Romans: The Letter to the Capital

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Paul, who never met me. His secretary, a man named Tertius, adds his own greeting near the end (Romans 16:22). No serious scholar doubts that the letter is Paul’s.

When: About 57, from Corinth, just before Paul carried a collection of money to the poor in Jerusalem.

Written for: The house churches in Rome, a city Paul had never visited. Their Jewish and Gentile members were judging each other, and Paul wanted their help for a journey to Spain.

What it remembers of me: That I was descended from David and was raised from the dead (Romans 1:3–4). Almost none of my teaching, though some lines sound very close to it: Bless those who persecute you (Romans 12:14).

How close it stays to me: Close on enemies, neighbors and the poor. Far in chapter 13, on rulers.

If you only read three chapters: Romans 8, Romans 12 and Romans 16.

Words to Know

Justified — declared to be in the right, the way a judge declares someone innocent.

Righteousness — being in the right with God. In Paul it also means God’s own faithfulness, God putting things right.

Grace — a gift that is not earned.

Works of the law — keeping the Law of Moses, especially the parts that marked out Jews from everyone else: circumcision, the food laws and the Sabbath.

Deacon — in Greek, diakonos, a servant or minister. Paul uses the word for himself, and for a woman named Phoebe.

The Book in Brief

Paul opens by introducing himself to the believers in Rome, whom he has long wanted to visit. Then he states his theme. The good news is God’s power to save everyone who trusts it, the Jew first and also the Greek.

Next he builds his case. In chapter 1 he describes the Gentile world turning from God to idols and sinking into every kind of wrong. In chapter 2 he turns on the reader who judges them, and argues that having the Law does not help a Jew who does not keep it. By chapter 3 his conclusion is that everyone has sinned, and that God puts people right through faith, as a gift.

Chapter 4 offers Abraham as proof. God counted Abraham as righteous because he trusted God, before he was ever circumcised. Chapter 5 sets Adam beside Christ, one bringing death to everyone, the other bringing life. Chapters 6 and 7 answer objections. Does grace mean you may go on sinning? No. Is the Law itself bad? No, but it cannot make anyone good. Chapter 8 describes life in God’s Spirit and a whole creation waiting to be set free, and ends by saying that nothing can separate us from God’s love.

Chapters 9 to 11 take up the question that troubles Paul most: why most of his own people have not believed. He answers with the picture of an olive tree, warns the Gentiles not to boast, and ends with the hope that all Israel will be saved.

Chapters 12 to 15 turn to how to live. Offer yourselves to God. Love without pretending. Bless those who persecute you. Be subject to the authorities and pay your taxes. Owe no one anything except love. Stop judging each other over food and holy days. Paul then explains his plans. He is taking money to the poor in Jerusalem, and after that he hopes to visit Rome on his way to Spain.

Chapter 16 commends Phoebe, who probably carried the letter, and greets about two dozen people by name.

Paul did not found the church in Rome. Nobody knows who did. By the time he wrote, there were already groups of my followers meeting in houses across the city.

Paul wanted to visit them on his way to Spain, where nobody had yet preached about me. Whenever I travel to Spain, I will come to you … and to be helped on my way there by you (Romans 15:24). He needed their welcome, and probably their money. So he wrote to a church that did not know him, to explain what he preached.

That is the setting of Romans. It is not a book of systematic theology written for all time. It is Paul introducing himself, carefully, to strangers in the capital, before asking for their help.

It became the foundation of Western Christianity anyway.

What was happening in Rome

To understand Romans, you need to know about a riot.

About eight years before the letter, the emperor Claudius expelled Jews from Rome. Historians still debate whether he expelled them all or only some. A Roman historian says they kept rioting at the instigation of Chrestus, which many scholars think is a garbled reference to arguments over me, Christus, in the synagogues.¹ Acts mentions the same expulsion. Priscilla and Aquila, the couple who later worked with Paul, were among those forced out (Acts 18:2).

While the Jews were gone, the groups of my followers in Rome would have been left mostly Gentile. When Claudius died in 54, Jews could come back. Now picture Jewish believers returning to find the congregations run by Gentiles who did not keep the Law, did not observe the Sabbath, and ate whatever they liked.

