by N. T. Wright
So Paul returns to Corinth at last. The Lord has given him authority, he says, not to pull down, but to build up.23 If there is still pulling down to do, he will do it; but he has learned, as he had said to the Philippians, to be content with whatever comes. The final resolution of Paul’s long and complex relationship with Corinth reveals him as a man into whom the gospel of the crucified and risen Lord has burned like a brand. He is recognizable. Corinth and Ephesus themselves have done it to him. He is marked out, beyond any question, as the representative of the crucified Messiah.
* * *
Throughout these turbulent years, something had been stirring in Paul’s mind and heart. He knew his vocation, the thing for which Jesus had called him on the Damascus Road. He had sometimes been tempted to wonder whether he had been wasting his time, but each time that thought returned, he played it through the mental loop of Isaiah 49 (the servant’s question whether it was all in vain and the divine vocation that always answered that question). He carried on through heartache and collapse, but also through moments of great encouragement and celebration. He had taught, and argued, and preached, and discussed, in brief conversations and lengthy dialogues, with strangers and friends, with eager colleagues and suspicious onlookers. He had been around the tracks. He knew what he believed, how the great scriptural narratives of Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, and Messiah worked. He had expounded it a thousand times and discussed its implications and outworkings in every conceivable variation and against every possible objection. So now, as he settled down to plan and then to dictate his great letter to Rome, he was not, to put it mildly, thinking things through for the first time. Romans itself was new, but every idea it expounded had been tried, tested, and worked out in detail.
There were specific reasons for writing Romans at that moment (probably in the spring or summer of 57). We will come to those presently. But why write it like this? Romans is in a different category from Paul’s other letters for many reasons, but particularly because of its careful and powerful structure. It comes in four sections, each of which has its own integrity, underlying argument, and inner movement. Together these four sections form a single line of thought, rising and falling but always on the way to the particular points that he wants to make. It remains an open question (at least for me) whether Paul was aware of literary models or precedents for this kind of thing. What cannot be doubted is that he had thought it through very carefully and knew exactly what he was doing. Scholars and preachers sometimes speak and write as though Paul just made things up on the fly. There may be passages like that—one thinks of some of the sharp phrases in Galatians, for instance, which a cooler editorial eye might have struck out—but not in Romans. He has thought, prayed, and taught this material again and again. He has now decided to pour this distilled essence of his biblical and Jesus-focused teaching into these four jars and place them in a row where together they will say more than the sum of their parts.
This does not happen by accident. Romans is not like, say, 1 Corinthians (the next longest letter), where, though there is a flow of thought, one thing follows another in something more like a list. Romans has a quality of literary artistry attempted nowhere else by Paul, or, one might add, by any of his contemporaries. It should be listened to in the way one might listen to a symphony—not simply for the next big tune, but for the larger whole to which all the tunes contribute.
Some have suggested, naturally enough, that Romans was a deliberate “systematic theology,” summing up the beliefs that Paul had hammered out over the previous decade of work. There is more than a grain of truth in that. But not only are there significant omissions (no mention, for instance, of the Eucharist, which we know from 1 Corinthians was a vital focus of early Christian worship), but, despite the “divisions” and “headings” in some translations, the flow of thought in the letter is not a matter of moving from one “topic” to another. It is, to say it again, a sustained and integrated argument, in which Paul comes back again and again to similar topics, but each time (to continue the musical analogy) in a different key or with different orchestration.
The letter is not simply a summary of everything Paul had been teaching. It is designed to make vital points to the church in Rome. Paul had not visited Rome, but from the greetings at the end of the letter he obviously had several friends there, and he knew quite a bit about what was going on in both the church and the wider society. All this is relevant to what he says and why.
The most obvious reason is that he now intended to round off his work in the eastern end of the Mediterranean world and to move on to the West. As I suggested earlier, I think this is a more focused ambition than simply finding more people to preach to, more “souls” to “save” (not that Paul would have put it like that). He wanted to plant the flag of the messianic gospel in key points where another “gospel” was being flaunted, namely, the “gospel” of the Roman Empire, of Caesar and all his works. Rome itself was therefore the obvious target; but out beyond that, Spain, the western edge of the world so far as Paul’s contemporaries were aware, was a major center of Roman culture and influence. Paul’s great contemporary Seneca had come from there. Galba, soon to enjoy a few months as emperor, had been governor there, based in the port of Tarragona, which would presumably be Paul’s initial target. Tarragona boasted a large temple to Caesar. As in Ephesus or Corinth, Paul would have longed to announce that Jesus was the true Kyrios right under Caesar’s nose. No matter what it cost.
But for this he needed a base, both, we may assume, as a source of financial and practical support and also as a community that would enter into koinōnia with him in prayer. And for that there had to be deep mutual understanding. They had to know who he was and what his work was all about. They might have heard all sorts of rumors about him. Some might distrust him, either because he was too Jewish or because he treated elements of Jewish practice too loosely (both accusations had been made, after all). Some kind of outline of his teaching was a basic necessity.
