 and other aspects of human life: for Barth, the law was “religion” (Reasoner). When scholars began to read Paul with the cultural and religious milieu of his own time, rather than with the lenses of later Christian systematic theology, Romans 7 was read not as autobiographical but as “rhetorical reinforcement” of the larger argument of God’s saving purpose for Jews and gentiles. Here Paul was offering an apology for Torah, a defense of its essential goodness, rather than a condemnation. With this approach, Paul’s Letter to the Romans provided a New Testament model for imagining Christianity and Judaism, the descendants of the Torah-abiding Jews and Christ-believers in Romans, as both having a place in the purposes of God. Paul’s vision in Romans created the basis for cooperative and appreciative relationships between Christians and Jews in the present.
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Krister Stendahl and his followers succeeded in shifting scholars’ interpretations of Romans away from the internal psychological reading to a reading that saw the subject of the letter as the relationship between peoples of the world, Jews and gentiles, in God’s saving plan for the whole creation. In a world that had seen the murderous effects of antisemitism and hatred between peoples, the shift to a corporate understanding of Romans spoke eloquently and opened up avenues of dialogue and mutual understanding. However, the individualistic approach to Romans, that it is about the person’s helplessness under sin and the need for inner assent and conversion to Christ, remains popular in evangelical Christianity and influential in Christian belief in general. Read as an autobiographical confession, Paul’s story of “I do not do the good I want” resonates with contemporary people’s own experience. Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, names powerlessness over alcohol as the first step of recovery. The power of sin, personified as a tyrant, describes and diagnoses a reality that many experience. Conversion to Christ within a Christian context or dependence on a “higher power” in Alcoholics Anonymous is effective in opposing and overcoming the force of sin. Others have read Paul’s language about sin here to refer to systemic or corporate systems of oppression and enslavement that make “doing good” impossible. The challenge is how to translate the drama of Romans 7 into the contemporary context and find appropriate analogues to “sin,” “law,” the “good.”
Romans 8:1–8:39: Life in the Spirit
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
The argument that began in 5:1 culminates in 8:39, ending as it began on a note of “love.” In the scriptural world that supplies the imagery in this passage, God’s Spirit is present at creation, linked to the resurrection of Jesus, and given at baptism. History is envisioned as a battle between opposing forces, a struggle at the brink of its conclusion, which is the intervention of God. God’s judgment is imminent. Here Paul claims that in the action of Jesus Christ, those who participate in his death and resurrection through baptism will not be condemned, but will become children of God. “Law,” nomos, has various meanings here that range from the common, “rule,” to the specific, “Torah.” As in Romans 6–7, the primary opposition is between life and death, and secondarily between freedom and slavery.
In Rom. 8:3–4, Paul expresses how God succeeded in defeating sin, a task that the law failed to do, “by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.” After God’s defeat of sin, the choice is between two ways of living, “according to the flesh” or “according to the Spirit.” One is the way of life and the other the way of death. The ethical choice between two ways of behaving is modeled after Moses’ challenge in Deut. 11:26–28 to choose between blessing and curse. Here the choices appear as two “spheres of influence,” “reigns,” “realms,” or kingdoms. “Flesh” does not mean physical flesh, but is a term that signifies sin. The one who has faith has already been transferred from the realm of flesh/death to the realm of spirit/life because of the Spirit who dwells within the person. Romans 8:14–17 is a baptismal formula that uses the language of adoption and “sonship” to describe the relationship between God and those baptized/those believers/those in Christ. This relationship is opposed to the spirit of slavery, the antithesis of adoption and sonship. It allows the right of inheritance and the privilege of crying “Abba,” the name given by a young child to a father. Traditions about the exodus undergird this passage—the people of Israel are considered children of God whom God creates, elects, and delivers from slavery in Egypt. The redemption in Christ is parallel with the delivery of Israel in the exile. The tradition of Israel’s holy war funds these images of conquering and being children of God (Grieb).
Paul understands that the present time of suffering is part of the final struggle between the forces of good and evil that will culminate in victory for God. God’s purposes include not only human beings but also the whole creation, described as groaning with labor pains. This culmination is near, but still in the future, a glory for which we “long” and “wait.” Just as righteous Israel suffered in preparation for vindication by God, so those who are in Christ suffer as they await the “glory” about to be revealed. Paul’s confidence that God will prevail is summarized in the assertion “those he called, he justified.” In an allusion to Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, “who did not withhold his own Son,” Paul connects God’s giving up of Jesus with Abraham’s giving up of Isaac.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
The overarching oppositions set up in this passage between the realm of the spirit and the realm of the flesh, characteristic of apocalyptic literature and deriving from “the two ways tradition” in the Deuteronomistic history, has been interpreted to denigrate the body and the material world in favor of the nonbodily and “spiritual.” Appreciation of the origins of this oppositional language, and a nuanced understanding that what Paul means by “flesh” is not the physical body but is by definition the realm of sin, help readers to contextualize this dualism rather than universalizing or generalizing it. Romans 8:28–30 describes God’s relationship with the elect people of God in a stair-step sequence of verbs. In these verses, Paul has transferred the scriptural terminology for Israel, “called,” “chosen,” “sons,” onto those gentiles and Jews who follow Jesus (Reasoner, 86). While these verses originally referred to God’s relationship with the people Israel, Luther and Calvin understood them to refer to God’s choice of individuals for salvation. In the Protestant Reformation, theologians developed theologies of predestination of individuals from the verbs “predestined,” “foreknew,” and “called.” Liturgically, the acclamation of the inseparability of the faithful from God’s love is well known in burial services in both Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. Outside of their context in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, these verses—“neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come”—have become an expression of faith for those who grieve the death of a loved one. For those who see Romans 1–8 as the theological center of Romans, this exultant affirmation of the love of God is the letter’s “climax.”