That is the tension running under the whole letter. It explains why Paul keeps saying to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. It explains why he spends three chapters on what will become of Israel. And it explains chapter 14, where he begs the strong and the weak to stop judging each other over food and holy days: Therefore let’s not judge one another any more (Romans 14:13).

Everyone is in the same place

The first argument of Romans is that nobody stands higher than anyone else before God.

Paul starts with the Gentiles. In chapter 1, he describes what happens when people worship images instead of God. They are handed over to their own desires, and the list grows: sexual sin, and then covetousness, malice; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit … backbiters … arrogant, boastful … disobedient to parents (Romans 1:29–30).

A Jewish listener in Rome would have nodded along. That is what Gentiles are like.

Then Paul turns on him. Therefore you are without excuse, O man, whoever you are who judge. For in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself. For you who judge practice the same things (Romans 2:1).

It is a trap, and Paul springs it on purpose. Chapter 1 builds a case against them, so that chapter 2 can turn it on you. By chapter 3 he has his conclusion: for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).

A passage used as a weapon

Two verses from that first chapter have been quoted, more than almost any others, against people who love someone of the same sex. Paul says that women changed the natural function into that which is against nature, and that men burned in their lust toward one another (Romans 1:26–27).

Scholars disagree about what exactly Paul had in mind. Some think he was condemning all same-sex relations. Others point out that the sex Paul’s world knew best between men was between masters and slaves, or men and boys, and that he was describing excess and lust, not love between equals. Paul uses nature in other places to mean custom. He says that nature itself teaches that long hair is a dishonor to a man (1 Corinthians 11:14). And a few chapters later in Romans, he says that God himself grafted the Gentiles into Israel contrary to nature (Romans 11:24).²

I will not settle that argument for you here. But I will tell you what is not in dispute. These verses are not the point of the passage. They are the first half of a trap whose whole purpose is the sentence that follows: you who judge practice the same things. Anyone who reads Romans 1 to condemn someone else, and stops before Romans 2, has walked into exactly the trap Paul set.

By faith

Then comes the center of Paul’s argument. If everyone is in the same place, how does anyone get right with God?

We maintain therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law (Romans 3:28).

For Paul, the works of the law certainly included the things that separated Jews from Gentiles: circumcision, the food laws, the Sabbath. His point was that a Gentile does not have to become a Jew to belong to God’s people. He reaches for Abraham, the father of my people, and quotes Genesis: Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness (Romans 4:3). Abraham trusted God before he was circumcised. So trust comes first, for everyone.

Fifteen centuries later, Martin Luther read works as meaning any good deed done to earn God’s favor, and faith as the inner act of believing. That reading launched the Reformation. Many scholars now think Paul was arguing about something more specific: who can sit at the table, Jew and Gentile together.³

Go deeperThe word Luther added

When Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German in 1522, he rendered Romans 3:28 as justified by faith alone. The word alone is not in Paul’s Greek. His critics said so at once.

Luther answered them in 1530, in a short open letter on translating. He said that good German needed the word to carry Paul’s meaning, and that he had learned how to make Paul speak German by listening to the mother in her house and the man in the market, not to scholars. He was not polite about it. A papist and a donkey, he wrote, are one and the same thing.⁴

The words faith alone do appear once in the New Testament, but not in Paul. They are in the letter of James, and James denies them: You see then that by works, a man is justified, and not only by faith (James 2:24). Luther knew that verse. It is one reason he called James an epistle of straw.⁵

The man in chapter 7

For I don’t know what I am doing. For I don’t practice what I desire to do; but what I hate, that I do (Romans 7:15). For the good which I desire, I don’t do; but the evil which I don’t desire, that I practice (Romans 7:19).

For centuries, readers have heard in those lines a tortured conscience, Paul confessing his own inner struggle with sin. Augustine read them that way. So did Luther.

But in another letter Paul describes his life before he followed me very differently: concerning the righteousness which is in the law, found blameless (Philippians 3:6). He did not have a guilty conscience. In 1963 a Swedish scholar and bishop named Krister Stendahl argued that the West had read its own anxious introspection back into Paul, and that Romans 7 is an argument about the Law, not a confession.⁶ Both readings are still argued over. It is worth knowing that the second one exists.

Nothing can separate us

Chapter 8 is where Paul is happiest.

There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).

He says the whole world is waiting to be set free, not just human beings. For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now (Romans 8:22). For Paul, the future is not souls escaping the earth. It is the earth itself being healed.