But that is only a start. There was a more pressing need. Something had happened in the recent past that had put the Roman Jesus-followers in a new and complex position. We recall that Claudius, who became emperor in AD 41, had banished the Jews from Rome after riots in their community. We have less information about this than we would like, but such evidence as we have suggests the late 40s as the probable time. (We should also assume that not all Jews would actually have left, only that the community would have been decimated and that any remaining Jews might have had to go to ground to hide their identity.) Paul’s friends Priscilla and Aquila were among those who had left, which was why they were there in Corinth when Paul first arrived, probably in 49. But with Claudius’s death in 54 and Nero’s accession to the throne, Claudius’s edict was revoked. Jews could once again be, if not exactly welcome, at least permitted back in town.
I say “if not exactly welcome” because in this period, as in many other times and cultures, there was a streak, and sometimes more than a streak, of anti-Jewish sentiment in Rome. (We use the term “anti-Jewish” not “anti-Semitic,” because the latter implies some kind of racial theory unknown until the nineteenth century.) Think of the charge in Philippi that Paul and Silas were Jews, teaching things it would be illegal for Romans to practice. Think of the angry whispers when Alexander, a Jew, stood up to speak in the amphitheater at Ephesus. The same thing can be sensed on the edge of remarks in poets like Juvenal or sneering historians like Tacitus.
Underneath the ethnic prejudice there was always the theological suspicion, which would then be transferred in subsequent centuries to the Christians, that Jews didn’t worship the gods, so if bad things happened, people knew who to blame. Even in Corinth, Gallio’s refusal to make a judgment about Paul causes the mob to beat up the synagogue president, and they get away with it. Going after the Jews was a default mode for many, right across the Roman Empire. The Romans had allowed the Jewish people to worship their own God, to raise taxes for the Temple in Jerusale
m, and to be exempt from religious observances that would compromise their beliefs, including the worship of Rome and the emperor. But that didn’t mean that the Romans liked them. And Paul could see, only too clearly, what that might lead to.
A century later, he was proved dramatically right. A leader called Marcion, originally from Sinope on the Black Sea shore of Asia Minor, arrived in Rome teaching a version of Christianity in which the God of Jesus was sharply distinguished from the God of the Jews. He produced a heavily truncated edition of the New Testament, with the Jewish and scriptural bits omitted or amended. The Christian faith as he taught it—and he became very popular—left no room for Jews and their traditions. It had become a completely Gentile phenomenon.
It didn’t take much imagination to see this danger coming. It had been less likely in the churches Paul had founded in Asia Minor and Greece, since he always started in the synagogue and made it clear that the message was “to the Jew first, and also, equally, to the Greek.”24 Paul had given no opportunity for any idea of a Gentile-only Jesus community. In most of the cities where he had preached, with the possible exception of a large metropolis like Ephesus, the probability is that the community of Jesus-followers was never very large, perhaps only ever a few dozen, or in Corinth conceivably a hundred or two. It would have been harder, though still not impossible, for significantly different theological positions to develop in such communities, at least to begin with. But in Rome things were different. The message of Jesus had evidently arrived there sometime in the 40s (tradition says that Peter brought it, but there is no first-century evidence for that), and Rome was in any case a city where, as in some large cities today, different cultural and ethnic groups from all over the empire would cluster in their own parts of town. It is highly likely, and this is borne out by the greetings to the different house-churches in Romans 16, that there were many different groups in Rome all worshipping Jesus but not really in contact with one another and almost certainly with different local customs that would owe more than a little to the culture from which they had come.
This was a new situation, and it called for a new kind of exposition. That is why, by the way, it makes no sense to see Paul’s letters as successive drafts of a “systematic theology,” so that, for instance, Galatians might be a first draft and Romans a final draft of essentially the same script. Galatians and Romans of course cover similar topics up to a point. But whereas Galatians is written in haste and heat to say, Under no circumstances must you get circumcised and take on the Torah, Romans is written at more leisure and with more compositional care to say, You must work out the gospel-shaped balance of Jew and Greek.
It isn’t that he is “anti-law” in Galatians and “pro-law” in Romans. That kind of shallow analysis has long had its day. It is, rather, that he can see one kind of danger in Galatia and realizes that it must be headed off immediately. He can see another, more long-term danger in Rome, and he decides to draw on his entire lifetime of biblical and pastoral reflection to construct a work that ought to ward off what to him would be the utter nonsense of a Jesus movement that was now eager to leave its Jewish and scriptural roots behind. He knew only too well from personal experience that Jews would regard him as a traitor, no better than a pagan, and that pagans might regard him as one of those annoying Jews, with some extra irritating bits of his own. The new wine of the gospel would be too sweet for some and too dry for others. But he had no choice. “The Messiah’s love,” he had written to Corinth, “makes us press on.25
Paul saw, then, the danger that a new generation of Roman Jesus-followers would have grown up, in the absence of Jews between 49 and 54, to be proud of the fact that this new cult, though “accidentally” having begun in the Jewish world, had now become a completely Gentile phenomenon. The temptation would then be for such a new generation to look at the powerful synagogue communities in Rome, up and running again after five years in abeyance, and to assume that the God of Jesus had finished with the Jews once and for all. The proud and vital word “Messiah” would just become a proper name. Worshipping Jesus would no longer be invested with the echoes of the Psalms and prophets, according to whom Israel’s Messiah would be the Lord of the whole world. The Jesus movement would turn itself into a kind of private spirituality, less concerned with the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven and more concerned with cultivating one’s own spiritual interiority. It would no longer be a movement based on messianic eschatology. It would become a “religion” that saw itself as different from “the Jewish religion,” a private religion that would no longer pose much of a threat to the principalities and powers, the rulers and authorities.