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
The proclamation of freedom in Christ in Rom. 8:15–17 functions as a “canon within the canon” for many theologians of liberation. The inclusion of the whole creation in the cooperative struggle toward renewed relationship with God, described in poetic, apocalyptic language, provides a rich resource for readers who seek earth-affirming images in Scripture. The “groaning” of Rom. 8:22–23 evokes the cries of labor and the sounds of speaking in tongues (Stendahl 1976; McGinn). Feminist interpreters resist reading the language of flesh and spirit to create a mind-body or a male-female dualism. The transformation from “slaves” to “sons” and “heirs” describes the move from death to life and from slavery to freedom accomplished in baptism. The NRSV translation of huioi as “children” obscures its male referent and masks the patriarchal assumptions of the metaphors of adoption, sons, and heirs. At the same time, society’s customs around adoption are not merely reflected by the text, but challenged, as indicated by the use of teknoi, “children”—male and female alike (McGinn; Kittredge 2012). Responding to the theological and ethical questions raised by readers after the Holocaust and in the economic and ecological crises at the close of the twentieth century, contemporary readers have turned away from focus on theologies of God’s election of individuals and their promised salvation. Rather, interpreters have read Paul’s affirmations of God’s commitment to rescue the whole creation, and they have attempted to translate that faith into holiness of life in the present.
Romans 9:1–29: God’s Promises to Israel Are Sure
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
In Romans 9–11, Paul addresses the success of the gospel among gentiles and its rejection among the majority of Jews. The reversed relationship between Jews and gentiles calls into question the central role of God’s elect people and threatens confidence in God’s integrity. The stakes are high. In an extended argument that runs through these chapters, Paul draws on Scripture and on analogies from everyday life to speculate about what God is doing. In sending Jesus Christ, God has altered the overall plot of the story, but revised it in a way that makes sense with patterns of divine activity told in Scripture. The phenomenon of gentile acceptance of the gospel and Jewish rejection was an urgent and immediate challenge for Paul because it appeared to undermine the faithfulness of God. Paul’s defense of God takes the form of a lament, colored by emotionally charged accusations, questions, challenges, expressions of doubt, and fury, alternating with thanksgiving and praise (Grieb; Hays 1989). Paul uses the “I” pronoun to refer to himself as he identifies with his own people and protests God’s decisions. Paul affirms (9:4–5) that Israel possesses all the privileges and gifts of relationship with God and is the source of the Messiah.
In order to defend the word of God from an accusation of failure (9:6), Paul garners a series of arguments that depend on citation and analysis of different verses and images in Scripture. The first is that God specifies that it is through Sarah’s child that God names true descendants. The second is that Jacob was chosen over Esau, and the third is that God raises up Pharaoh to show his power and proclaim God’s name. The sovereign power of God to choose on whom to have mercy is asserted by this series of scriptural examples. Each one is tinged with irony, surprise, and reversal and emphasizes how God inexorably carries out God’s purposes (9:11). Paul upholds God’s justice and mercy (9:14) and at the same time asserts God’s freedom to act without regard to human expectations. Employing the image of God as the potter (Isa. 29:16; 45:9; Jer. 18:1–11; Wis. 15:7; Sir. 33:13), Paul asks a series of questions (9:19–24) that imply the absurdity of the human creation arguing with the Creator. Citing the words of the prophet Hosea, who speaks of God’s choosing Israel and calling her “my people” and “beloved,” Paul applies this election to Jews and gentiles. He cites Isaiah’s reference to a remnant and to “survivors” or “descendants.” Paul’s argument in 9:1–11:36 is a series of attempts to address the problem of God’s change of plan, and its conclusion is not reached until the end of chapter 11.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
When Romans was read as a treatise on Christian doctrine, it was Romans 1–8 that was considered the center of the letter while Romans 9–11 was considered a parenthetical topic of little importance for theologians (Reasoner). With the scholars of the new perspective, Romans 9–11 received renewed attention. While the question of the status of Israel had seemed settled and irrelevant for interpreters during the time when Christianity dominated as a sociopolitical force, it became a critical question in a new way for Christians after the Holocaust. Simultaneously, interest in the letter in its first-century context coincided with application to its contemporary context. Before the modern period, interpreters from Origen through Augustine and the Reformers were chiefly interested in the issue of election, “that God’s purpose of election might continue.” What is now understood in its historical context to have been an affirmation of God’s relationship with a people was then interpreted as applying to individuals who were predestined to salvation or damnation. Interpreters read the “objects of wrath” and the “objects of mercy” as referring to two groups of people, each predestined to salvation or damnation. Augustine in his later work developed a strong predestinarian reading of the text. Karl Barth disputed rigid determinism and talked about God’s purposes of election as being more general (Reasoner). Paul’s rhetoric about the irony of God’s choice and the stress on God’s mercy was taken in an absolute and literal sense to speak about the predetermined fate of individuals and their inability to change that status. Commentators who have tried to put this passage into its historical context have read this passage as an argument among Jews about the role of Israel’s covenant responsibility in God’s overall purpose (Nanos 1996).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
As the question of the ongoing status of the people of Israel was a critical theological issue for Paul, so the relationships between Christians and Jews after the Holocaust were urgent for biblical interpreters. Stendahl and others believed that Paul’s argument in Romans 9–11 might give clues to understanding how Jews and Christians can be conceived to coexist within the mystery of God. As theologians grapple with pluralism of faith traditions, the way Paul uses Scripture and analogies with ordinary life may provide a model for how to reflect on what God is doing in the world. The manner in which Paul creatively engages with Scripture in a christological perspective, and in a way that seeks patterns within its narratives, can be used as a model for Christian preachers and theologians who interpret Scripture in the present (Hays 1989).