And he ends the chapter with the lines people read at funerals: neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from God’s love (Romans 8:38–39).

What about my people?

Chapters 9 to 11 are about the question that hurt Paul most. Most of my own people had not followed me. What did that mean?

I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brothers’ sake, my relatives according to the flesh (Romans 9:2–3).

He asks it outright: did God reject his people? May it never be! For I also am an Israelite (Romans 11:1).

Then he gives the Gentile believers in Rome a picture. Israel is an olive tree. Some branches have been broken off, and the Gentiles have been grafted in, like wild branches. Don’t boast over the branches. But if you boast, it is not you who support the root, but the root supports you (Romans 11:18).

And he ends with this: and so all Israel will be saved (Romans 11:26), and the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:29).

Remember those verses. For most of the next two thousand years, churches taught that God had rejected the Jews and replaced them with Christians. Paul, the man those churches quoted most, wrote that God had not. The Gentile branches were warned not to boast. They boasted for nineteen centuries.

The closest Paul comes to my sermon

Chapter 12 is the closest Paul ever comes to the Sermon on the Mount, and he never says he is quoting me.

Bless those who persecute you; bless, and don’t curse (Romans 12:14). Repay no one evil for evil (Romans 12:17). Don’t set your mind on high things, but associate with the humble (Romans 12:16). If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink (Romans 12:20, quoting Proverbs 25:21). Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21).

If you want to know what Paul thought a follower of mine should actually do, day to day, read chapter 12.

Chapter 13

Then comes the passage that every government has loved.

Let every soul be in subjection to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those who exist are ordained by God (Romans 13:1). The ruler is a servant of God to you for good … he doesn’t bear the sword in vain (Romans 13:4). For this reason you also pay taxes (Romans 13:6).

Remember who Paul was writing to. A small, mixed group of believers in the emperor’s own city, a few years after an expulsion, a few years before Nero would burn them alive as torches.⁷ Paul was telling them not to give Rome a reason. It was advice for survival.

But he wrote it without limits. No authority except from God, with no exception for a cruel one. That sentence has been quoted to support kings against their subjects, slave law against slaves, and in the last century, by many German churches, the Nazi state.⁸ It has also been quoted, on the other side, to remind rulers that they answer to God.

Read the next verses too, because they are usually left off. Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law (Romans 13:8). Love doesn’t harm a neighbor. Love therefore is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13:10). That is my teaching, from Leviticus, and Paul puts it right after the passage about rulers. The one thing a follower owes without limit is love.

The collection

Near the end, Paul tells the Romans where he is going next. I am going to Jerusalem, serving the saints. For it has been the good pleasure of Macedonia and Achaia to make a certain contribution for the poor among the saints who are at Jerusalem (Romans 15:25–26).

For years Paul had been gathering money from his Gentile churches for the poor among my followers in Jerusalem. It was the one thing the leaders in Jerusalem had asked of him, to remember the poor. He carried it there himself. According to Acts, he was arrested in Jerusalem soon after he arrived, and he went to Rome after all, in chains.

The greatest theological letter in the Bible was written on the way to deliver money to the poor.

The women in chapter 16

Most people skip the last chapter of Romans. It is a list of greetings. It is also one of the most important chapters in your New Testament.

It begins: I commend to you Phoebe, our sister, who is a servant of the assembly that is at Cenchreae … for she herself also has been a helper of many, and of my own self (Romans 16:1–2). The word translated servant is diakonos, deacon, the same word Paul uses for himself. The word translated helper means a patron, someone with money and standing who protects others. Phoebe was probably the person who carried this letter to Rome.⁹ The first person to read Romans aloud to the Romans, and to answer their questions about it, was probably a woman.

Next comes Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers, and the assembly that is in their house (Romans 16:3–5). Prisca is named before her husband.

And then: Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives and my fellow prisoners, who are notable among the apostles (Romans 16:7).

Junia is a woman’s name. Most scholars read Paul as calling her outstanding among the apostles, though some read well known to the apostles. Early Christian writers knew she was a woman. John Chrysostom, a bishop around the year 400, praised her for being worthy of the name of apostle. But in the Middle Ages, readers and later printers turned her into a man, Junias, a name that has never been found anywhere in the ancient world. For much of the twentieth century, standard Greek editions and many English Bibles printed the man’s name. Most modern Bibles have given her back.¹⁰

A woman apostle was not something they could believe Paul wrote. So they changed her.