This is exactly what happened in the second half of the second century with the rise of so-called Gnosticism, a religion of inner self-discovery rather than of rescue, of private devotion rather than public witness. Though Marcion regarded Paul as a hero (because he misunderstood him to be saying that God had finished with the Jews and their law), Paul himself, and especially Romans, stands firmly in the way of his entire scheme.
If the Roman church was going to be tempted to think that God had now cut off the Jewish people for good—and it might not only be Gentile Christians who thought that; perhaps some Jewish Christians, fed up with their recalcitrant unbelieving fellow Jews, might go that route as well—then there would be an equal problem among the different house-churches in Rome itself. The high probability is that Romans 14 and 15, where Paul addresses the question of different practices within different Christian circles, was addressed specifically to small groups that had become settled in their ways, whether it had to do with dietary laws (or the decision not to observe them) or Sabbaths and other holy days (and the question of whether they mattered anymore).
This question is obviously cognate with the question Paul faced in 1 Corinthians 8–10, but it is not exactly the same. There is no suggestion in 1 Corinthians that Paul was there dealing with separate groups worshipping in different locations, in different house-churches. He was addressing Jesus-followers holding different opinions, but all belonging to the one church in Corinth; in this situation differences of practice might have an immediate impact on the unity and fellowship of that church. In Rome it was different. The groups were already separate. They had already developed different codes of practice. They would now regard one another with suspicion. They would not be able to worship together. They probably used different songs; they might well speak Greek with very different accents, reflecting their countries of origin. (Latin was the elite language; a good many inhabitants of Rome at this time were basically Greek-speaking.)
Paul, coming to Rome for the first time but hoping to use it as a base for mission farther west, could not build on a foundation like that. He could not simply align himself with one or two of the Roman house-churches and ignore the rest. The unity he so passionately advocated was not just a pleasant ideal. It was vital for the coherence of his own mission. It was also, as he had said in Ephesians, the way in which God’s wisdom in all its rich variety would be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. If Caesar and the dark powers that stood behind him were to be confronted with the “good news” that there was “another king, Jesus,” the community that was living by that message had to be united. This would of course be a differentiated unity (“God’s wisdom in all its rich variety”; and we may compare the vivid lists of ministries in 1 Cor. 12 and Eph. 4). But if it was all differentiation and no unity, Caesar need take no notice; they were just a few more peculiar eastern cults come to town.
The underlying message of Romans, with these sharp-edged issues as key notes to be struck at some of the letter’s climactic points, is of course the lordship of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and hence the world’s rightful sovereign. The grand formal introduction to the letter makes it clear: the resurrection of the crucified Jesus had demonstrated him to be Messiah, “son of God,” and the messianic psalms, particularly Psalm 2, challenged the kings of the world to come humbly before him
and learn wisdom. From the time of Augustus onward, the Caesars had let it be known that events of their rule, including their accession, their birthday, and so on, were matters of “good news,” euangelia in Greek, since with Caesar as Kyrios (“Lord”) and Sōtēr (“Savior”) a new golden age had arrived in the world, an age particularly characterized by dikaiosynē (“justice”), sōtēria (“salvation”), and eirēnē (“peace”). Caesar’s all-conquering power (dynamis) had achieved these and would maintain them. The appropriate response from his subjects was “loyalty” or “faithfulness” (pistis), “believing obedience,” you might say.
Paul’s euangelion used the same terms, but meant something quite different. The differences were marked not least in poems like Philippians 2:6–11 and in Paul’s own embracing of the cursus pudorum, the “course of shame,” over against the Roman cursus honorum, “course of honor.” It was never a simple matter of a single scale with Caesar at the wrong end and Jesus at the right end. That would pull Jesus down to Caesar’s level, which could itself be a disastrous mistake if the church, in Rome or elsewhere, thought that allegiance to Jesus meant disobeying, on principle, the divinely appointed civil ruler. That would itself be a paganization of the essentially Jewish monotheistic vision of earthly rulers articulated by Jesus, Paul, and Peter.26 This didn’t mean, of course, that earthly rulers could do no wrong. Far from it. Paul, as usual, is resisting shallow and simplistic reductions. Instead, the main theological argument of the letter is framed by an introduction and conclusion that look Caesar in the face and declare that Jesus is not only the true Lord, but also a different kind of Lord:
Paul, a slave of King Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for God’s good news, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the sacred writings—the good news about his son, who was descended from David’s seed in terms of flesh, and who was marked out powerfully as God’s son in terms of the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead: Jesus, the king, our Lord!