Although this passage’s emphasis on the sovereignty of God appears to limit human choice and decision, the emphasis is not on human helplessness but on the mercy of God. While Paul mocks the idea that the pot would talk back to the potter, he himself is talking back to God out of an experience of anguish and making a bold and creative attempt to ascertain God’s purposes.
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
Opening the next stage of the argument with a rhetorical question, Paul contrasts gentile attainment of righteousness through faith with Israel’s lack of success. Paul uses the opposition of faith and works to explain the paradox that gentiles who did not strive succeeded, while those who did strive did not. Behind this explanation lies the metaphor of the footrace in which two runners “chase” (diōkein), “strive” or compete. A “stumbling stone” has tripped up one contestant and allowed the other to overtake. A quotation that combines Isa. 28:16 and Isa. 8:14–15 refers to God who lays a stone in Zion. In 1 Cor. 1:23 the word skandalon, “stumbling stone,” refers to Jesus Christ. Although the identity of the stone is left ambiguous here, Paul implies that Christ is the stone that is laid as an obstacle for Israel. The image of the footrace will be picked up again for further irony in 11:7–8.
In emotional language, appropriate for a lament (“heart’s desire”), Paul expresses his wish that Israel be saved. Their “zeal,” a quality Paul elsewhere attributes to himself (Phil. 3:6), misunderstands that righteousness through the law is not possible. “God’s righteousness” comes through Christ, as the next verse asserts. In the statement “Christ is the end of the law,” the word translated “end,” telos, can mean either “termination” or “goal.” “Goal” is the preferred interpretation: Christ is the “point” of the law as expressed in 3:21–26, “apart from the law” (3:21).
Employing a pesher style of scriptural interpretation in 10:5–13, Paul puts into opposition two quotations about the law, one from Lev. 18:5 and the other from Deut. 30:12–14. The text from Deuteronomy is used to interpret Leviticus. While Deuteronomy 30 in its original context asserts the nearness of the word so that the law could be done, here in Romans, by interspersing christological commentary into the quotation, Paul harnesses the original text to support the nearness of “the word of faith that we proclaim.” The lips and heart of the quotation now speak of the requirement of assertion of faith with lips and in heart. Paul quotes two more verses from Scripture: Isa. 28:16 and Joel 2:32. Together these texts assert no distinction between Jew and Greek, their sharing of the same Lord, and the availability of salvation to “everyone” who calls on the name of the Lord.
The reference to calling on the name of the Lord leads Paul to address the possible objection that Israel has not been given the opportunity to call on the Lord and to believe. With a sequence of linked phrases in which the second of two becomes the first of a second pair, “believed,” “heard,” and “proclaimed,” Paul presents a series of questions followed by scriptural quotations that demonstrate that God has provided Israel adequate opportunity to hear the good news. Isaiah 50–65 is the source of these quotations, passages where the prophet bewails the stubborn refusal of Israel to repent. Paul applies these prophetic critiques to the present situation of Jewish unbelief in Christ. Divine jealousy explains the current paradox. Deuteronomy 32:21 describes how the people’s idolatry causes God to be jealous. In turn, God incites jealousy among his own people by taking on others. Paul attributes this motivation to God to account for Israel’s unbelief.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
Paul’s reflection on the lack of success of his preaching of Jesus Christ to Israel, his own people, has been read by interpreters in their own historical context. They have understood Paul’s words to describe and to diagnose their present. Reading telos to mean “end” rather than “goal,” Marcion rejected the law as a whole. Others have cited this verse to support antinomianism. The Protestant opposition between faith and works, drawn from Paul and developed by Luther, has shaped Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism as being motivated by “zeal” and focused on selfishness. Interpreted psychologically, this opposition is understood to be egoism and pathology. When this argument in Romans is read universally or timelessly, “Israel’s unbelief” may be equated with ongoing Judaism, so that Judaism represents rejection of Jesus. For centuries, many churches derived from this interpretation of Romans 10 a mandate to convert Jews, but in the wake of the Holocaust many denominations worldwide have explicitly repudiated this view. So pervasive is this mapping of Paul’s rhetoric in Romans onto contemporary Judaism that it is invisible and unconscious for many Christians (Levine). For example, Paul’s christological interpretation of Deut. 30:12–14 has so defined the passage that Christian readers conclude that, for Jews, God is far away and must be sought across the seas, while for Christians, the word is near. The requirement of verbal confession and belief in the heart has become dominant in evangelical Protestantism as the necessary and critical action for conversion or salvation.
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Contemporary interpreters grapple with the legacy of distorted and negative caricatures of Judaism built on Paul’s rhetorical arguments about Israel and gentiles. Commentators see a sad irony that the portrait of Israel’s unbelief presented by the prophet Third Isaiah to his own people, within their common tradition, to woo them back to faithfulness, has here been taken up by the lips of Paul, enshrined in Christian Scripture, and applied as Christian condemnation of Jews in the present. The agony of Paul’s first-century commitment to his own people is lost in translation across history and context. Those who seek to read the letter in a way that honors its first-century context and still finds positive value as Christian Scripture attempt to understand Paul’s scriptural interpretation as selective and tendentious; they place it within a wider conversation of interpretation of Scripture in the Second Temple period. At the same time, they try to read it sympathetically and find in it a model for reading Scripture. Richard Hays, for example, suggests that Paul’s use of Scripture might provide a model of intertextual theological reflection for Christian readers (Hays 1989). Krister Stendahl developed the motif of “holy envy” to describe the ways that each religion envies the gifts of the other, and that envy is used by God for good (Landau).