Go deeperWho the believers in Rome were

The greetings in chapter 16 are the best picture anyone has of a church in the capital in the 50s.

There was no church building. Paul greets groups that met in homes, the assembly that is in their house (Romans 16:5), and others who seem to be separate circles of believers (Romans 16:14–15).

Many of the names are Greek, not Latin, and many are the kind of names commonly given to slaves and freed slaves in Rome, such as Amplias, Hermes and Persis. Paul also greets those who are of the household of Aristobulus and of the household of Narcissus (Romans 16:10–11). A household like that was made up largely of the slaves and former slaves of a great man, and Paul does not greet the men themselves. A scholar who studied the names in detail concluded that a large part of the Roman church came from the slave and freed population.¹¹

One more name is worth a look. Paul greets Rufus, the chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine (Romans 16:13). Mark says that the man forced to carry my cross was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus (Mark 15:21). Mark names the sons as if his readers knew them, and an old tradition places Mark’s gospel in Rome. Whether the two are the same Rufus, nobody can prove. It was a common name.

What Romans did afterward

Few letters have changed history more.

In 386, a young teacher of rhetoric in Milan heard a child’s voice saying take up and read. He opened Paul’s letters at random and read, not in reveling and drunkenness … But put on the Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 13:13–14). He became Augustine, and his reading of Paul shaped Western Christianity for a thousand years.¹²

In the 1510s, a monk named Martin Luther, terrified of God’s judgment, read Romans 1:17, the righteous shall live by faith, and said he felt reborn. In 1738, in a meeting room on Aldersgate Street in London, a priest named John Wesley heard someone read Luther’s preface to Romans and felt his heart strangely warmed, and that night became a turning point for the Methodist movement. In 1919 a young Swiss pastor named Karl Barth published a commentary on Romans that shook the theology of Europe.¹²

Today, a popular way of explaining salvation is called the Romans Road, a handful of verses from this letter laid end to end. For the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). If you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved (Romans 10:9).

It is worth remembering what the road leaves out. It leaves out the riot in Rome, the strong and the weak, the olive tree, chapter 12, the money for the poor, and Phoebe. It takes a letter written to bring Jews and Gentiles to one table, and turns it into a private transaction for one soul.

Go deeperWhere does Romans end?

If your Bible is the World English Bible, look at the end of chapter 14. You will find a closing prayer of praise, to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever! Amen (Romans 14:24–26). In most other Bibles, the same prayer is the last three verses of the whole letter, Romans 16:25–27.

That is not a printing error. In the ancient manuscripts, this prayer moves around. Many put it after chapter 14. The oldest copy of Paul’s letters, a papyrus from around the year 200, puts it after chapter 15. The great codices of the 300s put it at the end of chapter 16. A few have it twice, and a few leave it out.¹³

One common explanation is that early on, some copies of Romans ended at chapter 14, with this prayer as the closing, and that the prayer moved when the longer copies appeared. The theologian Origen wrote in the 200s that Marcion, the man who made the first list of Christian scriptures, had cut off the letter after chapter 14. A short form would also have been useful to churches outside Rome, who did not need Paul’s travel plans or his greetings to people they had never met.¹⁴

Some scholars once argued that chapter 16 was really a separate letter, sent to Ephesus, because Paul greets so many people in a city he had never visited. Most now accept it as part of Romans. Rome drew people from everywhere, and Paul would want to name every friend he had there.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Romans 1:28–32, and then keep reading into Romans 2:1.

You will find: a long list of other people’s sins, and then the turn: you who judge practice the same things.

Then read Romans 16:1–7. Count the women.

The Short Version

• Romans is Paul introducing himself to a church he did not found, before visiting it on the way to Spain.
• It was written to a church split between Jewish and Gentile believers, after an emperor had expelled the Jews from Rome.
• Its argument is that everyone stands in the same place before God, and that God puts people right by faith, Jew and Gentile alike.
• Paul insists that God has not rejected Israel, and that all Israel will be saved.
• It ends by greeting Phoebe the deacon, who probably carried it, and Junia, a woman Paul calls notable among the apostles.