Romans 11:1–36: The Restoration of Israel and the Inclusion of the Gentiles
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
In the final stage of the argument of chapters 9–11, Paul refutes the conclusion that might logically be drawn from the portrayal of the people of Israel as “disobedient and contrary” (10:21). He completes his attempt to explain how God is keeping God’s promises to Israel while drawing in the gentiles, by looking toward the future and imagining God’s future action. He picks up and elaborates in turn on a series of images and metaphors from Scripture: the prophet Elijah’s complaint and God’s response, the motif of hardening, the dough, the olive tree, and the apocalyptic motif of previously unrevealed mystery.
The aim is to warn against arrogance of gentiles toward Israel, an attitude that ironically may have been provoked by earlier parts of Paul’s argument. The lament continues with Paul citing himself and his own story. Implying a parallel between himself and Elijah, Paul recalls that God did not leave Elijah alone, but kept a remnant chosen by grace (1 Kgs. 19:18). This remnant is Paul’s community of believers, who will have a role with regard to the salvation/fate of the rest. Citing from Isa. 29:10 and Ps. 69:22–23, Paul claims that God has hardened those who have not accepted the gospel. Returning to the image of stumbling in the footrace, Paul implies that the stumbling is temporary, not permanent, and will make Israel jealous. Here Paul uses again a “how much greater” argument (pollō mallon, see Romans 5) to predict the full inclusion of Israel that will be restated at the climax in 11:26. Again using himself as an example and employing the “jealousy” motif, Paul says that his role as apostle to the gentiles will, in a roundabout way, save some of his own. He invokes the images of the dough and roots to speak of the way that holiness “spreads” from the part to the whole. The word for “dough” is the same word as “lump,” referring to clay, in 9:21. The image of root and branches leads into an elaborate argument whose central metaphor is the cultivation of an olive tree that is grafted with wild pieces, pruned, and regrafted. “Natural” (kata physin) is used to describe the original tree; “unnatural” (para physin), the wild branches. With this simile, Paul is able to speak of the relationship between peoples, Jews and gentiles, to speculate on shifting relationships between them, and to urge humility and forbearance toward Jews on the part of gentiles. Wild branches should realize their dependence on the roots. That some branches were broken off should serve as a warning against pride. In the final move, Paul imagines that in time, even the natural branches, formerly separated, will be grafted back in. As in Romans 9, where mercy is the last word, here kindness and mercy have the stress. Paul describes what God is doing using the word for a secret revealed by God: a “mystery.” The “hardening” will last until “the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved.” The motif, known from the prophets, that the faith of Israel would lead all nations to God takes an unexpected twist: here the disobedience of Israel leads to mercy for one community first, and then for all. The section concludes with a doxology, or hymn of praise to God, that draws on language from Isaiah and from Job. The lament in which Paul complained and wrestled with the attempt to know God’s ways and justify them to humans ends with an exclamation of wonder at the impossibility of knowing God or the “mind of the Lord.”
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
What was for Paul an urgent question in the first century, the ultimate fate of Israel in the plan of God, was not an issue for the church fathers and other early interpreters. In their view, the church had replaced Israel as the elect. It was ongoing Jewish practice and belief that posed a threat to them, and with which they disputed. Indeed, in much of its history, Paul’s warning against gentile arrogance actually was used to fuel Christian triumphalism! Paul’s hopeful conclusion about God’s regrafting Israel into the tree did not hold a central place in their reading of Romans. Augustine focused on and developed Paul’s negative statements about Israel. Luther understood that his contemporaries, the Jews and the Roman Catholics, exemplified those who lived as God’s people by works rather than grace. Forcible conversion of Jews was one response to his reading of Romans 11. Karl Barth interpreted “all Israel will be saved” as speaking of the church. Among contemporary scholars, some interpret “all Israel” to refer to the church and Jesus-believing Jews, while Dunn and others understand it to include Christians and Jews (Reasoner).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
It makes sense that in the contemporary reality of religious pluralism, Paul’s argument in Romans 9–11, and in Rom. 11:13–36 in particular, is taken up as a model for Christian theological reflection on God’s surprising and unpredictable plans for the salvation of the whole world. While Paul claims in 11:34–35 the impossibility of human attempts to know the mind of God, it is exactly this effort that he makes in these verses. He approaches the task by searching for patterns in the Scriptures of Israel, even patterns that undermine traditional patterns of expectation. In addition to drawing on Scripture, Paul calls on images from everyday life—foot-racing, bread making, and horticulture—to attempt to imagine how God can demonstrate both faithfulness to the past and creativity for the future. Paul’s surrender to the impossibility of the attempt after his extended effort in the exclamation of praise in the concluding doxology testifies to both human theological creativity and the merciful creativity of God.
Romans 12:1–21: Exhortation to Holy Living
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
Paul appeals to the audience to practice a particular manner of life based on the argument of Romans 1–11. Several elements tie the content of this exhortation back to the images and stories earlier in the letter. “By the mercies of God” recalls the multiple examples of God’s mercy demonstrated in the stories of Pharaoh and others in Romans 9. God’s expansive vision of inclusion of the gentiles finds its concrete expression in the life of the community by the exercise of Christian virtues that echo the teaching of Jesus. Out of concern for the whole body, members are to practice forbearance toward the scruples and weaknesses of others (12:14). The language of baptismal renewal from Romans 6–8 recurs in the vocabulary of transformation and renewal (12:2) and of “one body” (12:4–5). Paul weaves together liturgical traditions from the early house churches, the preaching of Jesus, and the ethical teaching of the prophetic and wisdom traditions in Scripture. It is not possible to untangle these strands of teaching. The appeals appear to be general rather than to any specific behavior in the Roman church.
The image of sacrifice underlies the opening appeal “to present your bodies as a living sacrifice” and evokes the complex of meanings surrounding the sacrificial system in ancient Israel. As the drama of Rom. 6:12–19 described the members presented to slavery or to righteousness, here the presentation of the “body,” the whole sentient being in community, is made to God. The “spiritual” worship (NRSV) might also be translated “rational” worship (logikē) or the worship one owes as a rational being (Byrne). The living sacrifice and the rational worship stand in sharp contrast to the corrupt and perverse worship of the creature rather than the Creator described in Rom. 1:18–32. Paul draws on the prophets who insist on the alignment of ritual and ethics (Isa. 1:10–20; Jer. 6:20; Hosea 8:11–13; Amos 5:21–27).
Believers are not to conform themselves to the current age, but are through baptism (6:4) to be transformed. Renewed minds enable discernment of God’s will and, by implication, right decisions about how to live. The ideal of controlled rational discernment here corrects the picture of chaotic depravity in Rom. 1:18–32. Paul warns against arrogance and urges sober assessment of oneself “according to the measure of faith that God has assigned” (12:3). The stress on right proportion and differentiation resembles Stoic teaching about moderation and temperance. The measured tone contrasts with the apocalyptic drama portrayed elsewhere in the letter. The sequence of imperatives to love, zeal, joy, followed by the instruction to “bless,” echoes the sayings from Jesus’ teaching, particularly those found in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. The prohibition against taking vengeance cites a text in Deut. 32:35 that restricts the exacting of punishment to God. One feeds one’s hungry enemies and gives water to those who are hostile in order to shame them. As in Prov. 25:21–22, “heap burning coals on their heads” (Rom. 12:20) may imply that they will experience remorse in response to one’s good deed.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
Paul’s rationale for not taking vengeance—that one’s forbearance to enemies would result in heaping “burning coals on their heads”—was interpreted in two directions by patristic commentators. John Chrysostom, on the one hand, understood Paul to mean that nonretaliation by Christians would have the effect of intensifying ultimate punishment by God toward enemies. Origen, Augustine, and Jerome, on the other hand, interpreted the heaping of burning coals to be a provocation to repentance, and hence to divine mercy for the enemies. Modern interpreters take parallel options, some taking the more generous approach: not taking vengeance gives enemies a chance to repent; and others taking the more severe one: that the righteous avoid vengeance so that God’s vengeance on the unrighteous can be more severe.
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
The potent mixture of Jewish wisdom and prophetic traditions and the inheritance of Jesus’ teaching in this rhetorically eloquent exhortation demonstrates the close kinship of what later has been known as “Jewish” and “Christian” teaching. The conviction, held in common by prophets and early Christian writers, that right worship and right action are necessarily aligned, is a basis for ethical and liturgical decision making. Paul’s imperative “do not be conformed to this world” (12:2) provides an antidote to the counsel of submission in Rom. 13:1–7 that follows. The apocalyptic sense that this present age is passing away provides leverage for Christians to critique and resist the powers that be in their political context. The exhortation to rational formation and decision making assumes the ability to reason on the part of human beings. Unlike those accounts in Romans that assert human incapacity for doing good (Rom. 7:14–25), here the outlook for human transformation is more hopeful. While a flesh/spirit dualism operates powerfully in other parts of the argument, the presentation of the body here presents a picture of bodily existence as integrated with physical, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions.
Romans 13:1–14: Subjection to Governing Authorities
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
Paul exhorts, “let every person be subject to the governing authorities.” The address appears universal—the word translated “person” is literally “every soul.” The tone is absolute as Paul claims that authorities on earth have a divine origin—they are appointed by God and have a purpose from God. They are to be God’s servants, to provoke fear of punishment and to execute God’s judgment, symbolized by the sword. The language of the passage is replete with vocabulary of “order”—the roots tasso- and tag- mean “put,” “place,” “appoint,” and the prefix hyper means “over.” The symbolic universe assumed by these instructions is a hierarchical one in which human rulers rule with the authority of God, and the role of subordinates or citizens is to be ruled, to be subject, to take one’s appointed place. “Fear,” phobos, is the proper attitude to be shown by a subordinate to a superordinate. Elsewhere in the New Testament Epistles, commands to “be subject” are addressed to women, slaves, and children, who must behave as their appointed station requires (Col. 3:18–4:1; Eph. 5:21–6:9; Titus 2:1–10; 1 Pet. 2:18–3:7). The view of the world presented in Rom. 13:1–7 is closely paralleled in Hellenistic writings such as Wisdom and Josephus. God’s judgment and wrath, which have played an important role in the narrative of the letter, are constructed as equivalent to the judgment of the authorities.
Historical-critical scholars have noted the tension, if not contradiction, between the perspective expressed here and Paul’s view that the form of the world is passing away (1 Cor. 7:31) and that the rulers of the world are ignorant of the purposes of God (1 Cor. 2:6–8; 15:51–58). The counsel against resistance seems at odds with the exhortation not to conform to the world (Rom. 12:1–2). Some critics have evaluated the counsel to be so out of place that they judge that the passage is not a part of the original letter. Others try to conceive of a historical context in which such a counsel would have made sense. Within the context of imperial propaganda, Paul’s instruction to pay taxes may have been made to ensure the safety of Jewish communities in Rome for whom tax revolts caused danger. Arguments about the historical context function to highlight Paul’s statement as a historically specific and strategic instruction, rather than a generalizable principle about the relationship of church and state (Elliott 1997).
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
Discussion of this passage in the history of interpretation has been closely connected with the relationship of the interpreter’s community with the political “authorities” of their own historical period. Most readers have had to grapple with the fact that although the text claims that there is an equivalence between the judgment of rulers and of God and that rulers are God’s servants, this ideal is contradicted by experience—the experience of Christians under Roman rule in which martyrdom was the fate of many, the experience of blacks under apartheid in South Africa, African Americans under Jim Crow in the United States, and many others. Origen was disturbed by the claim that all governments are from God when some persecute believers (Reasoner, 130). He writes that “authority” can be misused and that God will judge those who violate the laws of God. Martyrdom is a means of overcoming evil governments. Since Luther identified Rom. 14:17 as the ultimate reference point for biblical teaching about the state and developed the doctrine of “two kingdoms,” this text has been a center of controversy in theological discussion. For Luther, there were two ways for God’s rule to be expressed: in the secular sphere, where the civic authorities ruled, and in the spiritual sphere, where the church ruled. On the basis of this passage, Luther opposed the peasant revolts in Germany. Karl Barth, on the other hand, rejected the equating of any political organization or ideology with the kingdom of God. For Barth, the state was evil, and all governments are under the judgment of God. Barth’s insistence on the sovereignty of God above any civic authority appears to undercut the outward implication of the passage that civil authorities derive their legitimacy from God.
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
The challenges raised by this text for contemporary interpreters come from the history of interpretation, particularly influenced by Luther, in which this text has been used to prohibit resistance or rebellion against state authority. In the “state theology” of South Africa in the time of apartheid, this text was the centerpiece of supporting and legitimizing apartheid and disallowing resistance (West). In order to dispute interpretations that read the text at face value for self-serving ends, engaged biblical scholars have employed different strategies to diffuse the text or to deploy its power in another direction. One strategy is to explain it as a realistic response to a dangerous political environment for Jews—to counsel quiescence for the sake of the safety of others. By contextualizing the text in a particular historical and social place, these readers relativize its absolute and universal-sounding claims. Another strategy is to place this counsel in the larger panorama of Paul’s argument about nonretaliation, about overcoming evil with good (12:14–21), and within the wider framework of apocalyptic eschatology. For Christians living in contemporary situations of persecution, rather than being a text that prevents them from possible agency, the plea to be subject and the counsel that follows becomes a source of realism, caution, and hope in God’s ultimate judgment against injustice (Tamez; Elliott 2008). Another approach is to recognize that the difficulty comes from the enormous distance between a worldview that sees the hierarchical political realm as a reflection of the hierarchical heavenly realm and a worldview built around democratic debate. Rather than affirming the exhortations to subordinates—citizens, wives, slaves, and children—to submit, readers will critique them on the basis of these democratic values.
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
Paul urges tolerance of diverse views and practices within the community by exhorting consideration of those whom he calls the “weak in faith.” His rhetoric assumes that he counts himself among the “strong” (15:1), whom he urges not to pass judgment on those who take other positions about eating (15:2) and the observation of “days.” It is not possible to identify precisely the early Christian parties or groups behind this dispute, nor is it certain whether Paul knows of specific disagreements about these matters in the church at Rome. One influential theory is that some believers returned to Rome who were more attached to the observance of Torah as part of Christian practice, and they came into conflict with those who did not practice dietary restrictions and other observances. However, vegetarianism, abstention from wine, and consideration of special “days” are not known to be part of Torah regulations. Those who reconstruct the disputes behind Paul’s instructions here rely on controversies from other letters—over the eating of idol meat in 1 Corinthians 8–10, circumcision and feasts in Gal. 4:8–11 and Col. 2:20–23—although none of these provides a precise parallel. Paul argues against judgmentalism on the basis of a series of theological rationales: that they should welcome one another because they have been welcomed by God, that the weak have the same lord/master as the strong (14:3–4), and that both groups do what they do out of full conviction and to honor the Lord (14:5–6).
The passage incorporates traditional elements from liturgical or wisdom settings; for example, 14:7–8 may be a hymn. The blessing/prayer wishes in 15:5–6, 13, 33, may also be traditional. Paul argues that the strong should refrain from eating or drinking in a manner that would injure another and destroy the “work of God,” the community. One’s own conviction, or one’s “faith,” makes the difference in discriminating what is sin. Paul cites Christ as a reason for tolerance, arguing that Ps. 69:9 refers to Christ’s suffering rather than pleasing himself. Christ is the original source of “welcome” or acceptance. Returning to the theme of the reliability of God’s promises and the story of Christ, Paul describes Christ as the servant of the circumcised whose ultimate purpose is the gentiles’ glorification of God. A series of four scriptural quotations, from the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (Ps. 17:50 LXX; Deut. 32:43 LXX; Ps. 117:1 LXX; Isa. 11:10 LXX), affirms Christ’s purpose to bring gentiles to God. A prayer wish concludes the exhortation not to pass judgment, but to forbear, to act from faith, and to tolerate a range of diverse beliefs about matters of food and drink and calendar.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
Paul’s appeal for tolerance, respect for the convictions of others, and inner commitment to one’s own faith convictions in 14:1–15:13 has not been given the same attention in the history of interpretation that Romans 1–8 has received. Theologians who have been occupied with questions of predestination and free will have not found this moral exhortation to be of interest. The radical claims about faith in the earlier chapters of Romans appear to be compromised here with the focus on the needs of the “weak in faith.” However, this section of the letter has received renewed attention because concern about how those with diverging opinions about Christian practice or belief can best live together is an urgent ethical issue in the current environment of diverse positions within the Christian community and without. In the context of the Roman Empire, this counsel of tolerance would have been an alternative value system (Elliott 2008).
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Contemporary interpreters who read Romans as primarily occupied with the relationship between peoples in God’s plan for salvation and with holy relationships within the community have developed the principles and theological rationales that are elaborated here. For example, Neil Elliott speaks of this passage as conveying an “ethic of solidarity” in tension with the Roman imperial system of hierarchy and patronage (Elliott 2008). Kathy Ehrensperger shows how a feminist ethic of relationships overlaps with the perspectives of Romans 14. She identifies an ethic of “mutuality and accommodation” rather than hierarchy. As theologians have focused on the relationship between “belief” and “practice,” Paul’s concrete practical counsel is valued as offering a way of living out the claims of the gospel in a complex and diverse world.
Analysis of the composition of this chapter out of fragments of liturgical and philosophical tradition demonstrates how the commonplace maxim “no one lives unto himself” is incorporated into a letter of Paul and in light of the overarching christological arguments takes on new depth and meaning (O’Neill). The anthropology implied in the exhortation here, with its emphasis on conviction and personal commitment, appears to give human beings more control and intention to their actions than does the anthropology of Rom. 6:12–19, in which every human serves a master. The language of thralldom and slavery seems in contrast to the more rational implications of this quasi-Stoic counsel. In the course of history, interpreters have been drawn to one or the other view more strongly. The choice to interpret one or the other anthropology as primary is a decision that is made on theological, ethical, or political grounds.
Romans 15:14–33: Paul’s Reasons for Writing, Plans to Visit Rome, and Delivery of the Collection
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
These verses give information to reconstruct the “reasons for Romans” or the situation “behind” the letter. While appearing as informative “news” about his plans, the substance of this communication is highly symbolic and theological. Paul’s travel and its rationale express his understanding of the relationship between Jews and gentiles and how he understands his identity and his purpose. Paul expresses confidence in the competence of the congregation. This friendship-strengthening rhetoric both reflects and fashions the relationship between the sender and receiver of the letter. At the same time as he underplays the letter as “writing rather boldly,” Paul’s self-description as a “minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit” (15:16) is a claim of unique status in God’s mission. Using cultic language taken from the tradition of Israel’s worship, Paul conveys his conviction that by his ministry, he is delivering the gentile believers in Christ as a holy offering to God. While he had begun the letter by saying that he is not ashamed, here Paul admits to having reason to “boast.” As in 2 Cor. 2:12 and Gal. 3:5, the action of the Spirit in the community is accompanied by signs and wonders. The map of Paul’s preaching extends in a full circle from Jerusalem to Illyricum on the east coast of the Adriatic Sea. The picture of the vast sweep of the gospel is less a reflection of Paul’s own individual activity and more a theological portrayal of the inevitable progress of the good news.
Referring to his practice of not preaching where another person has begun the work of evangelism, Paul quotes from Isa. 52:15, words that refer to the work of the suffering servant. By borrowing the prophetic words to describe the recipients of his preaching who have “never been told” and “never heard,” he makes an implied parallel between his ministry and that of the Servant of the Lord (Grieb). His missionary travels have occupied him until the present, when he will fulfill his long-held wish to visit them on his way to Spain. In ancient rhetoric, the expression “be sent on by you” may imply financial support. He speaks of his plan to deliver the collection from the churches of Macedonia and Achaia “with the poor among the saints at Jerusalem” (15:26).
The collection from the churches in Greece and its delivery and acceptance by the Jerusalem church represent economically the relationship between Jews and gentiles, the subject of the letter. By contributing to it, gentile churches demonstrate their gratitude to Jerusalem for the spiritual benefits that they have received, and by accepting it, the Jerusalem church acknowledges the rightful role of the gentile churches in God’s promises. The successful delivery of the collection equals the confirmation and legitimization of Paul’s own mission as apostle to the gentiles. He appeals for their prayers and asks that he be delivered from those unbelievers who would oppose him. Paul’s letters refer to the collection for Jerusalem in 1 Cor. 16:1–4; 2 Cor. 8–9; and Gal. 2:10. The survey of Paul’s plans concludes with a picture of the anticipated joyful union with the church at Rome.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
Before the advent of historical criticism, interpreters took the attribution of the letters to Paul at face value and accepted the presentation of Paul as chief apostle in all the letters and in Acts of the Apostles as factual. Paul’s centrality and uniqueness was taken for granted. In the view of modern biblical criticism, the canon of the New Testament gives evidence that the figure of Paul was given increasing authority in the second century. The addition of pseudonymous letters, 1, 2 Timothy and Titus, and the Acts of the Apostles, Luke’s theological history of the church, combined to create the persona of Paul. As the rhetorical character of Paul’s letters has come to be better appreciated, Paul’s own statements about his missionary practice or the views of his opponents or his relationship with the congregation to whom he writes have come to be understood as statements that do not just reflect reality but also contribute to shaping it. Tensions between theological perspectives in the undisputed letters, Ephesians and Colossians, and the Pastoral Epistles were recognized and interpreted as showing the development of the Pauline tradition, the positions that claimed Paul as their authoritative source. Paul’s own self-understanding, which he expresses here, while it may have been more complicated or even contested in his own time, came to be accepted by the church. In reconstructing the reasons for Romans, scholarly scenarios develop one or more aspects of what Paul says here: need for support from the church at Rome, fear of the rejection of the collection, or the danger of the mission to Spain.
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
Contemporary interpreters have given attention to the collection for the poor in Jerusalem as a concrete practice that expressed the solidarity (koinōnia) of the gentile churches with the mother church in Jerusalem. Within the structure of patronage in the Roman Empire, the collection functioned to communicate an alternative structure of relationship and accountability. Economic exchange and distribution shows the power of economic relations to embody relationships of justice. The collection for Jerusalem provides a model for practices of solidarity that subvert conventional values and create an alternative community. If the collection was a “symbol of resistance and subversion” (Wan, 196) in the context of the Roman Empire, what might be analogous practices of economic solidarity in the current globalized economy?
Romans 16:1–27: Paul Commends Phoebe and Greets His Coworkers
THE TEXT IN ITS ANCIENT CONTEXT
The letter to the Romans concludes with greetings from Paul to members of the church at Rome (16:1–16), a warning against those who cause division (16:17–20), additional greetings, and a doxology (16:25–27). Critics have questioned whether these elements were part of the original Letter to the Romans or were added at later points in its composition. While all editions of Romans contain chapter 16, in some manuscripts the doxology comes after 15:33. In addition to textual evidence, readers have questioned how Paul could have known so many individuals by name in a community that he has not visited. The theory that Romans 16 was not an original part of the letter is no longer widely accepted. Paul’s greetings to other leaders and his amplification of their association serve to strengthen the bonds with the community at Rome and to enhance Paul’s own reputation and reception. The twenty-six leaders named here give insight into the makeup of the early Christian missionary movement, particularly the activity of other prominent missionaries, and the role of women as leaders. The terms “coworker,” “beloved,” “relative,” and “in the Lord” convey the collaborative role of these individuals in the mission. The women named by Paul are named independently (Mary), paired with a man (Prisca, Junia), paired with another woman (Tryphaena and Tryphosa), or called “mother” (of Rufus) and “sister” (of Nereus). Paul’s commendation of Phoebe names her as a deacon, a term that refers to offering service and that later became a formal office. She is a prostatis, a benefactor, who has provided Paul and others financial support. Phoebe is the one who delivers the letter to Rome. Prisca and Aquila, a missionary pair who are also mentioned in Acts 18, have demonstrated bravery that has earned the gratitude of all the churches of the gentiles. Andronicus and Junia receive high praise as “prominent among the apostles” and who were “in Christ before I was” (16:7). Paul greets these named coworkers and includes “all the other saints who are with them” (16:15). Paul asks them to greet one another with a holy kiss, a sign of love exchanged in the assembly. Critics disagree about whether the harsh warning that appears to interrupt the series of greetings is original to Romans or was added by a later writer. Its harsh tone appears to be out of place in Romans; however, other letters of Paul include severe warnings in their closing verses: Gal. 6:12–13; Phil. 3:2; and 1 Cor. 16:22.
There is widespread agreement that the doxology which concludes the letter is not original. Textual evidence shows it occurring in different positions (being omitted or included after chap. 14, after chap. 15, or in both positions). Its language concerning “strengthening you” and the disclosing of a “mystery” resembles the language of Ephesians (Eph. 1:9; 3:3–4, 6, 9; 5:32; 6:19). It may have been composed by a later writer who understood Romans itself as part of the “prophetic writings.” At the time of the assembling of the canon, the doxology was added as an emphatic response and conclusion to a letter that had attained significance and esteem.
THE TEXT IN THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION
In the history of interpretation, Paul’s centrality was accepted as a given. The presence of other evangelists, missionaries, or apostles, though clearly spelled out here, were not memorialized or celebrated by the ongoing tradition of the church. While Paul habitually greets, thanks, and refers to his coworkers, the singularity of Paul, his independence, and uniqueness are remembered most insistently by the tradition. That among these twenty-six names are recorded the names of nine women, some with titles—“deacon,” “benefactor,” “apostle,”—and some with epithets—“coworker,” “sister”—may account for the fact that this series of coworkers has been overlooked in the history of interpretation and minimized in majority scholarship. Because the exclusion of women from leadership became an element of orthodox teaching, the names of the women here and their participation in the early Christian mission became invisible. The female name Junia was amended in the manuscript tradition to the otherwise unattested male name Junias to conform to the norm that no women were apostles (Brooten 1977). Phoebe, likely the one who delivered the letter to Rome, becomes a footnote in the story of the Letter to the Romans. In the contest over the authoritative interpretation of Paul in the canon, the position of 1 Timothy, which requires women to learn with all submission (1 Tim. 2:11–13), prevails. The memory of Paul’s commendation of Phoebe, deacon of the church at Cenchreae, or Junia, prominent among the apostles and in Christ before Paul himself, fades into obscurity.
THE TEXT IN CONTEMPORARY DISCUSSION
As women have become conscious readers of Scripture and agents aware in the making of history, they have contributed to research into women in the Greco-Roman world and in Jewish and gentile Jesus movements. Readers have questioned the gender asymmetry encoded in Scripture and recognized its complicity in the maintenance of male superiority and female subordination in church and society. Reconstruction of early Christian history to include the presence and leadership of women has made it possible to read restrictive biblical texts differently and has recovered models and exemplars of women’s leadership in the early period. Romans 16 gives rich evidence of a missionary movement of women and men in partnership, counters the view of the singular apostle, and nourishes the imagination for reenvisioning the ecclesia as a discipleship of equals (Kittredge 2012).
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